[DONE] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer/American OST Edition

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:37 pm

Did a minor change this morning because I felt off about one track, only episodes 82 and 79 were updated.
vknives wrote:I joined just to tell you thank you so much for taking the time to do this! Watching Kai with the original soundtrack was always weird but now I can finally enjoy it
my pleasure!

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by TheMikado » Thu Dec 07, 2017 12:46 pm

Faulconer has been epic for western audiences. Honestly I still cringe at the original soundtrack. I don't think its nostalgia either. I will say I do like the OG Funimaiton Dragon ball themes

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Thu Dec 07, 2017 1:02 pm

TheMikado wrote:Faulconer has been epic for western audiences. Honestly I still cringe at the original soundtrack. I don't think its nostalgia either. I will say I do like the OG Funimaiton Dragon ball themes
I'm someone who can appreciate both Kikuchi and Faulconer, but I give my preference to Faulconer simply due to the amazing tracks that it has. I'm hoping to re-create that epic feeling while trying to get rid of the issues that people had with Faulconer that can be fixed, such as playing all the time, choppiness, poorly placed tracks in certain instances, etc.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Sun Dec 10, 2017 10:20 pm

Cell Games Saga is complete, I'm fairly confident that the music placement is 99% of how it will be in the final product. Now it's time to re-add the sound effects to the Saiyan Saga and make some final tweaks to the Final chapters.

Really pleased with how this arc has turned out, made a lot of changes in the episode of Gohan's build up to SSJ2 explosion in particular and I don't think I'll ever need to go back and rework this saga again

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Sun Dec 17, 2017 5:13 am

Alright folks, Saiyan Saga has the sound effects work done. Did some additional tweaks, such as making sure the theme was consistent for all the episodes and attemping to put in the secondary announcer files without having leakage of the original soundtrack.

I am currently working on the Final Chapters, should be maybe a week or two and then we can call this thing pretty much done!

So if you were in the wings waiting to download until this was at a final product, you can go ahead and grab 1-98 because I think those are in excellent shape and don't need any more tweaks unless I have some divine inspiration sometime later or someone suggests something brilliant.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 1:01 am

Just wrapped up the Peaceful World Tournament Saga edit. Changed a couple tracks here and there, but it was mostly audio tweaks and trying to filter out the occasional pops and cracks that came from Funi's poor audio mixing.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 2:53 am

I dont like Faulconer, but I still need to say you are doing a great thing. because Kai's more accurate dub needs to attract more old school DBZ fans and this will help a lot! Kudos!
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by KBABZ » Tue Dec 19, 2017 5:10 am

I'm thinking of doing a similar project to this at some point, only I'd place the Kikuche soundtrack back in with the selection as heard in the original Z, rather than the replacement score for the DVDs. What were the challenges you faced during this project?

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 2:48 pm

Had that strike of inspiration last night to adjust one track in episode 8, i added a bit of a riff to the track playing when the saiyans arrive so that the timing of vegeta's pod opening and the track's shift matched.

I also added some clips to youtube for you to preview, link is in the original post.
Cure Dragon 255 wrote:I dont like Faulconer, but I still need to say you are doing a great thing. because Kai's more accurate dub needs to attract more old school DBZ fans and this will help a lot! Kudos!
Damn that means a lot, thank you! I completely agree about how more DBZ fans need to watch Kai, I see way too many stick with the old dub simply because of the music.
KBABZ wrote:I'm thinking of doing a similar project to this at some point, only I'd place the Kikuche soundtrack back in with the selection as heard in the original Z, rather than the replacement score for the DVDs. What were the challenges you faced during this project?
That would be brilliant because I'm sure a lot of people here would want that since the kikuchi track was poorly handled by Toei.

Honestly, there are a lot more challenges than I thought there would be when I first started doing this, it's partially tied to how you score the tracks (I used audacity to put in the tracks and watched the video at the same time to match the placement) as well as your own standards. A big issue for me was having exact placement of where I wanted them and more often than not I'd spend an hour or two just moving a track a 10th of a second just so that it was where I wanted and it synchronized. I also wanted to avoid having tracks be repetitive, meaning one track played more than once in an episode or played multiple times in consecutive episodes, as was the case in both the original Faulconer score and the Kikuchi replacement score of Kai. Partly why I liked Faulconer is that it had a wide variety of tracks for most circumstances, so I could easily avoid this problem.

Perhaps the biggest, though, is how far you'll want to go and how much time you'll want to divulge into this thing, because I'm sure you're aware projects like these can suck the life right out of you and you can get lost in doing this project while not investing enough time in your work and personal life, so time management is crucial as well as pacing yourself. And, you're going to want to set goals with what you'll consider a final product because otherwise you'll just leave something and keep coming back to it and it will never shape up to how you want it.

That's pretty much what I can think of off the top of my head, another one would be balancing original intent with creative intent. When I started this project I also wanted to be extremely faithful to the original score, but when you're watching the same episode a billion times with the track you begin to notice whether a track worked or it didn't in some cases. Nobody is perfect, and sometimes the original placement is flawed. It definitely is the case with Faulconer, and you may come to a point like me where you decide to take a bit of deviation in placement. It's hard to be 100% faithful when Kai is cut differently than the original score, not just in shortening sequences but also changing the placement of frames, the mood of a scene, pacing, etc.

Some technical challenges I ran into were loss of sound effects, which I managed to restore most thanks to audacity (using invert on the sound effect tracks, I can go more into detail on this if you want). Also, some re scores I noticed didn't bother re-adding lost "thought" or echo vocal tracks, but you can easily replace them with the echo function in audacity, or if you have something better use that and let me know because I'd like to know LOL (I use settings .075, .65 respectively. Not perfect but its better than nothing). Also, you gotta balance between how noticeable you want the track to be, because it can sometimes drown out the scene or be drowned out, so playing with that takes a bit too.

These are a bit unorganized, I know, but I just wrote these down as I thought of them. Hope this helps. There are probably more, but I'll need some coffee if I want to dig deeper

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 4:55 pm

Also do you add Silence? One of the main criticisms of the Faulconer track was that it never had any silence? Does this follow suit or...?
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Tue Dec 19, 2017 5:00 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote:Also do you add Silence? One of the main criticisms of the Faulconer track was that it never had any silence? Does this follow suit or...?
Yup, that was my biggest problem too. I made sure to have times where the music stopped playing, and to have it make sense. The way I did this is I kind of followed the music beats of kai, where I'd have music play where kai played music and then have silence where kai didn't play music. This isn't always the case as sometimes I have silence where there was a kai track playing, or I have a faulconer track playing where there was silence, but I think I balanced it pretty well. There are a few episodes where music is playing all or most of the time, but this is usually because the episode is so action packed. during the laid back episodes I try and keep my music usage to a minimum. It probably has a bit less moments of silence than the original kai score, but far more than what the Faulconer score allowed.

As said in the description this is about a 60-70% faithful score to Faulconer, meaning not only are there moments of silence but I also made changes to tracks used in scenes where I felt A. something was better or B. the original didn't fit (I.E Krillin gets impaled by Frieza)

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by KBABZ » Tue Dec 19, 2017 8:53 pm

Diccolo-420 wrote:That would be brilliant because I'm sure a lot of people here would want that since the kikuchi track was poorly handled by Toei.
Yeah. The other reason why I wanted to do it was because I have an enormous reverence for the Kikuche score for OG Dragon Ball, and yet I've only experienced Z with either Falcouner when it aired on TV in my tween years, or with Yamamoto's plagaristic bombastism score. The replacement score feels souless in its placement but Z is incredibly bloated, so I wanted to see if I could improve Kai to be the best of both worlds; modern brevity with the original score.
Diccolo-420 wrote:Honestly, there are a lot more challenges than I thought there would be when I first started doing this, it's partially tied to how you score the tracks (I used audacity to put in the tracks and watched the video at the same time to match the placement) as well as your own standards. A big issue for me was having exact placement of where I wanted them and more often than not I'd spend an hour or two just moving a track a 10th of a second just so that it was where I wanted and it synchronized. I also wanted to avoid having tracks be repetitive, meaning one track played more than once in an episode or played multiple times in consecutive episodes, as was the case in both the original Faulconer score and the Kikuchi replacement score of Kai. Partly why I liked Faulconer is that it had a wide variety of tracks for most circumstances, so I could easily avoid this problem.
Ah! I use Sony Vegas for my The First Chapters project (basically Kai-ing the original Dragon Ball, including credits). It's a video editor that started out as an audio editor, so I'm able to just drag the audio tracks about if I need to rather than adding .01 seconds of silence like in Audacity. I think Kikuche had a big library of music to use as well, but whoever did Kai used something like thirty, which sounds like a lot but isn't nearly enough for a near-100 episode show. I also recall that it used some Dragon Ball tracks from time to time as well, even up to the final episodes.
Diccolo-420 wrote:Perhaps the biggest, though, is how far you'll want to go and how much time you'll want to divulge into this thing, because I'm sure you're aware projects like these can suck the life right out of you and you can get lost in doing this project while not investing enough time in your work and personal life, so time management is crucial as well as pacing yourself. And, you're going to want to set goals with what you'll consider a final product because otherwise you'll just leave something and keep coming back to it and it will never shape up to how you want it.
Yep, I definitely know that! I've been working on T1C for over a year now, and have technically already "completed" it. However that was using the Blue Brick footage; I've since bought the Dragon Box and am in the process of redoing all of my edits using the new footage, as well as creating new titles for every episode and redoing the credits to make it look like Kai (but with a healthy amount of blur to make it look like Kai as if it were done in the 80s). It's taking a long time, but luckily I logged every single one of my changes in a Word document, and I've got my original project files if I need to double-check how I did something the first time around.
Diccolo-420 wrote:That's pretty much what I can think of off the top of my head, another one would be balancing original intent with creative intent. When I started this project I also wanted to be extremely faithful to the original score, but when you're watching the same episode a billion times with the track you begin to notice whether a track worked or it didn't in some cases. Nobody is perfect, and sometimes the original placement is flawed. It definitely is the case with Faulconer, and you may come to a point like me where you decide to take a bit of deviation in placement. It's hard to be 100% faithful when Kai is cut differently than the original score, not just in shortening sequences but also changing the placement of frames, the mood of a scene, pacing, etc.
Yeah, that's something that I face when removing filler, particularly on episodes that would run quite short without them. Sometimes a filler scene can genuinely add to the story and even be useful. For example, when Goku and co. reach Pilaf's castle for the first time, I kept the Pilaf gang's filler scene with the Dragon Radar shenanagins almost entirely untouched, because it serves to introduce them before the heroes meet them (and the radar talents will be important with King Piccolo). I had a similar one with Upa and Bora; the scene of them cooking and carving with no dialogue is effectively filler since it wasn't in the manga, but I kept it because it helps the audience and Goku connect with them, so that Bora's death is more tragic.
Diccolo-420 wrote:Some technical challenges I ran into were loss of sound effects, which I managed to restore most thanks to audacity (using invert on the sound effect tracks, I can go more into detail on this if you want). Also, some re scores I noticed didn't bother re-adding lost "thought" or echo vocal tracks, but you can easily replace them with the echo function in audacity, or if you have something better use that and let me know because I'd like to know LOL (I use settings .075, .65 respectively. Not perfect but its better than nothing). Also, you gotta balance between how noticeable you want the track to be, because it can sometimes drown out the scene or be drowned out, so playing with that takes a bit too.
The thought echoes (as well as that of sound effects in cave settings) were my primary concern. Good to hear that they can be resolved!

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 3:33 am

KBABZ wrote: Yeah. The other reason why I wanted to do it was because I have an enormous reverence for the Kikuche score for OG Dragon Ball, and yet I've only experienced Z with either Falcouner when it aired on TV in my tween years, or with Yamamoto's plagaristic bombastism score. The replacement score feels souless in its placement but Z is incredibly bloated, so I wanted to see if I could improve Kai to be the best of both worlds; modern brevity with the original score.
Your description of Yamamoto fits perfectly, it's almost distracting how over the top it is in most scenes where it doesn't need to be despite that it has some fantastic tracks here and there.
KBABZ wrote: Ah! I use Sony Vegas for my The First Chapters project (basically Kai-ing the original Dragon Ball, including credits). It's a video editor that started out as an audio editor, so I'm able to just drag the audio tracks about if I need to rather than adding .01 seconds of silence like in Audacity. I think Kikuche had a big library of music to use as well, but whoever did Kai used something like thirty, which sounds like a lot but isn't nearly enough for a near-100 episode show. I also recall that it used some Dragon Ball tracks from time to time as well, even up to the final episodes.
Not only were the tracks extremely repetitive, but the unique tracks that were used in the original rendition weren't really used, such as Gohan's SSJ2 transformation. Instead they just used another BGM that we had heard 3 times in the episodes prior, and it was just lazy. The placement for the sumitomo score in the final chapters was no better, but then again there wasn't much variety to work with. Thankfully it seems they got their act together with super.

Interesting method, I wish I had heard of it sooner because it might have saved me a lot of headache.
KBABZ wrote: Yep, I definitely know that! I've been working on T1C for over a year now, and have technically already "completed" it. However that was using the Blue Brick footage; I've since bought the Dragon Box and am in the process of redoing all of my edits using the new footage, as well as creating new titles for every episode and redoing the credits to make it look like Kai (but with a healthy amount of blur to make it look like Kai as if it were done in the 80s). It's taking a long time, but luckily I logged every single one of my changes in a Word document, and I've got my original project files if I need to double-check how I did something the first time around.
I scrolled through your thread about it and I have to say I was impressed, but hey using the dragon box to make the best footage is totally worth it. I can't wait until the final product is up

See, I had a similar experience in that I think I've gone through the first 98 episodes and rescored most sections 2-3 times now because I didn't like the placement at all, and that I had discovered better tracks in the process.

KBABZ wrote: Yeah, that's something that I face when removing filler, particularly on episodes that would run quite short without them. Sometimes a filler scene can genuinely add to the story and even be useful. For example, when Goku and co. reach Pilaf's castle for the first time, I kept the Pilaf gang's filler scene with the Dragon Radar shenanagins almost entirely untouched, because it serves to introduce them before the heroes meet them (and the radar talents will be important with King Piccolo). I had a similar one with Upa and Bora; the scene of them cooking and carving with no dialogue is effectively filler since it wasn't in the manga, but I kept it because it helps the audience and Goku connect with them, so that Bora's death is more tragic.
This is a critique I had with kai, where I felt they cut far too much filler in the saiyan saga. I wish they had kept maybe two or 3 episodes detailing how Gohan grew in his 6 months, not to mention introducing the other characters. Part of making the audience care about characters is having them spend time with them and introducing to them properly, Kai pretty much trod all over that.

I've had half a mind to test my video editing skills and do a kai edit of a few of those episodes (using dragon box footage), where I get rid of the unnecessary crap (mostly Goku falling into hell or his other stuff on snake way) and edit it into kai. The only issue is there would be a jarring difference between Gohan and Bulma's voice actors, but I think having a few episodes of character development would be worth it, because watching these characters struggle is only special when we've become attached to them in the first place. I think Kai assumes that everyone just starts at the original dragonball, and not everybody does, so those people don't really care when Tien or Chiouzu die. I could go on about this, but that would detract from this entire thread.

Seriously though, go for that Kikuchi rescore, because having Kai's biggest issue (the music) fixed will pretty much render the original series obsolete unless you're watching the sub.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by KBABZ » Wed Dec 20, 2017 5:29 am

Diccolo-420 wrote:Interesting method, I wish I had heard of it sooner because it might have saved me a lot of headache.
Sony Vegas (or more specifically, Movie Studio Platinum, a more consumer-level version of it) isn't too expensive for what it does, so you may want to look into it at some point.
Diccolo-420 wrote:I scrolled through your thread about it and I have to say I was impressed, but hey using the dragon box to make the best footage is totally worth it. I can't wait until the final product is up
Thank you! It may be a bit; I'm working on another project at the moment (Pokémon Yellow and Crystal soundtracks in Stereo) but I fully intend to return to it. I've gotten up to the fight with Jackie Chun, which is where the first instance of re-inserting an insert song that Funimation removed will occur. If you hadn't already, you should check out the YouTube playlist I made for some of the more noteworthy edits I've made so far.
Diccolo-420 wrote:See, I had a similar experience in that I think I've gone through the first 98 episodes and rescored most sections 2-3 times now because I didn't like the placement at all, and that I had discovered better tracks in the process.
Yep, it is frustrating to do the same content over again, but for me I have been able to make smarter and cleaner edits than the first time around thanks to what I learned editing 153 episodes down to 100. In some cases I even had the motivation to edit the footage itself to make it work; I photoshopped the bandage on Roshi's chin in a single shot; combined with a wide shot where the artists legit forgot to draw it on him, it allowed me to completely remove the scene where Roshi tries to get Bulma into a tight shirt!
Diccolo-420 wrote:This is a critique I had with kai, where I felt they cut far too much filler in the saiyan saga. I wish they had kept maybe two or 3 episodes detailing how Gohan grew in his 6 months, not to mention introducing the other characters. Part of making the audience care about characters is having them spend time with them and introducing to them properly, Kai pretty much trod all over that.
My main critique with Kai is that it tries to make the show feel modern when it so obviously isn't, and it contrasts badly when you come out of a redrawn shot or the incredibly crisp opening + title card and then cut to footage from the 80s. I don't think anyone would have complained over Ha La Head Cha La with a replacement logo and some more eyecatch variety. For T1C I've purposefully gone for the aged look; the new title cards intentionally use off-whites to match the background art, and the text for them and the credits is blurred to feel like its old footage.
Diccolo-420 wrote:I've had half a mind to test my video editing skills and do a kai edit of a few of those episodes (using dragon box footage), where I get rid of the unnecessary crap (mostly Goku falling into hell or his other stuff on snake way) and edit it into kai. The only issue is there would be a jarring difference between Gohan and Bulma's voice actors, but I think having a few episodes of character development would be worth it, because watching these characters struggle is only special when we've become attached to them in the first place. I think Kai assumes that everyone just starts at the original dragonball, and not everybody does, so those people don't really care when Tien or Chiouzu die. I could go on about this, but that would detract from this entire thread.
That would actually be pretty interesting, having Kai edits of filler footage so that they focus more on the character progression and less on stalling for time. One angle you could do is to ignore any content with Bulma, and have Gohan go mostly voiceless and instead use Clinkenbeard samples from other Kai episodes, focusing mainly on vocalizations. Might give it a unique angle, almost like a silent movie? The tricky part is that Kai brushes over the timeskip in the middle of an episode, not at the end of one.
Diccolo-420 wrote:Seriously though, go for that Kikuchi rescore, because having Kai's biggest issue (the music) fixed will pretty much render the original series obsolete unless you're watching the sub.
Thank you! I have a few other similar ideas bubbling around at the moment, in particular doing a 4:3 Kikuche'd edit of The Final Chapters content that also further edits the show down, since TFC right now keeps a lot of filler to hit a required episode count. The other and far more intriguing one is doing a Kai edit of GT to help make it more watchable. AND if I ever do get to do a proper Kikuche Kai, I might try and remove stalling-type scenes there too, particularly around the Frieza and Cell fights. I mean do we really need an ENTIRE episode just on Satan's "fight" with Cell?

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by curt202 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 1:13 pm

Hi, I downloaded this & watched the entirety of Kai at the start of the Month. This is absolutely fantastic - you have made some of us Faulconer fans extremely happy and I would like to offer my sincere thanks. I would have thanked you sooner but I was too hooked on finishing it to find the time to make an account on here to do so :D. Regarding the bitrate, it is certainly on the lower on with certain episodes. I did read the description and I'm not an expert by any means, but would you be able to render the final audio at the bitrate of the highest bitrate track, just so the ones that are slightly higher quality wouldn't be reduced? If this is not possible then you don't need to bother explaining why to me, just a thought. As far as any constructive criticisms go, even though you already fixed the constant playing problem that the original show suffered from, I could only really say maybe leave the additional few scenes of silence here and there (it's been a few weeks since I watched it, so I can't provide any references, but I just remember thinking at times that a few of the scenes would have been better silent - possibly just personal preference though, of course. I may have just got this impression from the jarring start & stop to the music, but I'm aware that due to Faulconers Music being intended for more drawn out sequences, this cannot always be avoided). By the way, I'm sure you have probably encountered it before, but there is another Rescore under the title 'DBZ Kai Music Revival' which only has track from E53-98. I only tried a few tracks from it several Months ago, and I don't remember them having quite as good placement as yours, but you may wish to give them a listen and see if you like particular aspects. Also, the Bitrate usually around 250 or higher on that Rescore even though it's not as good, so possibly it is possible to bump it a bit higher? Also, you almost undoubtedly already know, but I might as well say it anyway just in case - if your project files for the editing are in software such as Vegas, if you happen to gain access to higher source tracks, simply placing them in the same directory and replacing the old track should make Vegas update the final edit when you re-open the project, without needing to re-incorporate the track. Anyway, thank you greatly once again! :)

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:08 pm

KBABZ wrote: My main critique with Kai is that it tries to make the show feel modern when it so obviously isn't, and it contrasts badly when you come out of a redrawn shot or the incredibly crisp opening + title card and then cut to footage from the 80s. I don't think anyone would have complained over Ha La Head Cha La with a replacement logo and some more eyecatch variety. For T1C I've purposefully gone for the aged look; the new title cards intentionally use off-whites to match the background art, and the text for them and the credits is blurred to feel like its old footage.
Yeah I noticed that too, the jump between old frames and reanimated frames is so jarring it makes me wish they just stuck with the original, but this is just awful laziness on the part of Toei.

KBABZ wrote:That would actually be pretty interesting, having Kai edits of filler footage so that they focus more on the character progression and less on stalling for time. One angle you could do is to ignore any content with Bulma, and have Gohan go mostly voiceless and instead use Clinkenbeard samples from other Kai episodes, focusing mainly on vocalizations. Might give it a unique angle, almost like a silent movie? The tricky part is that Kai brushes over the timeskip in the middle of an episode, not at the end of one.
I'm not entirely sure that would work in what I wanted to do. What I had in mind was the first episode focus entirely on gohan, first half with his encounter with the robot and then the second half with the injured dinosaur. These two interactions in particular were key in getting Gohan out of his baby mode and able to survive on his own. In these, I feel that dialogue is crucial, especially in the interactions. So, I don't really mind having the different voice actors. The other two would involve the z-fighters being gathered to go to Kami and then Gohan escaping the wasteland, meeting the orphans, and nearly making it back home to his mom only to realize he needs to go back and train. This is another key moment in his development, which I felt that Toei should have kept, but oh well.

KBABZ wrote:Thank you! I have a few other similar ideas bubbling around at the moment, in particular doing a 4:3 Kikuche'd edit of The Final Chapters content that also further edits the show down, since TFC right now keeps a lot of filler to hit a required episode count. The other and far more intriguing one is doing a Kai edit of GT to help make it more watchable. AND if I ever do get to do a proper Kikuche Kai, I might try and remove stalling-type scenes there too, particularly around the Frieza and Cell fights. I mean do we really need an ENTIRE episode just on Satan's "fight" with Cell?
You could ask the guy behind buu-kai manga-cut to provide a musicless rendition of the episodes and you two could collaborate on that, that would probably be your best bet since he's nearly done.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:15 pm

curt202 wrote:Hi, I downloaded this & watched the entirety of Kai at the start of the Month. This is absolutely fantastic - you have made some of us Faulconer fans extremely happy and I would like to offer my sincere thanks. I would have thanked you sooner but I was too hooked on finishing it to find the time to make an account on here to do so :D. Regarding the bitrate, it is certainly on the lower on with certain episodes. I did read the description and I'm not an expert by any means, but would you be able to render the final audio at the bitrate of the highest bitrate track, just so the ones that are slightly higher quality wouldn't be reduced? If this is not possible then you don't need to bother explaining why to me, just a thought. As far as any constructive criticisms go, even though you already fixed the constant playing problem that the original show suffered from, I could only really say maybe leave the additional few scenes of silence here and there (it's been a few weeks since I watched it, so I can't provide any references, but I just remember thinking at times that a few of the scenes would have been better silent - possibly just personal preference though, of course. I may have just got this impression from the jarring start & stop to the music, but I'm aware that due to Faulconers Music being intended for more drawn out sequences, this cannot always be avoided). By the way, I'm sure you have probably encountered it before, but there is another Rescore under the title 'DBZ Kai Music Revival' which only has track from E53-98. I only tried a few tracks from it several Months ago, and I don't remember them having quite as good placement as yours, but you may wish to give them a listen and see if you like particular aspects. Also, the Bitrate usually around 250 or higher on that Rescore even though it's not as good, so possibly it is possible to bump it a bit higher? Also, you almost undoubtedly already know, but I might as well say it anyway just in case - if your project files for the editing are in software such as Vegas, if you happen to gain access to higher source tracks, simply placing them in the same directory and replacing the old track should make Vegas update the final edit when you re-open the project, without needing to re-incorporate the track. Anyway, thank you greatly once again! :)
Thank you, glad you're enjoying it!

If you only had the episodes at the beginning of the month and not later, that probably would explain the lower bitrate. Around the Android-Trunks saga I decided to up it to 256-bit and I was happy with that and I have applied that to episodes 1-113 so far, but I could see about bumping the bit-rate to 320 in my further edits

Yeah, that is a problem with faulconer is that the tracks can be extremely choppy so that just having silence would make the music seem jolted, and that it was designed to be played for long periods of time. There are a few episodes where I have music playing almost all of the episode, but they are few and far between. In the last few weeks I did some adjustments, especially with episodes 54-98 so that problem was fixed. I might go back and find other opportunities to do it sometime, it's just that it's hard to do with how ingrained faulconer's tracks are. However, once I'm done with the buu saga's final edits I'll definitely give it a look.

Actually the DBZ Kai Music Revival was partly why I did this, because it seemed like they gave up. They had potential, but their product was far from finished as I had my own gripes with how they handled their scoring.

I happen to score through audacity and export to AC3 so I can easily up the bitrate there, I tried doing AAC but for some reason it muffles some of the sound so AC3 is what I'm rolling with. The problem is I'm not sure upping the bit-rate will be enough since some of my tracks, especially the unreleased, were ripped from youtube by a mp3 converter.

Thank you for the input, this is exactly what I was hoping for when I started this project since I want to make sure I make a product that everyone can be satisfied with!
Last edited by Diccolo-420 on Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:21 pm

Ok, correct me if I'm wrong because I by no means am an expert with audio edits, but would a 640 kbps AC3 export work and make that much of a difference for people? I can definitely do it in audacity's options, but I want to get some opinions before I do it.

Another option would be 448 kbps. I'm currently playing with the settings myself.

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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Danfun64 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 3:59 pm

Can you include WAV/FLAC as well as AC3/AAC? Would be nice to have something lossless for a change.
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Re: [WIP] Dragon Ball Z Kai: Bruce Faulconer Edition

Post by Diccolo-420 » Wed Dec 20, 2017 4:05 pm

Danfun64 wrote:Can you include WAV/FLAC as well as AC3/AAC? Would be nice to have something lossless for a change.
Possibly, Audacity sometimes has fits when exporting to FLAC so WAV might be it, and as for WAV I might do that after I've perfected the bit-rate on AC3.

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