American releases' video quality

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 7:04 pm

If its in Region 2, its PAL, right? They dont sell NTSC stuff in europe... right?
If thats the case then there is usually a huge difference between R2 and R1 releases. R2's alot of the time come from R1's and the conversion to PAL will often screw up fields or show really bad deinterlacing every few frames if a bad IVTC -> speedup to 25fps job was pulled. As for the actual mpeg encoding I'd hope R1 releases use clean source material and arent simply re-encoding japanese dvd encodes, that would be teh suck :/

Fungie½ · Post by **Fungie½** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 7:47 pm

As for your interest in the Battle Athletes OVA series, the american DVD's are quite nice, and at $15 each quite a good deal ^^

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 8:04 pm

From my experience, region 2 japanese DVDs are far better than region 1 dvds. Many of my region 1 anime dvds look attrocious, whereas the region 2 discs are pretty good. Take evangelion for example, while they both have horrid interlacing, the japanese discs are far superior in quality to the american ones, which have washed out color, compression artifacts, and the like.
The only region 1 dvd that I have seen where I have been truely happy with the video quality was Utena the movie. Still, they messed it up by not leaving it progressive :\
And on the Akria movie... wtf is up with all that grain?? It totally distracts me from the movie!

Some of the newer all-digital stuff being released in japan, such as Read or Die and Gatekeepers 21 looks just beautiful, with hardly any compression artifacts in sight. Hopefully these type of shows will be able to make a similar level of quality in the US releases, though I have my doubts.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 8:14 pm

Oh yes, and I don't know if I would trust animeondvds words on video quality. Everything that they say looks great, I find to look like utter crap. Maybe i'm just too critical...

I have the battle athletes dvds too. The oavs have pretty decent quality, but there's rainbows and such. Its an older show, show you can't expect too much from the quality, and I doubt the R2s would be a whole lot better. For the price, its worth it. The tv series dvds have absolutely crappy quality. I'd imagine that they could have looked a lot better. Still, they are really cheap, got mine for like 80 bucks bout a year ago, and it's a really great series.

dokidoki · Post by **dokidoki** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 8:41 pm

Zarxrax wrote:Oh yes, and I don't know if I would trust animeondvds words on video quality. Everything that they say looks great, I find to look like utter crap.

I'm not sure about the equipment they review on, but A/V equipment may have comb filters to reduce the rainbow effect. When ripping directly, it doesn't go through this process, which may be part of the discrepancy. However, you didn't say if you're basing your opinions on rips or watching on TV.

Anyway, the worst case I've seen is the first edition of CPM's Grave of the Fireflies DVD. (Note: I hear the new Collector's Edition is much better)

A frame from the Japanese DVD:
http://www.doki.ca/pics/misc/R2GotF1.jpg
(Since it's anamorphic, the image appears stretched. In short, that's a good thing, and the DVD player corrects the aspect ratio)

The same frame from the American DVD:
http://www.doki.ca/pics/misc/R1GotF1.jpg
Awful colours, rainbows, and a big black spot that's there for five frames!

I don't have the R2 pics handy, but you can see how awful this scene is in R1:
http://www.doki.ca/pics/misc/R1GotF2a.jpg
http://www.doki.ca/pics/misc/R1GotF2b.jpg

These are two consecutive frames. You can see a blotch of noise in the upper left of the first. If you flip between them, you can see how badly the rainbowing looks when animated.

But to reiterate, the new R1 release looks better, apparently.
http://www.animeondvd.com/reviews2/disc ... s/1453.php

mexicanjunior · Post by **mexicanjunior** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 8:45 pm

dokidoki wrote: Anyway, the worst case I've seen is the first edition of CPM's Grave of the Fireflies DVD. (Note: I hear the new Collector's Edition is much better)

Gah! And I just used the CPM DVD of GOTF in my new video!!!

I noticed alot of black dots that looked like cig burns in movie film as well as scenes that seemed to shake. I probably should have gotten that Collector's Edition.

dokidoki · Post by **dokidoki** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 8:52 pm

mexicanjunior wrote:Gah! And I just used the CPM DVD of GOTF in my new video!!! I noticed alot of black dots that looked like cig burns in movie film as well as scenes that seemed to shake. I probably should have gotten that Collector's Edition.

Thankfully, a friend of mine told me that my GotF video (literally) looked like crap, and loaned me his R2. And I bought the CPM DVD just before the Collector's Edition came out.

Since we're talking about them...
<plug>Rainbow reducer that I really should update soon</plug>
http://www.fiction.org/www/smoothiq/

Dugan · Post by **Dugan** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 9:26 pm

Tim Park is making a Grave of the Fireflies video?

Oh no.

mexicanjunior · Post by **mexicanjunior** » Thu Nov 07, 2002 9:45 pm

Dugan wrote:Tim Park is making a Grave of the Fireflies video?

Oh no.

He already made it.

It was his Masters entry at AWA.

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Fri Nov 08, 2002 12:14 am

thats depressing to think most of your sources are that much different from the originals
its sad ;_;