Anime Archive
Dual-Duality's Base

The Origins of Dual-Duality
Hmm well where to start? I guess it all began with some dvd's. I had bought the first part of Soul Eater in around Febuary of 2010 and I really enjoyed it. I tried experimenting with ripping it using handbrake but that just sort of failed and I gave up on it, as the dvds looked fine and there was already some good encodes out for it. But that idea that learning to rip videos sort of stuck in my head. The real revelation came when I received the dvd's for one of my favorite series ever, The Slayers. Part of my love for this show comes from the extreme nostalgia that Slayers causes in me. When I was a child my grandmother and I would go to the video store and rent the VHS's for Slayers, we both liked the show alot, but eventually that video store closed down. So now years later I finally order the "remastered" dvds only to find what can only be described as terrible. After seeing what had left such a prominent memory in my head be a teleclined interlaced disaster, I knew what I had to do. I had to encode this dvd for all those people who bought the Slayers dvd and were disappointed by it, I did not care that the show was from Funimation, I just new that I had to do the right thing. So I was told by the nice folks over at OZC about avisynth, the basis for modern encoding. I took that up and spent hours reading before attempting to encode. I tried a couple times and produced a decent level of quality, but never quite at the level that I wanted. I had noticed that my time spent making comparisons for offers at bakabt was paying off in my increased attention to detail. I still had much to learn and I spent several days working on that one script.
Skip ahead a week or 2 and I met Lynn. I told him about some raws for a bluray version of Nadesico, he was mainly interested in the movie, so I gave him that. He told me he was able to encode it and synchronize the audio, I asked him if he wanted to form a group with me, and he accepted. Unfortunately this did not last long. After he made that encode my skills quickly increased and so did my expectations of quality. A little while later, John joined up. He was fun to be around and was a useful asset in attaining dvds, aswell as doubling as a QCer (quality checker). So I asked him to join my group and he accepted. Over time I came to learn that Lynn just did not have the level of passion or the amount of time available to produce encodes that could stand up to my level of quality. We had alot of drama but eventually he left and lets just say even after talking to him I got no sense of closure. Skip forward about a month and everything has changed. I am almost a full fledged encoder, and have a pretty good understanding of the basics of avisynth. Lynn has started his own group which has produced the kind of quality you would expect from Lynn. A couple of issues have occurred, me being extremely new to the encoding scene have encountered 2 major problems. The first of them is synchronizing audio which is something I am just unable to do and the other is subbing. Well luckly due to my repeated recruitment attempts I was able to draw in a another member, this one with with skills that are able to complement my own. I got a friend from bakabt to join, Sashamaru. He has skills in HTML and some basic knowledge in audio manipulation. So after only a day of joining he helped me to release my first ever bluray encode and I was able to learn how to do subbing.
 The future looks bright, keep the engine oiled and the guns loaded and the catgirls in their maid outfits.
Dual-Duality here is so get ready for some fun!

Philosophy, Ideology and Release Protocols
Well I have always been a philosophical person, I loved NGE and understood the meaning of the last 2 episodes, if you do not believe me just ask me to explain them to you. My ideals and philosophy are the basis and the reason for why and how I encode.

I encode because old shows deserve good encodes too, just because you bought an old dvd does not mean you should have to be unhappy with the quality of it. I also encode because I hope to inspire people to buy dvd's that are poor quality so they can still support the industry and have my encode as their dvd replacement. I do not plan to replace dvds though. If you have ever seen my encodes, then you know they can differ extremely from what the original looked like, some people view this as being disrespectful to the original artist. I view it as just a different visual interpretation of what the creator intended, because really the artist's really are only there to entertain you, not to have you appreciate their art, if they wanted to just have you appreciate their art, then it would be for free.

I believe that what I do is right. But that does not mean I can not make wrong decisions, as I am not self righteous but more like altruistic. I think what I am doing is only helping others and if in any case I believe that I am no longer following that path I will try to cease the activity or product that is causing or being caused by my straying from the path.

Another great philosophy that I uphold is love thy dub but I take this to the fullest and also believe to love thy neighbor's dub. So even with my astonishing admiration for the English dubs regardless of said quality I will always include the other languages. This does not just pertain to Japanese, no I mean any dub available, be it German, Chinese, Taiwanese, Portuguese or what ever, if it is available to me and does not cause me any trouble to include it, I will make it easily available for the people who want it, because who am I to remove what I normally love only because it is not my own language. I will not complain about other dubs, I can only praise the dubs of my native language.

When it comes to releasing things I have very strict codes that I want to follow. I do not want to encode a dvd that looks good already because then I am just another pirate. I do not want to produce something of low quality just because I want to meet a deadline or just to say I have made another release. If I produce something of bad quality, then I promise to never release it to the public until it has reached and surpassed my expectations of quality. So you will never see any shitty encodes coming from me, but what you will see is ALOT of revisions with some shows. Since I am so new to this (hehe as of this writing my group is only 2 months old) my techniques and methods tend to change and get more refined with every attempt and every encode. My core style will very likely stay the same but other things will change.

 When it comes to quality I have 2 perspectives. Keep it reasonable, FLAC is whack cause it don't mean jack ;) (Though I will try to have optional FLAC downloads available for you audiophilic bastards :), you do not need 2 or 3 gigabytes for an episode even if it is bluray. But also do not compromise on quality in exchange for size. So try and keep the size for blurays under 20% and the size for DVD's under 50% while making the quality better. Do not believe that higher bitrate is an adequate replacement for a good avisynth script. Fuck your 10000 kb/s I got 3000 and it looks nicer. Fuck transparency I want it to look nice not like the dvd. I mean if  you wanted the dvd then you should go BUY IT.

I can and will not encode in 1080p for multiple reasons. Some of the biggest being, I plan to actually never do a 1080p encode, I only have a 720p tv that is my computer monitor. My computer can barely handle my heavy scripts and just dies of a memory allocation failure if I attempt to encode 1080p. I like to save space and 1080p is always just too big and never really justifies it to me. But on the upside instead of a 1080p encode, I do want to do a SD encode and by that I mean a 480p encode from the bluray.

One other thing about my releases. I may do some releases that are not on my site, do not ask me where you can get them, because they will be obvious. For everything else I use mediafire, so get a download manager or anything that supports multiple connections.

Pre-Dual-Duality
This section is before I started my encoding group, its always nice to have some background details and history, atleast that is what I think.

This oversized wall of text is run by me and Jay does somethings too but he mainly is there to act like this is a larger project that is too big for 1 person lol then again I am not a normal person. Either way I should post the origins of this blog later tomorrow and I will get around to making the user profile pages that way Jay can get off his lazy ass and work continue to be an upstanding member of this two-man blog team.

About The Profileth (written by Jay)

The Profileth (a.k.a. The Librarian) hails from sunny California. Like a lot of fans, he cites his favourite anime as Neon Genesis Evangelion, crediting it for changing his perspective on life and the role of the self. However, anime is here to entertain as well as to make one think, and The Profileth is no exception - he is also a big fan of series with a focus on comedy and ecchi (nudity), especially when it's played for humour. Hop on over the the OZC forums and check out his signature if you still need convincing!

Nevertheless, The Profileth is something of a unique specimen amongst anime fandom - he vehemently prefers to watch a show with a dub compared to one without. To this end, his knowledge of dub voice actors is better than the average, but don't expect him to keep up with the latest series until it's been licensed and thoroughly VA'ed.

When he is not furiously offering torrents on BakaBT or searching for evermore high quality encodes, his other main interests are challenging videogames with unconventional elements - the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, Fallout/System Shock 1&2, Mount & Blade, Dawn of War, and so on. You'd do well not to mention the current crop of homogenised "easy-mode" AAA titles to The Librarian ..

To get in touch with TheProfileth
Either use Xfire, live messenger, the chatbox, or telepathy.

 About Jay Psi (written by Jay)

 Jay Psi (a.k.a. The Vault Dweller) is an altogether more sardonic, cynical soul from the bleak lands of England. His anime tastes have developed along these lines, as he prefers introspective series with good production values or other artistic merit. If you haven't guessed his favourite yet ... that's right, it's Cowboy Bebop. Still, he doesn't just watch anime to make his head spin - an extensive DVD collection of mecha (both super-powered robots and military dramas) points to an anime fan of the 80s!

As Jay recently came back into the "current" anime fold, he tends to pick his series rather carefully. It doesn't stop him complaining about the recycled fluff that passes through executives hands nowadays; it just means that he doesn't actually watch any of it. There is one thing he is very grateful to the modern anime age for - high resolution! After scrimping and saving for a decent computer for once in his life, he feels it is his right to enjoy the good stuff in as much screen filling glory as possible.

His other interests are numerous, but the most current ones are computer hardware and JRPGs with a smattering of Excel and theory crafting (yes, we do indeed have a proper nerd here)!

The origins of the Anime Archive
For those who were in the beginning stages of OZC forum you should no this tale of triumph, glory, friendship, failure and redemption. And as exciting as that sounds, that probably was a bit on the "exaggerative" side. It all started when I began to try and get good dubbed mecha, ecchi and comedy anime. This was then expanded to non-dubbed. I decided to centralize all of the threads into 1 thread. This thread was completely suggestion driven so I forgot to give suggestions of my own, I still need to add alot of anime that I like. I then started to get links for these shows almost exclusively from BakaBT. I soon hit the 60000 character per post limit, so the Anime Archive Mk2 was formed. This version included organized genres and keywords. Everything was perfect and I could of seen that the anime archive would of become a large part of OZC, but the unthinkable happened. I was blinded by excitement and put up a few Funimation licensed shows! OZC nearly 5 minutes later order me to take them down. This seemingly small mistake would lead to the cancellation of the Anime Archive Mk 2. Now OZC is not an evil man, so he said that I could keep the archive going IF and only IF I were only to link to AniDB or ANN. I protested that, it was not the reason I started the Anime Archive, I started it to help people get access to anime with minimum hassle and to ensure that they got the best quality dual audio (if available) encode available. So I declined, and the rights to the archive were handed over to Jay, where he promptly..... sat on them for about a week. During that week my freetime became a choir because I did not have meaningless busy work, that the Anime Archive had offer to me before. So I got tired of Jay not doing anything so I created this blog. I have since expanded to all types of anime (except hentai) and anime licensed by anyone. I have recruited Jay in hopes that he will help or at least do something entertaining, which he has done as he is the one who wrote the Bios for both him and myself (it is fun to have other people write about you) Hopefully he will be a bit more active but hey a man has got to work. I hope that I am able to create a vast archive that rivals all others on the internet, but I can not do it without you!
Buy those DVD's of shows that you love to help support the industry.
I know I have, but have you?