Was Dragon Ball mastered at 6500K?

[VDenter]

I was looking over at Dragon Box footage hooked up through RGB on my CRT and it looked nice. Of course most of us all know that the colors of the original film negatives have faded over the years and the colors aren't what they were back when the episodes were produced. So it got me thinking if someone were to color correct the footage in a professional way or just want to calibrate the display so that the show looks like it was supposed to then should they calibrate to the industry standard of 6500k? Now the reason i ask is that i read about this somewhere a long time ago that content in Japan was mastered at or somewhere around 9300K instead of 6500K. Which is a much cooler color temperature. Is there any merit to this claim? Does anyone here know?

[Ajay]

Colour temperature isn't going to fix the Dragon Boxes.

The white balance is not only off from episode to episode, but scene to scene. Beyond that, it requires significant hue shifts to restore it back to the original look.

It's an astonishing amount of work to fix, there's no shortcut. Film degradation is a messy beast. Not entirely sure where you got this idea of mastered colour temperature standards since that's variable depending on endless factors, but regardless, it's not relevant to fixing the boxes.

[Zestanor]

It's an astonishing amount of work to fix, there's no shortcut.

It could be done easily, of course, by professionals with a reasonable budget. Will it happen? No, because popular and lucrative anime made by giants like Toei don't get more than the bare minimum. Dragon Boxes are good releases, but are basically the smallest possible amount of effort they could have put in. Funny, the smaller the company, the more you tend to find the business model of "put out quality products for people to buy."

[kei17]

Every video master in Japan from the SD era is mastered at 9300K, so the same goes for the DBox footage. Seeing it on a 9300K monitor would somewhat neutralize the reddishness of the discolored film footage. However, it's not really a fundamental solution like Ajay said.

[Matches Malone]

Funny, the smaller the company, the more you tend to find the business model of "put out quality products for people to buy."

That's because they have to actually work for their sales, Toei and other big companies rely on brand recognition to sell their product. That's not to say every big company doesn't care about their reputation, but Toei unfortunately isn't exactly one of them.

[Zestanor]

That's because they have to actually work for their sales, Toei and other big companies rely on brand recognition to sell their product. That's not to say every big company doesn't care about their reputation, but Toei unfortunately isn't exactly one of them.

Yeah, and I mean I understand the position of "this was originally broadcast from fuzzy analog video tape so suck it" which is Toei's position, (and the Dragon Boxes do look quite good, color problems aside, on CRT TVs), but at the same time, it's really not that hard to do a proper HD digital transfer and cleanup. We know it's not an impossible feat because other animation studios do it.

[jaisonas]

That's because they have to actually work for their sales, Toei and other big companies rely on brand recognition to sell their product. That's not to say every big company doesn't care about their reputation, but Toei unfortunately isn't exactly one of them.

Yeah, and I mean I understand the position of "this was originally broadcast from fuzzy analog video tape so suck it" which is Toei's position, (and the Dragon Boxes do look quite good, color problems aside, on CRT TVs), but at the same time, it's really not that hard to do a proper HD digital transfer and cleanup. We know it's not an impossible feat because other animation studios do it.

Iirc Toei did the recent tv specials and movie remasters in house.

[Robo4900]

That's because they have to actually work for their sales, Toei and other big companies rely on brand recognition to sell their product. That's not to say every big company doesn't care about their reputation, but Toei unfortunately isn't exactly one of them.

Yeah, and I mean I understand the position of "this was originally broadcast from fuzzy analog video tape so suck it" which is Toei's position, (and the Dragon Boxes do look quite good, color problems aside, on CRT TVs), but at the same time, it's really not that hard to do a proper HD digital transfer and cleanup. We know it's not an impossible feat because other animation studios do it.

Iirc Toei did the recent tv specials and movie remasters in house.

I'm pretty sure that's just speculation. I don't think we know who was responsible?