The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[kevers7290]

Is there any difference between the UK Studiocanal Ghibli releases of "When Marnie Was There" and "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" vs the US GKIDS releases?

[professorwho]

They are different encodes. If I had to guess, the SC versions have worse compression. But they should still be more than acceptable (nowhere near as FUNi levels of bad).

[gwfb5]

Originally Posted by kevers7290

Is there any difference between the UK Studiocanal Ghibli releases of "When Marnie Was There" and "The Tale of Princess Kaguya" vs the US GKIDS releases?

The GKIDS BD of Princess Kaguya comes with an 86-minute cut of "Isao Takahata and His Tale of the Princess Kaguya" on a separate DVD, while the UK BD lacks any version of it.

[professorwho]

The UK has the Kaguya documentary, but sold separately. So, I’d say the US versions are better.

[gwfb5]

Originally Posted by professorwho

The UK has the Kaguya documentary, but sold separately. So, I’d say the US versions are better.

Apparently, it's still DVD only and still edited down to 86-minutes, so it's the same as what the GKIDS BD comes with except you have to buy it separately.
https://www.blu-ray.com/dvd/Isao-Tak...ya-DVD/143087/

Side note: The full 200-minute documentary has its own Blu-ray release in Japan, but I don't think it's English friendly.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Isao-...lu-ray/112283/

[Yuripa]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

I thought of ordering Maquia, but I dodged a bullet there. The US Maquia BD doesn't have French subs, so hopefully AL will author their own softsubbed FR/EN disc with better PQ.

Lu Over The Wall looks good.

A AL staff member responded on the UK ANN discord, that they'll use their own authoring.
Now the question is who is authoring for them, UK studio, MediaOCD or... AL fr (Com'On screen)

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by Yuripa

A AL staff member responded on the UK ANN discord, that they'll use their own authoring.
Now the question is who is authoring for them, UK studio, MediaOCD or... AL fr (Com'On screen)

It isn’t MediaOCD- Justin told me. With our best choice out the window, let’s hope the guy who did Amanchu and Geass Movie 1 can fix the brightness issue, and do a good job.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by gwfb5

Apparently, it's still DVD only and still edited down to 86-minutes, so it's the same as what the GKIDS BD comes with except you have to buy it separately.
https://www.blu-ray.com/dvd/Isao-Tak...ya-DVD/143087/

Side note: The full 200-minute documentary has its own Blu-ray release in Japan, but I don't think it's English friendly.
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Isao-...lu-ray/112283/

Yes, the UK DVD is still the edited version. I wish SC could get the license to the 200 minute version, but alas they didn’t. (Since it’s DVD, I’d say either version probably looks idenatucal. But, considering the GKids version has it included for free, I’d say the GKids/Universal set is better)

[Mangaranga]

Originally Posted by pikagreg

I know you guys mentioned Shout not having great releases but this is the first time I have seen something like this. I put Maquia in my pc and saw it was on a BD50 and thought....cool! After scanning it I noticed it had two different video tracks. The file with the JP track on it also has no subtitle file and they are hardcoded into the video. The English track has two sub files for song/signs and hard of hearing subs with descriptions for sounds.

Out of interest, is that the same subtitle font they used for the theatrical run? I wonder if they've done the next most stupid thing after Fireworks (where they encoded the video from the theatrical master), and just encoded the theatrical masters as is, including subtitles/alternate credits.

[pikagreg]

Originally Posted by Mangaranga

Out of interest, is that the same subtitle font they used for the theatrical run? I wonder if they've done the next most stupid thing after Fireworks (where they encoded the video from the theatrical master), and just encoded the theatrical masters as is, including subtitles/alternate credits.

The subs at the theater I went to were white but also were a little too high and cut off during the dates so I don't think they are the same.

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by professorwho

Also, this is for anyone who saw Dragon Ball Super: Broly in theaters- did you see any colour banding? I saw some in a few of the darker lit shots. It’s not distracting, but if I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, that’d be good to know. Maybe FUNi’s DCP has different files than Toei’s (The credits were with English text, so it’s posisble) in the bulk of the film. Otherwise, it looked pretty good on the big screen in terms of clarity. It didn’t look 4K sharp- I assume this is a 2K (2048×1080) or 1080p master, but it looked great regardless.

I did notice a bit of banding, but nothing that was truly distracting.

The 4DX version was by the way ****ing amazing. I was never a proponent of gimmicks such as 3D and HFR, so 4DX was like the antichrist to me, but holy f*** was I wrong. The shaking seats, wind, vibrations and water effects add so much to the experience that I'm not sure if I ever want to watch it on Blu-ray.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

I did notice a bit of banding, but nothing that was truly distracting.

The 4DX version was by the way ****ing amazing. I was never a proponent of gimmicks such as 3D and HFR, so 4DX was like the antichrist to me, but holy f*** was I wrong. The shaking seats, wind, vibrations and water effects add so much to the experience that I'm not sure if I ever want to watch it on Blu-ray.

I’m jealous.

On the other hand, how was the sound mixing? (The film leaked yesterday in 1080p and from what I’ve heard on Twitter from those who got it, the sound mixing was as poor as it was in the US/UK/AU/NZ) Maybe the Dutch screenings had better audio?

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by professorwho

I’m jealous.

On the other hand, how was the sound mixing? (The film leaked yesterday in 1080p and from what I’ve heard on Twitter from those who got it, the sound mixing was as poor as it was in the US/UK/AU/NZ) Maybe the Dutch screenings had better audio?

The Japanese version sounded fine.

[cooperb21]

Why do ponycan releases cost even more than Aniplex? They really trying to sell a 12-13 episode series in three parts at 80$ each. 15-20$ an episode what a great value....., Aniplex looking affordable in comparison now. Possibly the worst publisher in North America for blu-rays.

[Bobo1313]

Originally Posted by professorwho

I doubt that, as their GKids releases are encoded with the exact same setup as Shout, with their “constant Bitrate” nonsense. However, as I don’t own any of them, I can’t say for certain.

I could have swore they said they author their own stuff. I quickly searched their twitter and only found these tweets, which are pretty vague, so I'd say you were probably right.

" This is not a Shout disc. This is a GKIDS disc. And its going to be the same encode as the UK."

" Or rather, it’s Shout-distributed, in partnership with GKIDS, as we do on all of our releases together. This one will happen to use the encode from UK."

[professorwho]

Wrong thread, but I agree in PonyCan being the worst.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by Bobo1313

I could have swore they said they author their own stuff. I quickly searched their twitter and only found these tweets, which are pretty vague, so I'd say you were probably right.

" This is not a Shout disc. This is a GKIDS disc. And its going to be the same encode as the UK."

" Or rather, it’s Shout-distributed, in partnership with GKIDS, as we do on all of our releases together. This one will happen to use the encode from UK."

Except the encoding style of the Ghibli BDs is identical to how Shout encodes anything. I think they’re trying to say “it’s a GKids release- in that we own it- but it’s encoded by and released by Shout. Perfect Blue uses the UK encode in this instance.”

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by cooperb21

Why do ponycan releases cost even more than Aniplex? They really trying to sell a 12-13 episode series in three parts at 80$ each. 15-20$ an episode what a great value....., Aniplex looking affordable in comparison now. Possibly the worst publisher in North America for blu-rays.

Definitely the worst.

Unlike Aniplex, you don’t even get that “Japanese quality”. And then there’s the quality of the covers, inserts and so on with their latest releases. What a mess.

[professorwho]

Of all the shots in Maquia that Pika provided, this makes the least sense:



Why? Well, besides the obvious banding, it's the fact that the grainy nature of the film makes it harder to introduce banding. Simply, to avoid banding, a compressionist applies a dither to the area in question to reduce or remove it. Film grain acts in the same way. Okada Mari must've wanted a very filmic image, so there's a lot of grain- as such, the chances of banding are reduced, but, it provides a new challenge- maintain the detail.

Maquia is obviously a digital film, and the grain (or "video noise acting as grain" if you prefer) is artificial. But, because it is on top of the original composited layer, it provides no extra detail, however, due to its inclusion, failing to render the grain with careful compression results in other artifacts.

So here, I doubt it's a source issue, as screenshots of the JP BD here don't show any banding (or if there was any, it's really minor), but rather very poor compression. The other screenshots Pika provided aren't bad, but I have a feeling that with a different approach to compression, involving locked subtitles rather than hardcoded ones, a higher bitrate, alternate angles for the credits and other tweaks, it could look better. As it, it's not terrible nor even bad, but the practice of hardcoded subs is unacceptable in the year 2019.

[pikagreg]

I emailed Shout about Maquia and they said that they were required to author the disc in this way for this particular release. No idea if it will be the same for other regions but I am glad they got back to me so quickly at least.