Steven Universe

[KindredCoda]

Hi,

I just ordered the SU Season 1 Blu-ray from Madman Entertainment.

Does anyone have this? Can you speak as to the quality of this release?

[NLScavenger]

I don't have it, but a few reddit posts make it sound like a mixed bag. That's sadly not too surprising considering a couple of Madman's in-house authored anime blu-ray releases such as Fate/Zero don't have good picture quality.

So there's a BIG problem with the Aussie SU BD (why it's not worth buying I've found out)

Steven Universe is animated at 24fps, or the traditional motion picture film speed. Versions in NTSC territories (we're now technically ATSC, but whatever) slow the episodes down ever so slightly to a fractional rate of 23.976023 frames per second, so it fits smoothly inside the NTSC rate of 29.970 frames per second in a process called inverse telecine. PAL territories do the opposite by speeding the frame rate up to 25fps.

See, well here's the thing about the Madman Season 1 Blu-Ray: All the episodes are still played at 24fps, but are downsampled to the IVTC film rate (23.976p), so as you can imagine, there's dropped and duped frames everywhere. It's a total mess. This is especially infuriating because the Blu-Ray standard ALLOWS for the usage of the traditional 24fps rate, but nope, Madman ****ed it up.

I was hoping I could finally stop using the WebDL versions (which ARE properly converted), but I guess not. Don't bother with this release. The DVD versions might actually be better in this regard since they've been sped up to 25fps with NO dropped or duped frames.

Some observations about the episodes on the Aussie Season 1 Blu-Ray and the release in general

• Each episode is on average about one and a half gigabytes big (RIP 100 gigs on my local drive).

• Audio is Dolby Digital (.ac3) at 224kbps. The Pilot is the exception, which is 192kbps.

• Pilot episode is an SD upscale, NOT mastered from 1080p (as previous mentioned by some other users). Sorry folks, that "proof of concept" four minute version is still the best copy resolution-wise.

• All episodes have the intro and full standalone end credits (This means Jail Break does not have the extended version of Love Like You. I posted these on the sub earlier), so the runtime of a half-season is increased by a little less than 10 minutes. If you watched this on a player, you could skip the intro with the chapter buttons.

• While the episodes are all in the accepted "international" order and will play as such on a BD player, the actual way they're stored on the discs as .m2ts files is all over the place (Monster Buddies is 00036.m2ts for example. I assume this is a data storage/authoring related thing).

• Subtitles are fully capitalized captions and not regular subs for just spoken dialogue and lyrics.

• Gem Glow is the "international" version of the episode with a sound mixing error that doesn't appear in the original U.S. broadcast version from 2013 (see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvw_...ature=youtu.be). The CN jingle sounds like it came from a very low bitrate source for some reason.

• There is a problem with Beach Party. While this doesn't inhibit viewing very much, there is a mastering error: there's a very small letterbox bar at the bottom of the frame or perhaps a cropping issue.

• slight "cheesecloth" effect throughout the episode that's not in the iTunes version if you look closely.

• I haven't checked every episode thoroughly, but it appears the "ghosting" errors in some shots of certain episodes that appear in the iTunes versions are (thankfully) absent.

• Contrast on Shirt Club is normal and there's no cropping error like the iTunes HD version

.

[KindredCoda]

Just got the disc last night.

Oddly, only SOME of the episodes seem to contain frame rate errors. Also, I'm not sure how censored these are.

I still don't regret buying it.

[nekelstal]

I don't think 23.976 frame rate is wrong. LOTS of animation titles contain 23.976 frame rate transfers.

[DawnShadow]

I can confirm the framerate issue, it really isn't that noticeable though, as I didn't see it until I went looking for it. Actual quality is great and nothing is censored to my knowledge.

[MrChristoph]

Here's the BDInfo scans, if anyone was wondering:

Seson One:

                                                                                                                Total   Video                                             
Title                                                           Codec   Length  Movie Size      Disc Size       Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track                          Secondary Audio Track
-----                                                           ------  ------- --------------  --------------  ------- ------- ------------------                        ---------------------
00000.MPLS                                                      AVC     5:02:17 45,492,465,024  46,540,126,606  20.07   18.86   DD AC3 2.0 224Kbps

                                                                                                                Total   Video                                             
Title                                                           Codec   Length  Movie Size      Disc Size       Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track                          Secondary Audio Track
-----                                                           ------  ------- --------------  --------------  ------- ------- ------------------                        ---------------------
00000.MPLS                                                      AVC     5:02:01 37,324,336,512  38,072,721,086  16.48   15.42   DD AC3 2.0 224Kbps

Season Two:

                                                                                                                Total   Video                                             
Title                                                           Codec   Length  Movie Size      Disc Size       Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track                          Secondary Audio Track
-----                                                           ------  ------- --------------  --------------  ------- ------- ------------------                        ---------------------
00002.MPLS                                                      AVC     5:01:14 18,829,645,824  20,081,616,197  8.33    5.65    DTS-HD Master 2.0 2041Kbps (48kHz/24-bit)

Season Three:

                                                                                                                Total   Video                                             
Title                                                           Codec   Length  Movie Size      Disc Size       Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track                          Secondary Audio Track
-----                                                           ------  ------- --------------  --------------  ------- ------- ------------------                        ---------------------
00002.MPLS                                                      AVC     4:47:14 18,359,672,832  20,806,845,992  8.52    6.33    LPCM 2.0 1536Kbps (48kHz/16-bit)

Seson Four:

                                                                                                                Total   Video                                             
Title                                                           Codec   Length  Movie Size      Disc Size       Bitrate Bitrate Main Audio Track                          Secondary Audio Track
-----                                                           ------  ------- --------------  --------------  ------- ------- ------------------                        ---------------------
00002.MPLS                                                      AVC     4:48:03 42,026,743,296  44,172,133,640  19.45   16.22   LPCM 2.0 2304Kbps (48kHz/24-bit)

[MrChristoph]

Season Five has arrived, and there's no surprises if you're familiar with the other releases (other than the re-inclusion of subtitles). The whole season is on a single region-free BD50 with uncompressed sound. Despite the timestamp on the disc being from this year, the commentary and animatics from the 2020 DVD are not included.

Whether it's worth it will depend on how bungled your local digital release is.