Offical Neon Genesis Evangelion Info/Update Thread

[CouncilSpectre]

I'll take a look at mine when I get back home at the weekend. Timings-wise they should be ok as they're from the platinum releases, but I didn't QC them to the same extent that I did the dub tracks. Should be fine though as I aligned the subs to the dub track anyway.

Pretty sure I ditched my raw materials once I'd finished but I should be able to extract them from my own MKV files. Not sure how you'd merge, or sequence them though, mine are aligned 'per episode' rather than 'per disc'.

I plan on going back and tidying them up at some point. Because they're from the Plat edition DVDs, they're clearly SD. Perfectly watchable, but I'd want better if I was actually serious about the sub tracks.

[Naiera]

I'll just combine them, add 20-ish seconds for the Kara stuff at the beginning and then go from there. Should be a lot bloody better if the subs actually fit the episodes!

I'd need SRT or ASS files though. I don't combine; I just let the .srt file sit there and then my Oppo sees them, as long as they have the same name as the MKV file, of course.

[CouncilSpectre]

I'll see what I can do. I ripped mine from the DVDs by converting the video from the DVDs into MKVs and then extracting the subs via MKVMerge. Sounds like I'll need to re-format them.

PM me on Saturday so that I don't forget and then I'll play around with what I have

[vincentric]

Received my BDs earlier today (yesterday to be technical), checked out the first disc just now and yep, it's looking good. Considering that, aside from the 35mm opening sequence, the show was shot on 16mm, I was surprised by just how much better it looked. I think they pretty much squeezed out as much detail as they could out of the 16mm film.

First disc contains eps 1-6 and is given 43.7 GB of total data | around 39.8GB is used for the video and 3.9GB for the audio. That's around 6.6GB of video and 600MB of audio data on average per episode.



There's hardly any compression to be seen even during fast moving action sequences, the picture remains solid. It's a very clear upgrade from the DVDs which even contain some black crush (in the ninth comparison) I never noticed until now. I have the ADV Platinums for comparison.

01 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

02 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

03 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

04 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

05 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

06 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

07 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

08 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

09 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

When I get a chance, I'll do some comparisons for episode 16 and End of Evangelion.

[Naiera]

Until recently I didn't know about the show being 16mm. Makes sense that the OP is 35mm too, because it obviously looks better than the show itself.

[Xtempo]

usually they spend more on the opening since its used for almost every episode depending on the show. Same thing with the ending.

[BigOnAnime]

Out of curiosity, which Platinum DVD's are you comparing? The ones from the thinpak, the singles, the Platinum tin (Which re-use the singles discs), or the Holiday Edition (Same thing as tin)? I remember reading the thinpak discs had a higher bitrate. Those dropped the extras, easter eggs, and reduced the disc count from 7 to 6.

Either way, this is still a good upgrade.

[svenge]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

I remember reading the thinpak discs had a higher bitrate. Those dropped the extras, easter eggs, and reduced the disc count from 7 to 6.

I've owned both sets, and I can confirm that the thinpak discs from the 6-disc box do have a higher video bitrate. The low video bitrate is most noticable on Volumes 6 & 7 of the Platinum singles, which have a total bitrate of 5 to 5.5 mbps (including two 448 kbps audio tracks, one each for the Japanese audio and English dub).

The primary reason is that the thinpak discs don't try to cram as much content on each disc (primarily by discarding with the full-episode animatics and the inane dub-crew featurettes that no one cares about), leaving more room for the main program's video encode.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by BigOnAnime

Out of curiosity, which Platinum DVD's are you comparing? The ones from the thinpak, the singles, the Platinum tin (Which re-use the singles discs), or the Holiday Edition (Same thing as tin)? I remember reading the thinpak discs had a higher bitrate. Those dropped the extras, easter eggs, and reduced the disc count from 7 to 6.

Either way, this is still a good upgrade.

I think the thinpak (I have it in storage and am too lazy to check). If it has the 26 eps split in a 5-5-5-5-6 fashion across five discs with the sixth disc containing the four DC episodes, then that's the one I used.

[svenge]

Originally Posted by vincentric

I think the thinpak (I have it in storage and am too lazy to check). If it has the 26 eps split in a 5-5-5-5-6 fashion across five discs with the sixth disc containing the four DC episodes, then that's the one I used.

Yep, that's the thinpak. For the sake of reference, the 7-disc set is as follows:

• 1-5
• 6-10
• 11-14
• 15-17
• 18-20
• 21-23 & 21'-23'
• 24-26 & 24'

[Naiera]

All done now

Although these subs are probably not ideal for committing to disc, I'm done for now. All discs are subbed and only a few eps need slight adjustments for future non-disc viewings. I even have DC subs for the last disc. Could have for disc 4 as well, if I wanted.

Big ups to CouncilSpectre and Sylontack for your out-of-forum assistance in this endeavour. I owe you both a big one

[Naiera]

I ran into an odd problem with my Oppo. It simply refused to play the last five minutes or so of the subs. It cut about where Rei pantyflashes Shinji. I tried to switch "old subs" for platinum ones, but they only lasted a bit longer.

In the end, it worked when I put subs from a random episode at the end of the disc 5 subtitle file. Except for the fact that Cruel Angel's Thesis subs started playing during the last Fry Me to the Moon, it made no difference.

It's an odd problem that I've never run into before. I've watched quite a few movies by MakeMKV'ing sound and video and pairing it with an SRT file. Exactly what went wrong with my disc 5 subs, I'll probably never know

[SeaFox]

Originally Posted by Naiera

It's an odd problem that I've never run into before. I've watched quite a few movies by MakeMKV'ing sound and video and pairing it with an SRT file. Exactly what went wrong with my disc 5 subs, I'll probably never know

That happened to me when I was encoding Perfect Blue from a DVD once. If you look at the way the subs are broken up with Subrip what I figured out was the very last segment of subs was not being ripped for some reason. So they weren't there in my OCR'd script. I never could figure it out and ended up taking the subs from THORA's release and restyling them to what I wanted.

[vincentric]

Have some episode 16 comparisons.

The upscale looks a bit rough indeed but there are nonetheless some minor improvements in clarity and line detail, and a major one that resolves compression blocking (VERY noticeable in the 4th and 5th bloodbath comparison images).

01 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

02 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

03 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

04 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

05 ADV PT DVD | JP BD

EoE comps coming soon.

[kuroshi]

[QUOTE=vincentric;11303092]Have some episode 16 comparisons.

The upscale looks a bit rough indeed but there are nonetheless some minor improvements in clarity and line detail, and a major one that resolves compression blocking (VERY noticeable in the 4th and 5th bloodbath comparison images).

Thanks for the comparison; it does look better. Though it remains annoying that my favourite episode is in SD.

[vincentric]

It is unfortunate, I would kill to see that rain of blood in native 1080p. All would have been right with the world if they lost the original film stock for ep 26 instead or something, ep16 is one of my favorite episodes as well.

Well, just some preliminary info before I do EoE comparisons.

Jesus H, I knew that the the old flipper Manga DVD had terrible quality but it's been a while since I've viewed it and had forgotten how crappy it truly looks. The aspect ratio (which I'll get into more in a bit) is fubared, gamma is set way too bright, and there is heavy compression among the worst offenders. There is nothing good about this release when it comes to the video quality.

Regarding the aspect ratio, they squeezed the 16:9 image down to 4:3 so 1920x1080 ends up being 1440x1080 surrounded by a thick windowbox:



I used VLC to crop the image to a proper 16:9 ratio greatly reducing the windowbox but the ensuing larger image reveals the flaws of the DVD encode that much more:



For aspect ratio accuracy, I'll be using cropped images of the Mangle DVD to compare with the JP BD. It's gonna be a bloodbath.

[Naiera]

I really love those lines to the left, there

[Naiera]

Eva's rummaging around in my head after finishing it all about 24 hours ago. Obviously It's been sooooo amazing to watch it again. Because of the movies I hadn't seen the TV series for upwards of a decade, believe it or not.

I can't wait to do it again. Next time, I'll do director's cut episodes and End of Evangelion. Hopefully that'll be sorted out, as far as subs go, sooner rather than later.

[Thomas Guycott]

I look forward to this comparison: that Manga disc sure was a hot pile of garbage in every single way.

[vincentric]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Eva's rummaging around in my head after finishing it all about 24 hours ago. Obviously It's been sooooo amazing to watch it again. Because of the movies I hadn't seen the TV series for upwards of a decade, believe it or not.

I can't wait to do it again. Next time, I'll do director's cut episodes and End of Evangelion. Hopefully that'll be sorted out, as far as subs go, sooner rather than later.

I've been revisiting Eva around once every 2-3 years, it manages to enthrall me each time and while I much prefer the EoE ending, I've even grown to enjoy the show's controversial one.

Good luck with the subs, I need to try muxing some of my own already.

Originally Posted by Thomas Guycott

I look forward to this comparison: that Manga disc sure was a hot pile of garbage in every single way.

It seems almost unfair to compare it, even among other poorly encoded DVDs, it looks bad.

And when put up against the JP BD, it's like David vs Goliath only this time David has no chance in hell of winning. I don't even need to go into nerdy detail, just look at that difference. INCREDIBLE:

01 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

02 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

03 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

04 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

05 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

06 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

07 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

08 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

09 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

10 Manga R1 DVD | JP BD

Wish I had a better version to compare but the crappy manga disc is all I have access to.