DCTP Forums

I've been thinking about it since One Piece has that fan coloring up to chapter 700, how big of a team you'd need to keep going consistently? I wonder how long a chapter would take and how to figure out the right colors (anime doesn't always use the canon colors).

k11chi wrote:I've been thinking about it since One Piece has that fan coloring up to chapter 700, how big of a team you'd need to keep going consistently? I wonder how long a chapter would take and how to figure out the right colors (anime doesn't always use the canon colors).

Well first you'd need better quality scans than what are out there. This could mean going and looking for Japanese scans and coloring those, and then getting them translated, or buying some kind of physical copy of stuff and scanning it yourself. Coloring itself takes a pretty good amount of time and depending on what kind of effect you want, could require several people. Some of the clothing colors could be approximated by looking at the key holes on the backs of each volume. For different outfits you may just have to guess, or copy the anime colors. There are some chapters and pages that do exist in color from Shonen Sunday, so you can look for those as well.

The Viz digital manga, if you can leech them, are higher quality than the raw scans and already translated (name changes aside). Wouldn't it be easier to start from that?

Dang, I thought this would be a thread about how Conan would get an official colour release like how they did Jojo's, and other manga series.

Since a good chunk of the earlier portion of the series has really poor quality scans, you could always find the tankoban and scan it yourself. Getting the tankoban second hand is really cheap. This would be a project of upmost love and care.

Ah, colored Conan chapters. That would definitley be cool.

Speaking purely hypothetically here...
Starting from the digital version (whether English or Japanese) would definitely be easier than scanning the volumes yourself. Nonetheless, you'd need at least one cleaner, since the pages would still need to be cleaned for coloring, i.e. removing all the blacks and greys. Basing the translation on an existing one, as uso suggested, would definitely save a lot of work. Nonetheless you'd need a typesetter to put the text in the bubbles because you'd most definitely want to edit the names. *shudders*
Then, as jimmy pointed out, coloring is the thing that would take the most time and effort, so you would need at least a couple of people with the time and skills to work on that...
But even if you somehow managed to gather all those people, taking on a manga with 930+ chapters just seems like a losing bet. Seems more sensible to pick out a couple of the best cases and start from there.