This was originally part of a request from younger Sis that wanted better Sailor Moon '90s Anime video sources, but the videos were of odd varying quality... and so were the subtitles. In fact, this project actually started somewhere in mid-December 2024 because some of her friends actually noticed and complained a bit about the typos and other issues in the subtitles, lol.
The videos either had wrong framerate, were not-so-great old NTSC sources (the DivX/XviD conversions back then did NOT help them), were Blu-ray sources (which are clearly upscaled and DNR'd from their own old R2 DVD sources, and it shows), or even better... were PAL sources converted to NTSC. The audio, at least from the R1 DVD sources, would be somewhat distorted... though some episodes were plagued with some distortion, it wasn't as bad as the opening and ending segments.
Apparently, for the episodes themselves, the best source... at least for now (until some group restores these episodes anyway) is the Dynit IT-DVD remux set... which is what these subtitles use, incidentally. The much later Toei BD upscales can be used as well (though this wasn't the primary reason for the Season 1 20-episode ScaledBorderAndShadow fix). As for the movies and specials... it's the JP-BD releases, which are pretty passable to me. That, and Viz's US-BD releases seem to have oversaturated colors anyway. You will not find these videos here.
The series subtitles nowadays are primarily sourced from SailorMoonCenter, but there are non-SMC subs floating around... some are also dubtitles. The original SMC sources were pretty good (well, better than most), but they needed some fixes, further proofreading, caps abuse removal, punctuation abuse removal, italics marking abuse removal, honorifics abuse removal, and a lot of weird subtitle placement hackery removal. Then again, we're talking about mid-2000s SubStation Alpha subtitle sources here. The Hark0n versions of the SMC subtitles actually removed a lot of the honorifics abuse, caps abuse, punctuation abuse, and probably italics marking abuse, but the typos and such remained, and some other typos and punctuation issues actually had been introduced by Hark0n themselves.
The movies and specials subtitles are primarily sourced from Judgment. Hark0n has multicolored those. Even so, there are mismarked dialogue colors and slightly mistimed effects (and later found out on February 15, 2025 after peeking at the S movie subtitles and during editing the R movie subtitles... incorrect and even missing punctuation marks due to unchecked historical OCR issues), which I almost completely fixed for the R movie and its Special so far (from using my legal copy of the R movie as reference).
Time was spent fixing as much of the SailorMoonCenter and Hark0n multicolor sets as much as possible. What is on this server is what you will receive for now. Seasons 1-4 is from the Hark0n-modified SMC set, and Season 5 is from the original SailorMoonCenter set re-timed and edited by yours truly, as Hark0n has not gotten to Stars yet... and that won't be for a while.
Seasons 1-4's translation origins are from the old R1 ADV and Pioneer DVDs, but OCR'd... except the intros and next episode segments for each episode; those were done by SMC, it seems... and it shows, honestly. (Also, those actually need refinery - but in terms of punctuation and such, not general dialogue... much!) A lot of the typos and missing words actually came from the original source. Some of the capitalization issues, punctuation issues, and the capital I/lowercase l mixing problems are from the OCRing. The abuse of the ellipses and capital word abuse are from the original source DVDs, but Hark0n actually removed a lot of that in the process.
Season 5 is unique to this issue, as this used VKLL's translations as its origins. Even so, there were a few technical issues that in rare cases actually broke some dialogue, since fixed. There is an apparent mistimed segment in an ordered chapters variant of SMC's Episode 200 - the original SMC script for Episode 200 doesn't even have this issue, however - I checked. Never mind the other odd stylistic choices in the scripts, like jarringly moving text and dialogue placed in parts of scenes like it's floating... (I have yet to actually go through the scripts for other issues...)
The movies' translation origins are from the old Pioneer DVDs, but OCR'd. Same issues apply as with the show's subs, but less pronounced. The specials seem to be fan-translated (specifically, R Special may be VKLL, SuperS Plus is VKLL), as they originally didn't show outside of Japan until pretty recently.
There also exists a changelog, but that is for internal use only.
I also found a quirk that if the DVD remux is ever used with these subtitles directly: the text is too wide in various players. This is due to the fact that the videos are actually 720x576i (3.75:3), but they are soft-rendered at 768x576i (4:3)... literally part of the PAL 4:3 DVD standard. [There's also the 25 frames vs. 23.976 frames issue in all but one episode, but that's another story.] Because of this, the videos will have to be post-processed to the final 768x576 directly using custom resolution limiting and allow upscaling, then these subtitles can be used without the wide font issue. Dirty workaround is to change all font width scaling in each subtitle script down 6%. Example: ScaleX is 100, should be 94; ScaleX is 120, should be 114.
I also found out on January 14, 2025 that Sailor Moon Sailor Stars: Season 5, Episode 24 (Series Entry 190) has an audio corruption glitch within the first 1.5 seconds of the file in the Dynit IT-DVD release and I fixed this myself in my own pre-release. (I tended to tamper with and edit audio a lot as a hobby since the early 2000s.) Though this is out of scope for this project, it is good to know this info for any project release using these particular IT-DVD remuxes as source.