Funimation Remastering of Z - What did they do wrong?

[SpiritBombTriumphant]

In every picture the Funi remaster looks better than the Toei version. But I know for a fact from owning the season sets that Funi screwed up via cropping, color ruining, blurring things (forget the tech term), and sharpening edges of characters.

You're saying that the bottom of each pair of images looks better than the top!? But the bottom image looks like it's been edited in an attempt to make it look INTENTIONALLY bad. Like those videoes internet trolls make with the ear-hurting/speaker-damaging audio. Just look at Gokuh's gi, at the line between light orange and dark orange.

No. It looks like it's been cleaned up, color corrected, and made clearer. It looks better.

[professorwho]

I disagree that it's uncut. The top and bottom are cut out, so technically I'm not seeing the footage uncut. The episode just happens to run as long as the original uncut episode did. Therefore...0/10.

You get what I meant, though. I'd give it a 0/10 in terms of PQ, but by "uncut", I meant no censorship. Even though you could say the removal of stuff like the episode previews count as that...

Obviously I'm not on the side who likes it- given my harsh words against FUNi here and on other forums. I hope that's clear.

[Forte224]

Yeah I know. I was essentially just adding more insult to injury when it came to the awful blu rays.

[Bruma rabu]

In every picture the Funi remaster looks better than the Toei version. But I know for a fact from owning the season sets that Funi screwed up via cropping, color ruining, blurring things (forget the tech term), and sharpening edges of characters.

You're saying that the bottom of each pair of images looks better than the top!? But the bottom image looks like it's been edited in an attempt to make it look INTENTIONALLY bad. Like those videoes internet trolls make with the ear-hurting/speaker-damaging audio. Just look at Gokuh's gi, at the line between light orange and dark orange.

No. It looks like it's been cleaned up, color corrected, and made clearer. It looks better.

They went way to far with cleaning it up and color correcting it.

[ABED]

For a series like DB, what would a proper (sorry to use such a vague term) restoration? Not even the highest quality, just one that restored the colors and cleaning up the image?

[Bruma rabu]

For a series like DB, what would a proper (sorry to use such a vague term) restoration? Not even the highest quality, just one that restored the colors and cleaning up the image?

For DVD the dragon boxes with color correction would be perfect
Blu-ray, what their with the Movies is good. It would be better if they keep the grain. With color correction of course.
And for the folks that prefer the original audio for all releases to have broadcast audio.
I think this would be the best possible out come for most if not everybody.

[ABED]

I get that, but how costly is that. Clearly the automated process is not the way. It's cheap, and you get what you pay for.

[KBABZ]

For a series like DB, what would a proper (sorry to use such a vague term) restoration? Not even the highest quality, just one that restored the colors and cleaning up the image?

I think restoring the colours and giving a proper grade is a big priority that doesn't get enough attention with these releases. When I watch The Path to Power it's really noticeable that the grade can be inconsistent: the tone suddenly goes blue for a shot and then reverts back to normal. Of course it all starts with a good scan, which is presumably what Toei is doing here. The 16mm stuff I don't think benefits too much from being beyond HD, but the 35mm content like the movies I think would benefit from 4K, but only at most. Past that, repairing any damage to the film like spots and whatnot should also be done. Brightness is something I think FUNimation went overboard for regarding the Orange Bricks and the Blu-Rays, it only screws with the overall look of the picture if you try to make the white WHITE and the blacks BLACK.

The big point of division I notice is with the noise removal. Personally, I think it should be light, just enough to ease it a bit, but certainly not with any intent to remove it completely. One of the problems Toei has with the classic content (as shown with Kai) is that they pretend that this stuff is more modern than it actually is. This shit is 30 years old, and they should act like it is. Don't cover it up, embrace it, this isn't meant to look as squeaky clean as Super does. Trying to update the colour range and remove all the noise to me is like how Jurassic Park got an awful Blorange colour grade and noise removal with the 2013 Blu Rays. It clashes with the time period the film is made and meddles with the work done by all the artists on the original production. Unless the film was made on the cusp of the digital era than it's almost never worth it to try and fake it to look more modern.

[linkdude20002001]

No. It looks like it's been cleaned up, color corrected, and made clearer. It looks better.

Well, perhaps you personally would PREFER the series had been drawn in a watercolor style, but it's not how it SUPPOSED to look. Thus, FUNi making it look like it was drawn with watercolors is "what they did wrong".
If you don't know what I mean, look at the clouds. Instead of being fluffy, they look like a watercolor painting.
Also, like I said before, color blending is broken in FUNi's remaster. Gokuh's gi is a good exampel. The two oranges don't blend together, and instead the in between shades of orange are changed to either the lite orange or the dark orange, resulting in no blend at all, and jagginess in its place.
Now, a lighter colors in the bottom screenshot is probably more correct than the darker colors in the top screenshot, but they forced it a littel too hard, damaging the picture. They tried to make their garbage-y masters look better than was possible, resulting in some-thing that looks worse. Again, you may like watercolor paintings (I know I do), BUT...DBZ shouldn't look like a painting. And even still, in their attempt to make it briter, they ended up crushing the whites (on top of the blacks already being crusht). What that means is, the things that are close to being white, but are clearly distinguishabel from white, BECOME white. And crusht blacks are the same of course. Honestly, neither picture looks good, tho, so don't mistake me for arguing FOR the top pictures. I'm just arguing against the bottom pictures.

[SpiritBombTriumphant]

No. It looks like it's been cleaned up, color corrected, and made clearer. It looks better.

Well, perhaps you personally would PREFER the series had been drawn in a watercolor style, but it's not how it SUPPOSED to look. Thus, FUNi making it look like it was drawn with watercolors is "what they did wrong".
If you don't know what I mean, look at the clouds. Instead of being fluffy, they look like a watercolor painting.
Also, like I said before, color blending is broken in FUNi's remaster. Gokuh's gi is a good exampel. The two oranges don't blend together, and instead the in between shades of orange are changed to either the lite orange or the dark orange, resulting in no blend at all, and jagginess in its place.
Now, a lighter colors in the bottom screenshot is probably more correct than the darker colors in the top screenshot, but they forced it a littel too hard, damaging the picture. They tried to make their garbage-y masters look better than was possible, resulting in some-thing that looks worse. Again, you may like watercolor paintings (I know I do), BUT...DBZ shouldn't look like a painting. And even still, in their attempt to make it briter, they ended up crushing the whites (on top of the blacks already being crusht). What that means is, the things that are close to being white, but are clearly distinguishabel from white, BECOME white. And crusht blacks are the same of course. Honestly, neither picture looks good, tho, so don't mistake me for arguing FOR the top pictures. I'm just arguing against the bottom pictures.

I like your argument. Finally someone explains clearly the problem. I'll say this. Of the two images we saw on page 1, I like the bottom (Funi remaster) better because of the reasons explained before. However, I would rather have a product that is HD and how the show is supposed to look. Basically an HD version of what originally aired on TV in Japan and then the U.S. I want an upscale, a color correction, and no cropping. I don't want any artificial edge sharpening, no smudging for whatever reason they do it (DVNR side effect?), and obviously no DVNR if it's different than whatever causes the smudging. But between the two images from the last page, I liked the Funi remaster version better. But I do not like how it's watercolor like. Regardless, I'd take it over the former if it was non-cropped. Cropping DBZ is one of the biggest plagues of the franchise.

[SheonGT]

All the replies in this thread refer to visual remastering and pretty much hit the issues spot on the nose, but Funi screwed up their Broadcast Audio track on the Bricks and Blurays.

The audio mixing/leveling was played with, different than how it aired on Toonami which I assume most people listening to Faulconer want to hear it like.

On top of that, voice filters were removed which you can hear quite prominently on Android 19 and Super Buu. 19 is okay but Super Buu is a huge downgrade. Just sounds like a mutation of Raditz as Cook doesn’t have a huge range without the filter, and it loses that cool pitchshift when Buu goes “You’re going to pay for everything you did to me!” and a bit of Pure Buu slips through.

Also, Ginyu Assault starts in a weird place. Well, I shouldn’t say weird, it’s technically correct and uncut, but it’s the first episode after what was the Ocean dub ended, and the last Ocean episode ended like halfway through the episode it corresponds to uncut. So the original Funi dub of Ginyu Assault is extra long to finish the episode, and then all of the next uncut episode.

But because of the Ultimate Uncut sedition dub, Ginyu Assault Broadcasts audio starts way later in the episode than originally intended. The first ever Faulconer track you hear (after Johnson score) is different than the original. I get why it happens but it’s a change.

One of the episodes’ Faulconer score was apparently completely lost by Funi and replaced with something else somewhere in the early Frieza saga, perhaps episode 70 or 80? As if Funimation couldn’t have pieced it together from the corresponding Single.

[SpiritBombTriumphant]

On top of that, voice filters were removed which you can hear quite prominently on Android 19 and Super Buu. 19 is okay but Super Buu is a huge downgrade. Just sounds like a mutation of Raditz as Cook doesn’t have a huge range without the filter, and it loses that cool pitchshift when Buu goes “You’re going to pay for everything you did to me!” and a bit of Pure Buu slips through.

I don't know about Super Buu, but I believe what they did to No. 19 was intentional. The original Japanese version of the show didn't have a robotic sound effect added to his voice like the broadcast Funimation dub did. I think they removed it as part of a tweak to the show they made throughout the release of the Orange Bricks. My guess is that Super Buu is a similar situation. If you think that No. 19's filter is missing, check out Kai. He does not have a filter in that either which is another reason I think it's intentional. They don't want to change things more than they have from the original Japanese version and voice filters is something they can easily fix.

[SheonGT]

On top of that, voice filters were removed which you can hear quite prominently on Android 19 and Super Buu. 19 is okay but Super Buu is a huge downgrade. Just sounds like a mutation of Raditz as Cook doesn’t have a huge range without the filter, and it loses that cool pitchshift when Buu goes “You’re going to pay for everything you did to me!” and a bit of Pure Buu slips through.

I don't know about Super Buu, but I believe what they did to No. 19 was intentional. The original Japanese version of the show didn't have a robotic sound effect added to his voice like the broadcast Funimation dub did. I think they removed it as part of a tweak to the show they made throughout the release of the Orange Bricks. My guess is that Super Buu is a similar situation. If you think that No. 19's filter is missing, check out Kai. He does not have a filter in that either which is another reason I think it's intentional. They don't want to change things more than they have from the original Japanese version and voice filters is something they can easily fix.

That’s valid. To me, the old Funi dub is so wildly different from proper Dragon Ball in Japanese that I treat them like two separate shows. I like them both but I don’t expect the dub to resemble the subbed any more.

Of course with Kai and Super they’ve shaped up their act and that’s fine

[SpiritBombTriumphant]

That’s valid. To me, the old Funi dub is so wildly different from proper Dragon Ball in Japanese that I treat them like two separate shows. I like them both but I don’t expect the dub to resemble the subbed any more.

Same here. Because of Faulconer and the tone the show has with the original Funimation dub, I see it and the Japanese version as different products as well. I enjoy them both though. Each in their own way.