The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[Rosenkreutz]

Does anyone by chance know if there's a major difference in video quality between the Sony & Mill Creek releases of Astro Boy (2003?) I noticed that the Mill Creek release had all 50 episodes on just 4 discs which is 1 less than the Sony release, granted even on the Sony release they had around 9 to 10 episodes per disc so I don't imagine the compression looks very good on either of them. However, it appears that the Sony thinpak can still be found for really cheap online which was pretty surprising to see unless there's bootlegs of it on the market that I'm currently unaware of. That being said, it shouldn't be difficult at all to track down the Sony thinpak if it does turn out to be the better of the two releases. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Mill Creek release includes the original Japanese opening themes or not.

[professorwho]

Both are dubbed only, IIRC and 4:3 cropped (show is 16:9 native), so I personally won't buy them. (No JP audio+subs and 4:3 cropping is a huge turn off)

Plus, Mill Creek does not equal quality.

[NLScavenger]

Mobile Suit Gundam Movie Trilogy UHD bitrate info and comparison with 2009 JP DVD and old JP BD: https://dvdprime.com/g2/bbs/board.ph...&wr_id=2342023

Originally Posted by TThomas

Someone posted a comparison between the Animoon (Germany) Blu-ray and the Japanese Blu-ray of the Konosuba Movie:

https://slow.pics/c/xvuqbuc0

stats however show 20 mbit/s avg with peaks above 60 mbit/s

They redid the disc. Average bitrate is around the same.

New disc: https://i.imgur.com/yVT8oYa.jpg

Original disc: https://i.imgur.com/nh8fAhJ.jpg

[Rosenkreutz]

Originally Posted by professorwho

Both are dubbed only, IIRC and 4:3 cropped (show is 16:9 native), so I personally won't buy them. (No JP audio+subs and 4:3 cropping is a huge turn off)

Plus, Mill Creek does not equal quality.

That's unfortunate to hear, I'm actually not too familiar with Mill Creek though, are they known for subpar releases or something?
Despite the issues I'd still like to get one of them as they're currently the only NA options, but I'm not sure if it be a safer bet going with the Sony release or not.

Edit: Turns out that the Mill Creek release is a stackpak, I'm defiantly not going with that one now.

[professorwho]

Working on 3 reviews for here:

Cowboy Bebop (Dynit, Italy)
Symphogear (Discotek, USA)
Sword Art Online II (Dynit, Italy)

I know people call me a shill for being a big fan of Dynit and Discotek, but I do call out issues when they exist- except there rarely are. Here, Discotek's Symphogear doesn't have any that I can see as encode related (in this case, problematic source), but Dynit... there's some legitimately awful decision making that happened on Bebop and SAO II. I never thought I'd say that before. What are they? Wait and see in my reviews. (They're not 100% negative, as there's still a lot amazing about them, but there's some certain things, localized into these titles I am not a fan of.)

[LexInHD]

Originally Posted by Rosenkreutz

Does anyone by chance know if there's a major difference in video quality between the Sony & Mill Creek releases of Astro Boy (2003?) I noticed that the Mill Creek release had all 50 episodes on just 4 discs which is 1 less than the Sony release, granted even on the Sony release they had around 9 to 10 episodes per disc so I don't imagine the compression looks very good on either of them. However, it appears that the Sony thinpak can still be found for really cheap online which was pretty surprising to see unless there's bootlegs of it on the market that I'm currently unaware of. That being said, it shouldn't be difficult at all to track down the Sony thinpak if it does turn out to be the better of the two releases. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Mill Creek release includes the original Japanese opening themes or not.

The Sony release is marginally better, but they are both minted from the same horrendous master files. Overseas, Sony has released the series on 6 discs, in it's original widescreen format, but chose not to do so in Murica, likely due to the lack of widescreen TVs at the time, as they were only a premium or enthusiast product back then. Ironically, the Sony DVD release has the ubiquitous "Mastered in HD" that has been present on many Sony DVD releases from the glory days of the format.

[LexInHD]

Originally Posted by Rosenkreutz

Unrelated to the above, but I just learned that the Golgo 13 TV series had a Blu-ray release, I've never seen the show, but I thought the movies were alright so I figured I'd check it out. Good thing someone pointed it out to me since I was originally going to get the DVDs. However, I know that Sentai has a habit of screwing things up from time to time so I just wanted to see if anyone knew of any reason not to get the Blu-ray over the DVD for this one.

The Blu-Ray is the complete series. The DVD is a few volumes that you'd have to track down. Both are OOP., so whichever one is easily available is what you get. As far as video quality goes, there is none on the BD. The show itself seems to have been finished in SD and then the SD masters were used to make HD masters with high-res intro/outro text tacked on to make it look HD. It's a bait-and-switch.

[NLScavenger]

Speed Racer - Funimation



BDInfo episode #1

Disc Title: Speed Racer: Complete Series (Disc 1)
Disc Label: SPEEDRACERCOMPLETESERIES_DISC1
Disc Size: 48,918,618,685 bytes
Protection: AACS
Playlist: 00815.MPLS
Size: 4,004,210,688 bytes
Length: 0:23:49.177
Total Bitrate: 22.41 Mbps
Video: MPEG-4 AVC Video / 19358 kbps / 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1
Audio: English / Dolby TrueHD Audio / 2.0 / 48 kHz /   753 kbps / 16-bit (AC3 Embedded: 2.0 / 48 kHz /   192 kbps / DN -31dB)
Subtitle: English / 52.530 kbps

[Rosenkreutz]

Did anyone ever confirm if that tweet (which no longer appears to be up) which stated that the English dub for the 4k release of Ghost in the Shell had audio syncing issues was true? If I'm remember right, I think they said it was when the garbage men were talking in the truck, but I'm not 100% sure.

Also, does anyone know if the Burn Up (OVA) release by Sentai in 2009 is exactly the same as the release by ADV Films in 2005? I see that the Sentai release is apparently 5 minutes shorter, but I'm guessing those were just the trailers or something. I have no idea if there were any kind of improvements made to the second release or not, I'm kind of leaning towards the 2005 release mainly just for the ADV nostalgia and because I like the cover art more, but on the other hand the Sentai release is a lot easier to find.

[BigOnAnime]

I don't have the ADV release, I've got only the Sentai release, but it's not the same disc, though it re-uses the ADV credit roll.

[SpaceDandy]

NANA (Kazé France)
TV shots, Captures from various episodes (Courtesy of @Gorkab)

A sample, for your very own eyes.

Visit the haunted house with the above link.

Typical result when some random distributor performs their own upscale…? Anyway, it's suffering from severe ghost frames, aliasing and banding. They failed to deinterlace the footage properly which ruined the video. Why are distributors afraid of 1080i/30?

Technical data, roughly:
5 BD - 30GiB used per discs, 3.5GiB total per episode
1080p/24, AVC (NTSC), 16Mbps mean video bitrate, 2 PCM 48kHz 24bits (JP, FR)

[NLScavenger]

Big ooofff

Originally Posted by Rosenkreutz

Did anyone ever confirm if that tweet (which no longer appears to be up) which stated that the English dub for the 4k release of Ghost in the Shell had audio syncing issues was true? If I'm remember right, I think they said it was when the garbage men were talking in the truck, but I'm not 100% sure.

No syncing issues. It was just some issue with the player that magically disappeared the next time.

[chronoclast]

Nana is one show that I hope Discotek picks up so Justin can work on it.

Those screenshots look as bad as Viz's DVDs from years ago which were absolute trash. I don't own them anymore but I recall Viz's discs having the same problems with ghosting and aliasing.

[Rosenkreutz]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

Big ooofff


No syncing issues. It was just some issue with the player that magically disappeared the next time.

Truly? Does that mean that the only issue with it was the lack of Chant III - Reincarnation in the Japanese credits? If so, maybe I'll have to get the 4K version after all, the lack of the proper ending theme sucks, but over all it should still be a major upgrade from the DVD especially since the regular BDs had far more glaring issues than that.

Though if I'm going to commit to the 4k release of GitS, then I may have to consider getting the 4k releases for a few other anime after all. I'll have to wait and see how the 4k releases for Akira & Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro turn out, but I'm still on the fence about Space Adventure Cobra on account of all the DNR. Was there ever any comparison shots posted between the BD and 4k releases? I know professorwho posted some images of the 4k release, but I might have an easier time deciding if I had a couple comparison shots to look at.

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by Rosenkreutz

Truly? Does that mean that the only issue with it was the lack of Chant III - Reincarnation in the Japanese credits? If so, maybe I'll have to get the 4K version after all, the lack of the proper ending theme sucks, but over all it should still be a major upgrade from the DVD especially since the regular BDs had far more glaring issues than that.

There's one line of Japanese text missing in the Atmos/7.1 TrueHD (UHD) and 5.1 TrueHD (BD) tracks, but it is present in the 2.0 PCM track that is included on both UHD and BD.

[Rosenkreutz]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

There's one line of Japanese text missing in the Atmos/7.1 TrueHD (UHD) and 5.1 TrueHD (BD) tracks, but it is present in the 2.0 PCM track that is included on both UHD and BD.

That's strange, but just to clarify, you're referring to a missing subtitle for a line on dialogue in the Japanese audio and not an instance where something written in Japanese would be translated in the subtitles correct?

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by Rosenkreutz

That's strange, but just to clarify, you're referring to a missing subtitle for a line on dialogue in the Japanese audio and not an instance where something written in Japanese would be translated in the subtitles correct?

I'm referring to a line of audio that is missing due to a mixing error. The line is translated in the subtitle track and it can still be heard in the 2.0 PCM track.

[TThomas]

Originally Posted by SpaceDandy

NANA (Kazé France)
TV shots, Captures from various episodes (Courtesy of @Gorkab)

Typical result when some random distributor performs their own upscale…? Anyway, it's suffering from severe ghost frames, aliasing and banding. They failed to deinterlace the footage properly which ruined the video. Why are distributors afraid of 1080i/30?

Technical data, roughly:
5 BD - 30GiB used per discs, 3.5GiB total per episode
1080p/24, AVC (NTSC), 16Mbps mean video bitrate, 2 PCM 48kHz 24bits (JP, FR)

Statement from Kazé France (autotranslated):

Hello, we have seen your feedback regarding Nana's blu-ray collector and we wanted to give you some answers, especially from our production team.
First of all, you should know that there is no HD material in Japan. We therefore wanted to meet the expectations of the fans and to do this, we set out to create our own version from the original NTSC SD masters.
The upscale with a passage of the video in progressive was for us the best option, and we arrived at a compromise which seems to us the most adequate in view of the wait.
The original production of the series already had some shortcomings, such as low resolution on some zoomed-in shots, banding and variable framerate. All this does not present a problem in DVD because the image is more blurry.
For contrast issues raised, we usually never modify the choices made on the original work.
Certainly, some wanderings remain in the eyes of the most seasoned despite the hours that our team has spent cleaning the image, but we absolutely did not want to keep the original NTSC format, which would have generated an interlaced image that is not what is expected of a Blu-ray. On the encoding side, we chose the highest level in order to limit the appearance of artifacts on the solids as much as possible. There are few complex animations and few strong color variations in this series, which induces a final bit rate lower than for other productions. We hear your feedback, but we wanted to provide the best option for Nana fans! It's a first time in blu-ray, a first time in such a magnificent edition.
We are sorry that our box set does not meet your requirements but we absolutely wanted to meet the demand of the fans: to offer NANA in blu-ray!

Source:
https://twitter.com/KazeFrance/statu...74092550676482

[NLScavenger]

Certainly, some wanderings remain in the eyes of the most seasoned despite the hours that our team has spent cleaning the image, but we absolutely did not want to keep the original NTSC format, which would have generated an interlaced image that is not what is expected of a Blu-ray.

What is not expected of a Blu-ray are the ghosting and the comb artifacts

[SpaceDandy]

Summary of Kazé's reply:

iNtErLaCeD cOnTeNt Is UnAcCePtAbLe FoR bLu-RaY

Also it's less apparent to the auto-translated text but they really emphasises on the fact that these defects are minor and only apparent to the tiny minority that seek for them.