Comment on Amazon’s AI ‘Banana Fish’ Dubs Are Hilariously, Inexcusably Bad
mo_lave@reddthat.com 1 day agoThere are ~25K anime in MyAnimeList. If we assume that there are 250K episodes with a total average length of 25 minutes, each, we are talking about dubbing 6.25 million minutes overall.
Let’s say 80% of them is not yet dubbed, that’ll be 5M minutes. Netflix delayed KaoruHana for at least two months to dub 8 episodes * 25 minutes, so they likely took three months to complete 200 minutes of footage i.e. a rate of 0.3 anime minutes/VA minute. Let’s say there are 100 organizations with three teams of English dubbers each, so the rate can be expanded to 90 anime minutes/VA minute overall.
Clearing the backlog will require 55K minutes. That’s 925 hours/115 business days, or almost a year. I guess it is possible if we wait this long. And this calculation ignores time to select the right VA for the job, paying the amount the VAs request to accept the job (and assuming the studio can afford them), plus a whole lot of other factors I failed to mention or I don’t even know exist.
And this is for just one language (English), and I"m still waiting for the Italian dub of JoJo Part 5.
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 1 day ago
bruv every anime listed in MAL has runtimes, lengths, additional metadata. Your overestimation is simply wrong, with the fact there are are few N1 localizers willing to work at the 硬貨 on the دينار for whatever AMZN is valued at. If you don’t pay what we are worth, continue waiting on Italians to localize Jojo for you at N5 levels of knowledge.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
How is “every anime has one season of 10 episodes running 25 minutes each” an overestimation? I’d call that an underestimation. Yeah, there are anime with much shorter runtimes, but there are also many anime with well over 100 episodes.
Not to mention, are you really expecting this random person to write an interface for their API to get exact numbers for an off the cuff online discussion?
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 1 day ago
Because dub time doesn’t equate to run time. Most anime has PLENTY of no voice work, and openings and endings can be copy and pasted.
I fear more you are not aware where in the internet you are. This is basic 101 scripting work that happens every second your application notifies you your new anime got updated. Basic scripting is what our /c/ and threadiverse do for most of us who actually moved on from fashit.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Cool, so you can share the total runtime?
mo_lave@reddthat.com 1 day ago
I prefer proper VA dubbing versus AI dubbing. This is more of a question if the viewership prefers AI dub vs. no dub if proper dubs are not yet available.
AntiBullyRanger@ani.social 1 day ago
According to the beta testers, and the Internet, listeners abhorred the LLM localization & actual tone-deaf Speech audio dubbing. Keeping the original dubbings is simply what folks want, esp. if it’s labeled abridged.
At the least you are aware why this /c/ prefers subs, because it is that much cheaper and errorless to output.
mo_lave@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Yes, at its current state. Will it stay that way? The tech companies are burning cash in attempts to make it not so. My hunch says even Vocaloid-tier AI dubbing will be enough for a large sector of the audience. Then the human vs. AI dubbing debate could be analogous to debates between lossy (more accessible) vs. lossless (higher quality) audio.