The Secret of Kells

[Misioon_Odisea]

Originally Posted by jorimt

Anyone notice a potential encoding issue in the latest GKids release?

I ordered two copies from Amazon and one copy from Shout Factory directly, and they all had the same issue.

Frame skipping roughly every second is evident, especially during pans. An example is timestamp 19:38.

Upon inspecting the disc file, I see it is 24.000 FPS flat instead of 23.976 FPS like the 2010 Cinedigm blu-ray release, which doesn't have this issue. My digital iTunes copy also doesn't have it.

I contacted GKids and got no response. After ordering a copy via Shout Factory, I contact them, and they just refunded it today "as a one time courtesy," and are letting me keep it. Weird.

Weirder still, Blu-ray.com reviewed this and did not flag the issue, so I'm wondering if it was introduced in later releases?

I have no experiencing reporting encoding issues, so not sure how to proceed...

EDIT: I wrote back and they responded with "Your messages have been sent to the product manager in charge of this release." I'll update here for the record if/when there is a resolution.

Hello, and welcome to the forums! I hope you enjoy your time here, and unfortunately no, you were not the only one to have noticed the encoding error in Shout's 2020 edition, also included as is later in the now discontinued premium Cartoon Saloon Trilogy set. It has been in fact proven to be an improper PAL 25fps>24fps conversion, and Shout! has not issued a replacement or an improved version since. Here are some quotes of the initial observations back when the error was first detected.

Originally Posted by BlueEyedGingerSP

So I just recently got my copy of the Irish Folklore Trilogy, the GKids North American version. I admit I haven't thoroughly read through this entire forum thread to see if anyone's brought this up yet (skimming didn't turn it up, apologies if it has been addressed) but comparing the copy of The Secret of Kells in this release with my old standalone BD shows something a bit off. The runtime's shorter at about 1h15m instead of 1h19m and the audio is pitched slightly higher. That would suggest PAL speedup, but the disc is definitely encoded at 24fps. I ripped both discs and stepped through the video frame by frame from each and found that yes the new disc is just missing 1 frame out of every 25, 1 per second. Needless to say I'll be holding onto my standalone disc...

Originally Posted by BlueEyedGingerSP

OK, yeah just looked up the specs for the Shout Factory standalone disc and they list the runtime as 75 minutes which matches what's in this Trilogy set.
https://www.shoutfactory.com/product...roduct_id=7477

Meanwhile someone over in the forum thread for StudioCanal's UK release of the Trilogy was kind enough to post BDInfo scans of the discs in that set. Sure enough the UK release has the longer runtime, so Shout screwed up their standalone release and since they didn't get called out on it just reused that faulty disc for this set. SMH

Since The Secret of Kells is one of my favorite films and one I consider to be a pinnacle and must-have staple of home video, I myself have too much to say about this problem, not necessarily regarding the disc itself but certainly about the many circumstances surrounding it, but since you're new around here, I'll spare you the pages and pages of passional, candid and possibly defiant text walls about the matter. However, you may ask me about anything you may need to know, particularly about which animation projects to keep an eye on or about being in the forums, and I'll try to help you out where possible.

Sometimes it happens that Blu-ray.com's official reviews may miss a defect on the technical presentation of the discs, such as in this case, so you could look up on the forums here to see if anything went unmentioned.

I think you did right by writing directly to the companies involved, which may be the best available course of action we can take to report these problems, even if often nothing seems to come out of it. They may not issue a replacement for this given the age of the release, but at least we can let them know where they went wrong so they can avoid making this mistake again. Great to see that Shout! replied to your message, and we'll keep an eye out here in case they follow you up on the matter. Hopefully, any potential 4K UltraHD Blu-ray reissue of the film won't suffer from the same error present in Shout's current disc.