Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by professorwho

It does have dropped frames due to a 1080 30i to 1080 24p conversion in some sequences (S1 OP, a few scenes in 2nd Gig), but otherwise it's fine. It has the best subtitles by far- because Manga UK redid them. And yes, the AU Madman BD is the same discs.

I'm not sure this is accurate. Looking at the Manga UK BD right now and it seems like they're dubtitles other than very slight changes in some places. Majority of the subs match the dub dialogue word-for-word, as opposed to other subs which do not at all.

For example, S1E8 "Missing Hearts"

at 2:31 when the major is talking to the nurse:
dub dialogue: "You called me." ... "Pretty unusual for this time of day."
subtitles (manga UK): "You called me." ... "Pretty unusual for this time of day."
subtitles (elsewhere): "It's pretty unusual for you to call me this time of day."

at 4:34 as the major gets into the car:
dub dialogue: "All right, chief. That's the whole story. It's not much to go on."
subtitles (manga UK): "All right, chief. That's the whole story. It's not much to go on."
subtitles (elsewhere): "Anyway, that's the story. There wasn't much hard information."

It seems to me that the manga uk subtitles are dubtitles >99% of the way, where does the information about them being redone come from?

[NLScavenger]

I've seen some bits of the Manga UK BD subs and they are quite a bit worse than the US DVD script. I wonder if Manga UK simply revised the controversial in-house DVD subtitle script.

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

I've seen some bits of the Manga UK BD subs and they are quite a bit worse than the US DVD script. I wonder if Manga UK simply revised the controversial in-house DVD subtitle script.

it also seems like it may be someone mis-hearing the dub.

e.g.

S1E8 "Missing Hearts" @ 10:31 the two guys in the back of the car
dub dialogue: "you wouldn't've forgotten to switch the stinkin' labels"
sub (manga uk): "you wouldn't have forgotten to switch the sticky labels"
sub (elsewhere): "you wouldn't have forgotten to switch the labels in the first place"

there's no way you get to that TL without the dub audio, and while the manga uk sub is not an exact match to the dub, it's an error that strongly suggests dubtitle as opposed to japanese translation.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by pixelforest

It seems to me that the manga uk subtitles are dubtitles >99% of the way, where does the information about them being redone come from?

The pot stirs again three years later…

Someone who worked there privately confirmed to me they were “redone.” Whatever that diction implies is one’s own guess, they didn’t clarify on it, but it being dubtitles doesn’t surprise me given the rather slapdash nature of the release (one can even see on many m2ts files “mastheads” which reveal the HDTV masters sent via Starz, so dubtitles for television broadcast are the most logical conclusion). The only revisions I know of for a fact are British English spelling edits. I did not own it at the time, having bought my copy later that year on 5 November, but every other person who had it strangely confirmed they were “better,” perhaps due to a placebo effect.

The myth of the subs being “better” was solved years ago, but never addressed here, so I’m not surprised it would pop again. Not gonna lie, I did a double take seeing I was quoted in this thread specifically!

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by professorwho

The pot stirs again three years later…

Someone who worked there privately confirmed to me they were “redone.” Whatever that diction implies is one’s own guess, they didn’t clarify on it, but it being dubtitles doesn’t surprise me given the rather slapdash nature of the release (one can even see on many m2ts files “mastheads” which reveal the HDTV masters sent via Starz, so dubtitles for television broadcast are the most logical conclusion). The only revisions I know of for a fact are British English spelling edits. I did not own it at the time, having bought my copy later that year on 5 November, but every other person who had it strangely confirmed they were “better,” perhaps due to a placebo effect.

The myth of the subs being “better” was solved years ago, but never addressed here, so I’m not surprised it would pop again. Not gonna lie, I did a double take seeing I was quoted in this thread specifically!

Sorry for the necro!

I'm waiting on my copy of the Korean SAC / SAC 2nd Gig box sets to arrive so I'll be curious to compare their subs to these, as I'm not sure I've seen anyone say exactly *where* they appeared to have OCR'd them from.

Interestingly I'm now looking at some spots in 2nd Gig that don't appear to have the same correlations as what I saw in the first season.

S2E15 "Pat"
1:54 when the technician is talking to one of the tachikomas:
dub: "Come on now you should know better than to dive into places like that without permission"
sub (manga uk): "Hey, you, don't sneak into there."
sub (elsewhere): "Come on, now. You shouldn't dive into places like that without permission"

12:04 man in lab coat talking to section 9 team
dub: "But we can't deny the possibility that he took them himself."
sub (manga UK): "He probably took them himself."
sub (elsewhere): "Although we can't deny the possibility that he took them himself."

[same scene continued, major speaking at 12:07]

dub: "In a perfect world we would have discovered evidence in the corpse's cyberbrain indicating that those 11 helicopters had functioned as some kind of trigger, but that's too much to hope for."
sub (manga UK): "It would be great if we got evidence that those 11 helicopters served as triggers" ... "from their cyberbrains, but I guess that's too much to ask."
sub (elsewhere): "In a perfect world, there would have been evidence in the corpse's cyberbrain..." ... "...that the flight of those 11 helicopters acted as some kind of trigger." ... "But that's too much to ask for."

What do we know about the number and source of different english subtitle translations that exist for the series? So far I see at least two.

Originally Posted by professorwho

The myth of the subs being “better” was solved years ago

can you elaborate what you mean here? I've read much of this thread, but not all.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by pixelforest

Sorry for the necro!

It's fine, no problem.

can you elaborate what you mean here? I've read much of this thread, but not all.

What I meant was that I saw a Twitter comparison in late 2020 or early 2021 which compared the UK BD and NA DVD subs with the English dub as well and came to the same results as here. I don't remember who made the comparison, nor do I have it saved, but the conclusion was the same: the UK BD subs are dubtitles with slight edits. I never posted it here, nor do I think anyone else did, so finding it might be tricky (if it's still up at all), so that's what I meant.

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by pixelforest

I'm waiting on my copy of the Korean SAC / SAC 2nd Gig box sets to arrive so I'll be curious to compare their subs to these, as I'm not sure I've seen anyone say exactly *where* they appeared to have OCR'd them from.

KR BD is OCR'd from R1 DVD with some minor OCR errors. The "elsewhere" examples are from R1 DVD script.

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by professorwho

What I meant was that I saw a Twitter comparison in late 2020 or early 2021 which compared the UK BD and NA DVD subs with the English dub as well and came to the same results as here. I don't remember who made the comparison, nor do I have it saved, but the conclusion was the same: the UK BD subs are dubtitles with slight edits. I never posted it here, nor do I think anyone else did, so finding it might be tricky (if it's still up at all), so that's what I meant.

Got it. It's interesting seeing the other random samples I posted up-thread don't share this problem. I'm going to have to dive deeper into this, my manga UK set arrived absolutely crushed from Anime On LIne - they shipped it UK->US in a single layer cardboard wing wrap - so all but a couple discs were bent/gouged to the point of being unreadable. They aren't shipping the replacement set until after the new year, so I'll be able to do a deeper dive then.

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

KR BD is OCR'd from R1 DVD with some minor OCR errors. The "elsewhere" examples are from R1 DVD script.

Great information to have.

I do wonder if I can find full dubtitles, or a release with them in a format that can be access as text, and then do a diff between the manga UK sub, actual dubtitles, the R1 DVD subs, and the OCR'd subs from the korean release. It'd be interesting to see 1) exactly how different the manga UK subs are in total from the dub script and 2) all of the typos in the korean OCR.

Circling back to my question up-thread, do we know of any other translations besides R1 DVD and whatever amount of the manga UK subs aren't just dubtitles (or dub transcription with errors and omissions)?

Originally Posted by professorwho

For those who won’t read the thread and want to know the best versions of each GitS property:
[...]
Stand Alone Complex: BEST PQ/AQ: Japanese box sets (has dub in lossy audio, no subtitles) or Korean box sets (has dub in lossy audio, has English subs with some typos) or Italian Dynit release (no English subs or dub- all are proper 1080i); Best US/UK release: Manga UK BD (has proper subtitles, but is forced 1080p and is REGION B LOCKED. USA release is sh*t, don’t buy it)

Looking back to this post, I don't see discussion regarding audio quality of the manga UK dub. The back covers simply say "Audio: DTS 5.1 English, Japanese". Here's what I see from mkvtoolnix (abridged for brevity):

 + A track
|  + Codec ID: A_DTS
|  + Language: eng
|  + Default duration: 10.667ms (93.750 frames/fields per second for a video track)
|  + Name: Surround 5.1
|  + Audio track
|   + Sampling frequency: 48000
|   + Channels: 6
|   + Bit depth: 24
| + A track
|  + Codec ID: A_DTS
|  + Language: eng
|  + Default duration: 10.667ms (93.750 frames/fields per second for a video track)
|  + Name: Surround 5.1
|  + Audio track
|   + Sampling frequency: 48000
|   + Channels: 6
| + A track
|  + Codec ID: A_DTS
|  + Language: jpn
|  + Default duration: 10.667ms (93.750 frames/fields per second for a video track)
|  + Name: Surround 5.1
|  + Audio track
|   + Sampling frequency: 48000
|   + Channels: 6
|   + Bit depth: 24
| + A track
|  + Codec ID: A_DTS
|  + Language: jpn
|  + Default duration: 10.667ms (93.750 frames/fields per second for a video track)
|  + Name: Surround 5.1
|  + Audio track
|   + Sampling frequency: 48000
|   + Channels: 6

Am I correctly reading this that both the original and dub audio are DTS master audio? Trying to make sense of where this slots in for dub audio quality compared to other releases, and whether it's the one you'd want to use if remuxing things to make the S-tier remux from various discs. AFAIK the US release's dub audio is TrueHD, and that would be lesser quality than DTS? And the only other english dubs are TrueHD or worse (JP BD - Dolby Digital 5.1 640 kbps, CAN BD -Dolby TrueHD 5.1, )

[Mangaranga]

Originally Posted by pixelforest

Am I correctly reading this that both the original and dub audio are DTS master audio? Trying to make sense of where this slots in for dub audio quality compared to other releases, and whether it's the one you'd want to use if remuxing things to make the S-tier remux from various discs. AFAIK the US release's dub audio is TrueHD, and that would be lesser quality than DTS? And the only other english dubs are TrueHD or worse (JP BD - Dolby Digital 5.1 640 kbps, CAN BD -Dolby TrueHD 5.1, )

UK BD has both audio tracks encoded as 24bit DTS-HD MA. TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are both lossless audio codecs and shouldn't sound any different from one another, though I'd personally trust the UK BD dub audio more considering the issues reported with the US BD.

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by Mangaranga

UK BD has both audio tracks encoded as 24bit DTS-HD MA. TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are both lossless audio codecs and shouldn't sound any different from one another, though I'd personally trust the UK BD dub audio more considering the issues reported with the US BD.

Right, the spots where the dub cuts over to JP randomly iirc?

So the ideal GITS S.A.C. remux pulling from the best sources of each component, based on what we know right now would be:

Video: JP / KR (proven interchangeable and identical?) 1080i
Audio: Manga UK DTS-HD MA
Subs: R1 DVD? Manga UK pending further review of the full span?

I'm assuming remuxing the subs from UK to the JP video will require retiming, but this should be straightforward to script since the UK MKV chapters give us the offset to remove the color bars / info cards (when you play in a BD player it jumps to the chapter at the proper episode start, makemkv just is pulling down the whole file).

[badfingerboogie]

Somewhat off-topic, I know, but on the subject of subtitles I was wondering if anyone knew the best version of GITS2 to get? I have the Aussie Blu which has lossless audio, but the subtitle track is so terrible it's basically impossible to watch with Japanese audio. Anyone have a better recommendation?

[JEArgumedo]

Originally Posted by badfingerboogie

Somewhat off-topic, I know, but on the subject of subtitles I was wondering if anyone knew the best version of GITS2 to get? I have the Aussie Blu which has lossless audio, but the subtitle track is so terrible it's basically impossible to watch with Japanese audio. Anyone have a better recommendation?

Probably the US Blu-ray from FUNimation is the easiest and cheapest to get your hands on. Lossless audio for the US Dub/JP Dub and comes with a sub track that I think might be the same one that Dreamworks commissioned when they first brought the movie over to the US. All the Japanese Blu-ray releases, including the 4K version that people don't like, also have subtitles with lossless JPN audio, but no dubs. So there's a few options out there. I think the JPN Blu's are using the same Dreamworks subs.

[gloomranger]

Originally Posted by JEArgumedo

All the Japanese Blu-ray releases, including the 4K version that people don't like, […]

I’ve seen it mentioned a few times, but does anyone care to elaborate on what exactly is wrong with the Innocence 4K?

[JEArgumedo]

So people didn't like the DNR look of it when it was upscaled. I also think a lot people didn't really like the after-the-fact HDR that was applied either. That said, I didn't mind it, but I'm not as harsh as some of the other posters around here and I can understand why people prefer the HD version (myself included). I'm glad I have it though for the DTS:X mix.

[pixelforest]

after over a month i've got the korean boxed sets in hand and am starting to take a look at them compared to the manga uk set. only some of the uk set arrived undamaged (waiting for replacement to arrive) and i haven't fed those later discs in from the korean set yet, so i'm just taking a look at the intro so far. watching the korean discs with VLC doing IVTC and it's obviously smoother than the uk set. compression is very slightly worse on uk - some extra artifacting but not a bunch of new banding or macroblocking that i see. the korean disc is coming out of makemkv as one file for all episodes so i don't have an exact view on the bitrate over the course of an episode but one manga disc has episodes total sizes ranging 5.8-6.5gb (mean of 6.083 across 6 eps on example disc) where the korean disc 1 is 34.3gb for 5 eps (mean of 6.86).

not sure if this is the correct proper way to make comparison screenshots but here are some examples made by using VLC's "take snapshot" feature, with subs left in to show their differences and the korean shots taken with VLC's deinterlace mode set to IVTC. https://slow.pics/c/IferLJDQ

[NLScavenger]

VLC is not good for screenshots because it handles colors incorrectly: https://slow.pics/c/xe1ABc4k
The Rec.709 colors are wrongly interpreted as Rec.601, so colors end up being wrong. The colors are also pixelated because of nearest neighbor scaling of color.

I use MPV, but it's not very user-friendly. Needs to be customized before it becomes useful. MPV doesn't have IVTC out-of-the-box, so it needs to be added manually to config file (either as ffmpeg or vapoursynth filter). MPC-HC/BE + MadVR is easier to take screenshots with.

The opening titles of SAC are 29.97 progressive on KR BD btw.

[pixelforest]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

VLC is not good for screenshots because it handles colors incorrectly: https://slow.pics/c/xe1ABc4k
The Rec.709 colors are wrongly interpreted as Rec.601, so colors end up being wrong. The colors are also pixelated because of nearest neighbor scaling of color.

I use MPV, but it's not very user-friendly. Needs to be customized before it becomes useful. MPV doesn't have IVTC out-of-the-box, so it needs to be added manually to config file (either as ffmpeg or vapoursynth filter). MPC-HC/BE + MadVR is easier to take screenshots with.

The opening titles of SAC are 29.97 progressive on KR BD btw.

wow, it's really obvious the color issues in your comparison, thanks for that. i already have mpv and ffmpeg on my machine (linux!) so i'll sort that out as it will be a nice improvement i didn't realize i needed in general. if you felt like sharing your mpv.conf that'd be awesome. this makes me wonder if i'm missing out by not owning an actual dedicated blu-ray player (i just feed everything straight to makemkv on the linux box that drives my tv).

also didn't occur to me that the OP would not be interlaced like the rest of the show - i had been checking out deinterlace settings on some panning shots in an episode and just assumed the OP was interlaced as well.

[NLScavenger]

My mpv.conf is essentially the gpu-hq profile with debanding disabled. Having debanding constantly enabled is not a good idea, so I mapped deband to ctrl+d for when I need it.

mpv.conf (left out hardware settings. recommended to use vo=gpu over vo=gpu-next because gpu-next still needs some work)

#OSD#
--keep-open=yes
--script-opts=osc-timems=yes
--osd-duration=2000
--osd-font-size=30

#Log file#
--log-file=~~/log 

#Screenshots#
--screenshot-format=png
--screenshot-template="%f_snapshot_[%P]"
--screenshot-tag-colorspace=yes

#Video#
--scale=spline36
--cscale=spline36
--dscale=mitchell
--sigmoid-upscaling=yes
--linear-downscaling=yes
--correct-downscaling=yes
--dither-depth=auto

#deband#
--deband=no
--deband-iterations=2
--deband-threshold=48
--deband-range=16
--deband-grain=48

input.conf (mapped ffmpeg deinterlace and IVTC filters to d, replaced default yadif deinterlacer with bwdif. See ffmpeg manual. IVTC of video with variable framerates is a pain in MPV; you may want to experiment with different settings/filters or even try vapoursynth filters)

Alt+- add video-zoom -0.001
Alt+= add video-zoom 0.001
d cycle-values vf  "lavfi=[bwdif=deint=all:mode=1]" "lavfi=[bwdif=deint=interlaced:mode=1]" "lavfi=[bwdif=deint=all:mode=0]" "lavfi=[bwdif=deint=interlaced:mode=0]" "lavfi=[pullup,dejudder,idet,bwdif=deint=interlaced,fps=24000/1001]" ""
ctrl+d cycle-values deband yes no

[gloomranger]

Lionsgate’s Ghost in the Shell 4K UHD Best Buy exclusive SteelBook is currently available in store and online via Best Buy for $16.99.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/ghost-in-the-shell-steelbook

[GeoffOliver]

Wish Lionsgate would reissue SAC as much as the 1995 film. Maybe they'd have an opportunity to redo Anchor Bay's godawful discs.