Cosmic Fantasy Anime, Translated and Live

[SuperDeadite]

So little known fact, there was a Cosmic Fantasy OVA released on LD and VHS back in 1994, a few months before CF4 came out. 
I wasn't aware of it until recently when Dan asked me to find it.  I was able to pickup the LD for cheap.  I recorded it, translated it, and now is
available on youtube with English Subtitles. 

It's about 40mins in length, and honestly nothing too special.  But worth a watch for Cosmic Fantasy fans I'd say. Animation is better then I would have expected being a Telenet property.  Though this was actually a PC-Engine Fan Magazine project.

Enable captions for English subs.  It's slightly buggy in a few places (CaptionTube is still in beta), but I'm happy with the results.
I was a bit liberal with the translation, but that's how I roll.

[tpivette]

Nice! I'm in the middle of playing CF2, so the timing of this couldn't be more perfect. Don't have time to watch right now, but I'll check it out when I get home from work.

Thanks for the translation, SuperDeadite!

[roflmao]

Awesome!  That's a really good-looking rip.  Laserdiscs don't play that well from my laserdisc player.

EDIT:  Your "liberal" translation has made me lol a couple times.

[SuperDeadite]

LaserDisc video is very dependent on the player.  I used my LaserActive, which is typically considered a poor movie player by most lol.  Getting this result was easy but took about 2 days...

1.  I fed the composite out to my HDD/DVD recorder in forced progressive mode.
2.  Ran the video through VirtualDub's deinterlacer filter to clean out the artifacts.
3.  Saved that file as uncompressed RGB (82gb file lol!)
4.  Used AVISynth's LanczosResize and YUY2 color convert.
5.  Encoded into mpeg2 using HCenc on max settings.  (This took over 8 hours!)
6.  Muxed in the AC3 audio with Imago.

Done lol.

[Nando]

NICE! thanks for the share SD!

[Necromancer]

Thanks, S.D.!  Good timing, as I'm playing through the first game right now.

[Nec.Game.head]

AWESOME .. GREAT STUFF THANKS FOR SHARING YOUR LINK !

[SignOfZeta]

You're a hero!

I never seem to be able to find this LD for less than $50 so I've always avoided it.

[roflmao]

LaserDisc video is very dependent on the player.  I used my LaserActive, which is typically considered a poor movie player by most lol.  Getting this result was easy but took about 2 days...

1.  I fed the composite out to my HDD/DVD recorder in forced progressive mode.
2.  Ran the video through VirtualDub's deinterlacer filter to clean out the artifacts.
3.  Saved that file as uncompressed RGB (82gb file lol!)
4.  Used AVISynth's LanczosResize and YUY2 color convert.
5.  Encoded into mpeg2 using HCenc on max settings.  (This took over 8 hours!)
6.  Muxed in the AC3 audio with Imago.

Done lol.

Thanks for sharing your process!  I've been wanting to tinker with capturing from my laserdisc player.  Lots of old animations I'd hate to lose when the player gives up the ghost.

[SuperPlay]

Great work :-) Thanks for sharing this.

[xelement5x]

AWESOME!  Thanks SuperDeadite, I didn't even know about this!

[arromdee]

Is this a real translation, even if you did spice it up?

How about releasing the script?  It should be possible to use the script and a video to actually play it as a real video with subtitles rather than using Youtube.  Maybe some fansubber could even make a version with the subtitles in the file.

[SuperDeadite]

The translation is quite accurate for the most part.  I just took a few shortcuts to save time.  Like during the intro sequence the narrator gives the usual basic speech about young people going to space and exploring for hopes, dreams, adventure, etc.  It's pretty much the same thing in every space anime I've ever seen, so I said f*ck it.

Most of Saya's spell names are pure gibberish (same as in the actual game manuals), so I just made them up towards the end.  As for other "weird" parts.  See Japanese people tend to use a lot less vocab then we do.  They reuse the same insults over and over.  So I can either use the same English word over and over, or I can spice stuff up a bit.    And I was going for an early 90's style, a very Working Designs approach if you will.

I do have a translation file if anyone wants it.  Most media players can use it optionally, I see no reason to hardcode in subs in this day and age.  Any decent DVD authoring software can make subs optional.

[ParanoiaDragon]

I feel like I heard BITD about this, but never saw anything to confirm it's existence....till now!

[arromdee]

A group that commonly has fansub torrents has a torrent of the Cosmic Fantasy OVA available for torrenting.  However, unlike most of their stuff, their Cosmic Fantasy OVA is not subtitled.  A subtitle file would work well with it.  I don't know if I'm allowed to give the URL here.