Funimation's 30th anniversary collectible home video release

[Matches Malone]

Sooo the steels aren't a 1:1 copy? If the colors are that improved throughout all the sets I might consider picking these up.

There is no improvement, these are the exact copies we got for the 30th set.

[Tylerman29]

Sooo the steels aren't a 1:1 copy? If the colors are that improved throughout all the sets I might consider picking these up.

There is no improvement, these are the exact copies we got for the 30th set.

Oh I thought someone just posted a comparison that showed that the colors were different.

[Matches Malone]

Sooo the steels aren't a 1:1 copy? If the colors are that improved throughout all the sets I might consider picking these up.

There is no improvement, these are the exact copies we got for the 30th set.

Oh I thought someone just posted a comparison that showed that the colors were different.

There's issues with these comparisons, but people who have it proved it's 1:1.

[KBABZ]

I legit have a serious question that I don't believe anyone can answer. Why does FUNi keep thinking they can make this show look "modern"? It's a show from the 80s & 90s. It is paced really slowly. With the Japanese score & sound effects, it sounds OLD! It can never feel "modern." Kai's the "modern" version of Z. Just leave it to feel its age. People know what they're getting, so stop trying to lie to them.

Spoiler:

This kind of argument is so flawed...

People who always say stuff like "it's old so it should look old"... Like, there was a time when it wasn't old and you should really critically think to yourself how it might have looked.

Most people's idea of an old thing looking "old" is the way they've seen this "old" thing after it's suffered from degradation.

Here's a good example to look at:

Spoiler:

The left is a DVD from when the movie was made, the right is a (4K?) Blu-ray remaster from degraded film material years or over a decade later. Tell me, and be honest, which one looks more "modern" to you (colourwise)? Someone who only watches 2000s movies from these kinds of later presentations will begin to think 2000s movies always looked the way as Spider-Man does on the right shot and therefore 2000s movies should never be made to look more "modern"...lol

This forum also has always made a severe miscalculation on what DB Kai colours are. Constantly labeling the colours as "modernised dbz"...like, no lol... Here are just a few shots from DBZ movie laserdsics (from as early as 1991) and as you see the colours are far more akin to Kai than they are to DBox, 2018 remasters, or god forbid Funimation's releases of the movies:

Spoiler:

I know your statement is over Funimation "modernising DBZ", but you've labelled Kai as the modernisation that Funimation should not try to be, and I'm showing you that Kai isn't even visually the modernisation that you think it is let alone Funimation's versions. I would say Kai's colours are instead a very good "restoration" since so many old remaining showcases of original masters look similar enough to Kai underneath the flaws of the particular medium they're on.

Funimation boosting contrast, saturation and sharpness isn't modernising...it's literally the most amateur 90s and early 2000s thing to do lmao.

I can tell just from reading the first sentence that you completely misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying that because it's old, it should look old. I'm saying, it's an old show & should be respected as one by giving it a good restoration. People know DB started in the 80s & originally ended in the 90s, so they'd be forgiving if it looked like things its age, even when restored into HD. With the correct kinds of colors, aspect ratios, & all that good stuff. Grain is also something that should be left in. Not a ton of it, especially if they can successfully tone it down without smearing the frames all to fuck, but at least SOME because it preserves the film look it's stuck with. FUNi's attempts try to make it look like it was digitally animated rather than physically, which really doesn't work at all. Like, I have a majorly hard time believing the majority of DBZ fans who don't like grain can't suck it up, or the ones that don't get that a 4:3 show shouldn't be cropped or stretched to widescreen can't get over the fact that DBZ wasn't created in widescreen. THAT is my point. When we have wonderful restorations like Star Trek TOS & TNG, X-Files, & so many other shows from the same era, Z just sticks out as being horribly mismanaged by FUNi in this regard.

To echo this sentiment, there's a big difference between restoring an old show and modernizing it. As much as I love Kai, one of its big problems is that Toei don't let it act its true age, between the colour grading, redrawn shots, and the OP/ED/Eyecatches looking WAY out of place compared to the core episode content. The Level Sets are so hallowed for this reason: they present the show with only minor touch-ups, but without trying to bely the fact that it's ultimately a 30 year old show made pre-widescreen with traditional methods, and any attempt to make it look like a modern, digitally-animated work is both futile and destructive.

[Ajay]

Kai's colours are literally how the show is meant to look, straight off the cels. There isn't any retroactive grade going on there beyond DNR.

The Levels are grungy ass multigen print mediocrity.

This misconception is exactly what that other user was trying to convey, and nobody's grasped that yet.

[KBABZ]

Oh... oops.

[Jhanzie]

Kai's colours are literally how the show is meant to look, straight off the cels. There isn't any retroactive grade going on there beyond DNR.

The Levels are grungy ass multigen print mediocrity.

This misconception is exactly what that other user was trying to convey, and nobody's grasped that yet.

I was just looking at this today:
https://www.kanzenshuu.com/animation-pr ... mastering/
According to this, Kai was supposed to have been color corrected but that wasn’t fully realized. The example shown was a shot of Goku against a green sky, which was supposed to have been color corrected to blue but the correction didn’t actually make it into the final form. (The red tint was reduced however.)

Another point of reference could be Bulma’s hair on Namek . It is green on the Dragon Box Version and on Kai but on the color corrected Funimation transfers it is definitely blue.

I was reading the above Kai article hoping to find out if Toei had done a full HD transfer of the entire DBZ, but alas it appears that only the parts needed for Kai were done.

If Toei were to do a full HD scan of their first generation film elements, then as we have seen with Kai, heavy processing wouldn’t be necessary to yield a nice HD picture. I guess I’ll keep my fingers crossed...

[Matches Malone]

Kai's colours are literally how the show is meant to look, straight off the cels.

Does this include the Buu arc as well ? Apart from the green tint of course.

[Planetnamek]

I legit have a serious question that I don't believe anyone can answer. Why does FUNi keep thinking they can make this show look "modern"? It's a show from the 80s & 90s. It is paced really slowly. With the Japanese score & sound effects, it sounds OLD! It can never feel "modern." Kai's the "modern" version of Z. Just leave it to feel its age. People know what they're getting, so stop trying to lie to them.

Spoiler:

This kind of argument is so flawed...

People who always say stuff like "it's old so it should look old"... Like, there was a time when it wasn't old and you should really critically think to yourself how it might have looked.

Most people's idea of an old thing looking "old" is the way they've seen this "old" thing after it's suffered from degradation.

Here's a good example to look at:

Spoiler:

The left is a DVD from when the movie was made, the right is a (4K?) Blu-ray remaster from degraded film material years or over a decade later. Tell me, and be honest, which one looks more "modern" to you (colourwise)? Someone who only watches 2000s movies from these kinds of later presentations will begin to think 2000s movies always looked the way as Spider-Man does on the right shot and therefore 2000s movies should never be made to look more "modern"...lol

This forum also has always made a severe miscalculation on what DB Kai colours are. Constantly labeling the colours as "modernised dbz"...like, no lol... Here are just a few shots from DBZ movie laserdsics (from as early as 1991) and as you see the colours are far more akin to Kai than they are to DBox, 2018 remasters, or god forbid Funimation's releases of the movies:

Spoiler:

I know your statement is over Funimation "modernising DBZ", but you've labelled Kai as the modernisation that Funimation should not try to be, and I'm showing you that Kai isn't even visually the modernisation that you think it is let alone Funimation's versions. I would say Kai's colours are instead a very good "restoration" since so many old remaining showcases of original masters look similar enough to Kai underneath the flaws of the particular medium they're on.

Funimation boosting contrast, saturation and sharpness isn't modernising...it's literally the most amateur 90s and early 2000s thing to do lmao.

I can tell just from reading the first sentence that you completely misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying that because it's old, it should look old. I'm saying, it's an old show & should be respected as one by giving it a good restoration. People know DB started in the 80s & originally ended in the 90s, so they'd be forgiving if it looked like things its age, even when restored into HD. With the correct kinds of colors, aspect ratios, & all that good stuff. Grain is also something that should be left in. Not a ton of it, especially if they can successfully tone it down without smearing the frames all to fuck, but at least SOME because it preserves the film look it's stuck with. FUNi's attempts try to make it look like it was digitally animated rather than physically, which really doesn't work at all. Like, I have a majorly hard time believing the majority of DBZ fans who don't like grain can't suck it up, or the ones that don't get that a 4:3 show shouldn't be cropped or stretched to widescreen can't get over the fact that DBZ wasn't created in widescreen. THAT is my point. When we have wonderful restorations like Star Trek TOS & TNG, X-Files, & so many other shows from the same era, Z just sticks out as being horribly mismanaged by FUNi in this regard.

Yeah Funimation's clumsy restoration reminds me of some infamously bad Blu-Ray transfers of films like Patton where all the characters looked like wax statues, there are some films i'll outright avoid on Blu-Ray for that very reason.

[Ajay]

I was just looking at this today:
https://www.kanzenshuu.com/animation-pr ... mastering/
According to this, Kai was supposed to have been color corrected but that wasn’t fully realized. The example shown was a shot of Goku against a green sky, which was supposed to have been color corrected to blue but the correction didn’t actually make it into the final form. (The red tint was reduced however.)

Another point of reference could be Bulma’s hair on Namek . It is green on the Dragon Box Version and on Kai but on the color corrected Funimation transfers it is definitely blue.

That guide's actually a bit out of date, so not 100% accurate. It's true that the advertised material is different from the final release, but the latter is closer to the original intent. The fight takes place during a sunset, so it was never meant to be perfectly blue in the first place. They did get a touch too green in the skies in the final release, but it's not too far off.



Note the colour of the sky behind Goku's eyeline.

Bulma's correct in Kai, too:

Spoiler:

Does this include the Buu arc as well ? Apart from the green tint of course.

Sadly not. Boo Kai's such a clusterfuck of a restoration. While it's true that a lot of episodes have their white points shifted into the greens, resulting in said tint, there's actually a huge number of episodes that are properly white balanced, but all the hues themselves are shifted green. It would require a full-on regrade to get that thing back to something resembling accuracy, and even then, I don't think you could undo a lot of the artifacts caused by their poor grade in the first place -- the haloing around the clouds, for example.

[ect5150]

Aren't the same screens from the Kai and DBox releases excessively green in that same shot though?

[Ajay]

Aren't the same screens from the Kai and DBox releases excessively green in that same shot though?

Yeah, I mentioned that.

They did get a touch too green in the skies in the final release, but it's not too far off.

Spoiler:

It doesn't fade quite into the regular blue. You can see on Vegeta's armour that it's not quite WB'd.

[Lightningexpose]

I can tell just from reading the first sentence that you completely misunderstood my argument. I'm not saying that because it's old, it should look old. I'm saying, it's an old show & should be respected as one by giving it a good restoration. People know DB started in the 80s & originally ended in the 90s, so they'd be forgiving if it looked like things its age, even when restored into HD. With the correct kinds of colors, aspect ratios, & all that good stuff. Grain is also something that should be left in. Not a ton of it, especially if they can successfully tone it down without smearing the frames all to fuck, but at least SOME because it preserves the film look it's stuck with. FUNi's attempts try to make it look like it was digitally animated rather than physically, which really doesn't work at all. Like, I have a majorly hard time believing the majority of DBZ fans who don't like grain can't suck it up, or the ones that don't get that a 4:3 show shouldn't be cropped or stretched to widescreen can't get over the fact that DBZ wasn't created in widescreen. THAT is my point. When we have wonderful restorations like Star Trek TOS & TNG, X-Files, & so many other shows from the same era, Z just sticks out as being horribly mismanaged by FUNi in this regard.

Them cropping 16:9 was not an act of modernisation, it was an act of simply getting rid of black bars because apparently the average viewer doesn’t like black bars.

It’s the same reason why the “old” Spider-Man DVD I showed you is 4:3 and not the way it was intended, 16:9. They didn’t turn it from 16:9 to 4:3 to modernise it, it was simply because average viewers don’t like black bars on their screens.

Even on Kai, what you like to label as “modern dbz”, 16:9 crop wasn’t one of their “modernisation” tools since it was offered in 4:3 on most other ways besides Japanese TV where it had to be 16:9 by law.

Also, DNR isn’t an act of modernisation either. Improving signal to “noise” ratio has always been desirable it’s not some new thing. It’s just that some people don’t realise/care that we reach a limit to where reducing noise any further will weaken the signal too.
If you shoot video or record audio today you still get noise that you may want to reduce. I didn’t know I was modernising my iPhone 11 voice memos by reducing the noise on them... Besides, this thread is literally about a release that has (fake) grain so any “why is funi modernising by being anti grain” is redundant here. They seemingly are ok with the amount of (fake) grain and goal was simply to pull off the amateur logic of “sharper no matter what is better” so they had to DNR first to apply their god-awful sharpening. Sharpening isn’t an act of modernising.

In conclusion, funimation have literally done nothing to attempt a visual modernisation. Just extremely incompetent attempts at restoring. A true restoration would’ve left it actually looking far more vibrant rather than saturated; with way more dynamic range in colours and contrast; and way more detail in the backgrounds...i.e. looking way more like something that was freshly made and not been deteriorated away. So you should be saying “funimation would be forgiven for letting an old thing look deteriorated rather than attempt a shitty restoration.”

[eledoremassis02]

some dragon ball flashbacks


quick "color correction" using photoshops automated system

[Tylerman29]

some dragon ball flashbacks

Those look absolutely horrible.

[Jhanzie]

I was just looking at this today:
https://www.kanzenshuu.com/animation-pr ... mastering/
According to this, Kai was supposed to have been color corrected but that wasn’t fully realized. The example shown was a shot of Goku against a green sky, which was supposed to have been color corrected to blue but the correction didn’t actually make it into the final form. (The red tint was reduced however.)

Another point of reference could be Bulma’s hair on Namek . It is green on the Dragon Box Version and on Kai but on the color corrected Funimation transfers it is definitely blue.

That guide's actually a bit out of date, so not 100% accurate. It's true that the advertised material is different from the final release, but the latter is closer to the original intent. The fight takes place during a sunset, so it was never meant to be perfectly blue in the first place. They did get a touch too green in the skies in the final release, but it's not too far off.



Note the colour of the sky behind Goku's eyeline.

Bulma's correct in Kai, too:

Spoiler:

Does this include the Buu arc as well ? Apart from the green tint of course.

Sadly not. Boo Kai's such a clusterfuck of a restoration. While it's true that a lot of episodes have their white points shifted into the greens, resulting in said tint, there's actually a huge number of episodes that are properly white balanced, but all the hues themselves are shifted green. It would require a full-on regrade to get that thing back to something resembling accuracy, and even then, I don't think you could undo a lot of the artifacts caused by their poor grade in the first place -- the haloing around the clouds, for example.

Annnnnd... WOW! The big deal about Funimation’s version of DBZ to me was the “color correction....” And all this time, because of them, I thought Bulma’s hair on Namek was BLUE!!!!

One might admit that aqua green rides a fine line between blue and green, but STILL. I had to watch the Level set promo video again. Sure enough, no mention of using actual animation cells for comparison.
https://youtu.be/moAy02J2fd8

If all Funi’s HD output for DBZ is based on their color corrected work, then that is kind of the last straw for me in hoping for a better edition from them. I will pick up the rest of the Steelbooks and hope for something better to come from Toei.

As much as it seems Toei isn’t interested in restoring DBZ, it would most likely have to come from them to be done right. Besides, a large chunk is already scanned in HD from the work done on Kai, and they have the best film elements available.

[Lightningexpose]

Annnnnd... WOW! The big deal about Funimation’s version of DBZ to me was the “color correction....” And all this time, because of them, I thought Bulma’s hair on Namek was BLUE!!!!

One might admit that aqua green rides a fine line between blue and green, but STILL. I had to watch the Level set promo video again. Sure enough, no mention of using actual animation cells for comparison.
https://youtu.be/moAy02J2fd8

If all Funi’s HD output for DBZ is based on their color corrected work, then that is kind of the last straw for me in hoping for a better edition from them. I will pick up the rest of the Steelbooks and hope for something better to come from Toei.

As much as it seems Toei isn’t interested in restoring DBZ, it would most likely have to come from them to be done right. Besides, a large chunk is already scanned in HD from the work done on Kai, and they have the best film elements available.

The levels are certainly overhyped by the "hardcore deebeezee fans" but they're okay for what they are.

They haven't been fully colour corrected in simplest ways to begin with, for example if you check episode 5 you'll see the whole episode is pretty damn red tinted.

But also, yeah, they certainly weren't colour correcting to match the cels or what a high quality first gen print would be. At best, I'd say they were simply trying to restore this third gen print back to the condition they first got it in? Of course even that would have more dirt, dust and hair then what they ended up restoring it to, but colourwise it might have been their goal.

With old animation you have two options, really, for restoration. You can either restore the film, or you can aim to restore the "cels". It's very normal to go for the latter, I could drop a huge list of anime that go more for a cels look rather than a filmic look. The cels look doesn't mean you absolutely have to degrain but it's more to do with vibrancy and dynamic range. Some restorations will try to restore lots of dynamic range and make the right colours more vibrant, others will be very filmic and not try to restore cel-like dynamic range & vibrancy, instead leaving it dull and faded.

Some examples of cel-like restorations:

Spoiler:

It's honestly hard to find anything that looks as as dull and un-cel-like as level sets, but some things that don't have the restoration like above are here:

Spoiler:

Like I say, in the 2nd group, these still look more cel-like than level sets but that's to be expected since levels is a rare case of an american company both scanning and restoring it from third or second-gen film. I don't hate the look, I do like gritty filmic colours but yeah there's something better about restoring it to a cel look that I can't quite put into words

edit: another common thing to say is "if you get rid of muh grain it'll just look like flash animation"...lol nah if its good degraining as in the examples I showed for "cel-like", even upon degraining the background textures, cel lines and cel shading have so much detail that digipaint anime sadly do not. Protip: remember that "DNR" isn't this one universal thing, there are a million different approaches you can take. It just so happens that the american company handling DBZ is always using the worst approaches.

[TheGreatness25]

I gotta say, though: say what you will about the video quality, but Funimation did a miraculous job of getting rid of all those scratches, tape marks, burns, and other damage that plagued the top and bottom of the video, which forced the 16:9 aspect ratio in the first place!

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

I gotta say, though: say what you will about the video quality, but Funimation did a miraculous job of getting rid of all those scratches, tape marks, burns, and other damage that plagued the top and bottom of the video, which forced the 16:9 aspect ratio in the first place!

Crazy isn't it? That was their big reason/justification among others for cutting 20% or more of the vertical image off the top and bottom back in 2007 on the Orange Bricks and again with the Season Blu-rays a few years later, and they've now found a way to remove those without doing that and it's really what they should've done rather than transferring and butchering the series to a fake widescreen presentation it was never intended to be viewed in.

The only part of the original run that i feel should be in widescreen is the movies, because in that case it was intended by the animators for theatrical presentation along with the 4:3 version as animated for TV broadcast and others.

[Matches Malone]

Crazy isn't it? That was their big reason/justification among others for cutting 20% or more of the image off the top and bottom back in 2007, it's really what they should've done rather than transferring and butchering the series to a fake widescreen presentation it was never intended to be viewed in.

The reason they keep messing up is to keep fans demanding more releases. If they were to put out one perfect release like they do for their other anime, they wouldn't be able to milk the hell out of it like they do now.