The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[Sylontack]

Originally Posted by vincentric

Do we know how the PQ for the Manga UK 3 disc Madoka complete set stacks up? Bitrates, banding, etc.

I recently (finally) got around to streaming the show at Netflix, enjoyed it but not enough to pay Aniplex prices for it.

The video snob in me however would be willing to pay top dollar for the AoA discs if the UK ones aren't up to par.

I tried searching for some answers but came up nil.

For anyone who owns the UK Madoka complete series, can you possibly try opening each disc with MakeMKV to see how much data they are using, would be much appreciated.

I'd love to help (UK and AU discs are almost guaranteed the same) but I'm on a 3 month road trip at the moment. If nobody has helped you out by early November (when I briefly return home) or early December (when I actually get home) and you're still willing to wait I'll try remember to check it out for you because I'd like to check too.

[vincentric]

I can wait for sure if nobody else gets to it first. Lord knows I have enough anime in my backlog (both BD and streaming, not to mention upcoming releases) to keep me busy for a long time. Enjoy that road trip.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

Still a shame that the Levels never continued. Oh and fun fact, FUNimation could have released their awful new BD's in 4:3 at least, but they didn't. Remember that survey about if people wanted the new BD's 4:3 or 16:9? Most actually voted 4:3, but FUNimation ignored the survey. Some like Lance fought for 4:3, but lost.

And the Dragon Boxes still remain the best the series will get. Though those have wrong colors due to color correction not being done on the aged film, and they don't have the JP broadcast audio. There's little hope of improving the Japanese audio thanks to the morons at Toei throwing the master audio tapes out.

A shame they stopped releasing the 4:3 bd sets indeed especially if my and Scavenger's assumption that Funi are sitting on a ton more restored eps than they would have us believe. I think if they released the level sets in affordable box seasons in the first place like they ended up doing with the terrible cropped versions, it would've sold a lot more from the get go.

I wonder if there is a private collector somewhere out there with fantape recordings of the original JP broadcast audio that could possibly be used by Toei for any future restored home video versions? A very long shot for sure though, in more ways than one.

Have some quick stats, thoughts and screens for box 1 of Fate Stay Night UBW.

As usual, AoA spared no expense regarding data usage. The double length eps (0, 1, and 12) on average are each given 15.3 GB of data for its video and audio, and the standard length ones around 7.7 GB. There are some small cracks in the armor mainly in the form of some slight, but noticeable, banding here and there. If one further nitpicks the video, by freeze framing the very fast moving fight scenes step by step like I did lol, there are also some very slight compression artifacts. Overall, the video looks flawless 99% of the time.

Some screenshots. Cherry picked from areas of the show where those cracks in the armor would be most visible - fight scenes for compression and shadow gradients for banding.

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5731/2...df3b68bc_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/642/21...35ce734e_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/584/21...fc37d456_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/662/21...58b18147_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/623/21...24dcd15e_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/761/21...3614a8d3_o.png

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5720/2...6a463b92_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/647/21...cf90c219_o.png

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5673/2...106da97e_o.png

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/771/21...c20f8ed0_o.png

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by vincentric

I wonder if there is a private collector somewhere out there with fantape recordings of the original JP broadcast audio that could possibly be used by Toei for any future restored home video versions? A very long shot for sure though, in more ways than one.

Kei17 has VHS tapes, Betamax tapes and even Hi8 tapes with 8bit PCM audio. Apparently the audio was offered to Toei, but they weren't interested. Chris Sabat from Funi has shown some interest and was given a flashdrive with some samples which he seemed to like.

I recommend checking out kei17's youtube channel. There's some interesting stuff on it like HD clips from a scan from 16mm reels of a Dragon Ball episode.
https://www.youtube.com/user/InternationalDBZ/videos

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by vincentric

A shame they stopped releasing the 4:3 bd sets indeed especially if my and Scavenger's assumption that Funi are sitting on a ton more restored eps than they would have us believe. I think if they released the level sets in affordable box seasons in the first place like they ended up doing with the terrible cropped versions, it would've sold a lot more from the get go.

There's also to consider FUNi released them at a time when they quite literally oversaturated the market and confused the consumer. They started the Levels right after the Dragon Boxes finished, and while DBZ Kai was still going. The number of releases for this series is ridiculous. Here's your volume 1 collection...
https://twitter.com/kanzenshuu/statu...63631747928064

[Mangaranga]

Has anyone else noticed a massive improvement in Sentai's encodes recently?
I've purchased Beyond the Boundary, Persona 4 The Animation and SNAFU from them recently and I've been pleasantly surprised by each.
They seem to have gone from churning out absolute garbage plagued with banding and other issues to relatively decent encodes in the last month or so.
No problems with screwed brightness/contrast on these releases either.

[SeaFox]

Have they fixed their subtitle typesetting yet?

[Oniros]

Originally Posted by Mangaranga

Has anyone else noticed a massive improvement in Sentai's encodes recently?
I've purchased Beyond the Boundary, Persona 4 The Animation and SNAFU from them recently and I've been pleasantly surprised by each.
They seem to have gone from churning out absolute garbage plagued with banding and other issues to relatively decent encodes in the last month or so.
No problems with screwed brightness/contrast on these releases either.

How is their release of Gatchaman Crowds? I was thinking on picking that one up.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by Mangaranga

Has anyone else noticed a massive improvement in Sentai's encodes recently?
I've purchased Beyond the Boundary, Persona 4 The Animation and SNAFU from them recently and I've been pleasantly surprised by each.
They seem to have gone from churning out absolute garbage plagued with banding and other issues to relatively decent encodes in the last month or so.
No problems with screwed brightness/contrast on these releases either.

Holy crap. I've been thinking of holding off on getting the RahXephon set from Japan mainly for financial reasons; I think Boundary and Snafu should replace it!

[Mangaranga]

Originally Posted by SeaFox

Have they fixed their subtitle typesetting yet?

Not entirely sure what you mean by that. Their subtitles are still yellow albeit smaller. Here's some caps from SNAFU which got a lot of typesetting love.

Originally Posted by Oniros

How is their release of Gatchaman Crowds? I was thinking on picking that one up.

No idea I'm afraid. I don't own it. It's not really a newer title if that means anything.

Originally Posted by Naiera

Holy crap. I've been thinking of holding off on getting the RahXephon set from Japan mainly for financial reasons; I think Boundary and Snafu should replace it!

I'd definitely recommend SNAFU. Someone at Sentai clearly cared about the series too based on the extent of the typesetting in it.
Not sure if this upward trend applies to all of their recent titles, but for these three there's definitely a big improvement over the norm.
The filesizes aren't any bigger either - still encoded at 19-20mbps with 24bit DTS-HD audio tracks.

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by SeaFox

Have they fixed their subtitle typesetting yet?

Or their translations. This isn't encouraging.
http://www.crymore.net/2015/02/12/of...ai-episode-02/
http://www.crymore.net/2015/10/04/of...ry-episode-01/

[pikagreg]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

Or their translations. This isn't encouraging.
http://www.crymore.net/2015/02/12/of...ai-episode-02/
http://www.crymore.net/2015/10/04/of...ry-episode-01/

Pretty sure every US release has some translation issues. My buddy who goes on that site a lot constantly whines about CR/funi subs. Just another thing for anime fans to circlejerk around.

[Clark Kent]

Funimation's subs are often terrible.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by Mangaranga

Has anyone else noticed a massive improvement in Sentai's encodes recently?
I've purchased Beyond the Boundary, Persona 4 The Animation and SNAFU from them recently and I've been pleasantly surprised by each.
They seem to have gone from churning out absolute garbage plagued with banding and other issues to relatively decent encodes in the last month or so.
No problems with screwed brightness/contrast on these releases either.

Nice, very good to hear.

Recently took the extreme step of purging my collection of anime BDs with horrible encodes in them. Needless to say, a lot of shelf space has been freed up. Haven't sold all of them yet but once I do, I will have a total of 0 Sentai titles leftover.

Sentai will have your post to thank for encouraging me to keep supporting them with their newer releases going forward. I'll probably go ahead and pick up Boundary and Persona now.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Holy crap. I've been thinking of holding off on getting the RahXephon set from Japan mainly for financial reasons; I think Boundary and Snafu should replace it!

I was also interested in getting the JP Rahxephon BDs but Illusion has me hesitating on it:

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...postcount=3543
http://www.fandompost.com/oldforums/...l=1#post177006

Would be very interested in hearing thoughts/seeing data and screenshots from you if you decide to get it.

[BigOnAnime]

To add on to RahXephon's BD's, I also remember hearing from someone who I follow on Twitter who is a videophile that the BD also has plenty of ringing. He also described it as a disaster. Really wish there were DVD vs. BD comparisons out there for that one.

Here's an old screencap the person I mentioned earlier showed me.

[Naiera]

I checked out a "fansub" based on the Blu-ray and it looked fine to me. Much better upscale than Eureka Seven or Toradora.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by vincentric

Would be very interested in hearing thoughts/seeing data and screenshots from you if you decide to get it.

I'm definitely getting it at some point. Like Eva, I haven't watched RahXephon in a decade, so it's about time. I can handle the used price on Amazon Japan.

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

Really wish there were DVD vs. BD comparisons out there for that one.

I guess I can do that, but they won't be timed very well

[Mangaranga]

Had a quick look at another relatively recent Sentai release - the Chuunibyou LE this time. At a first glance the encode seems relatively shit, but I compared it to a few JP BDrips, and like Kyoukai no Kanata they exhibit the same problems in the same places for the most part. I can only assume the Japanese source was pretty meh to start with. I don't have much experience with Japanese BDMVs outside of AniplexUSA's releases, so I do have to wonder to what extent the Japanese BD encodes are to blame. Most AoA releases authored by IMAGICA look great, whilst QTEC authored releases like Gurren and Monogatari don't tend to hold up the same. Other than that, K-On! is pretty much the only other JP BD I can think of off the top of my head which has problems (out of the titles I own.)

[BigOnAnime]

There's a good number of Japanese releases that have problems, excluding bad upscales. Like look at the Haruhi movie for another example.
http://www.fandompost.com/oldforums/...ll=1#post39367

Though generally R1 releases are still inferior.