Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[HakkaiBills93]

going back to dragon ball colors, i'm surprised as to why there's still so much debate on what colors to use? With Dragon Boxes, you will never be able to have as much dark details as there should be, proven by the huge amount of detail revealed in Kai. So, at the end of the day, you're not going to ever have a great product through cc'ing Dbox so no point bogging down on trying to make it extremely definitive. sometimes it's like you guys want to find the exact hex-codes of the colors used in every single pixel from whatever it is you're regarding as the "original colors" lol. when really all u have to do is remove color cast and then reduce the filmic presence from the colors.

this "filmic presence" can be taken out by simply making the cyans more magenta and the reds more yellow. sadly, though, turning reds into yellow won't give you the ideal result. it fixes one issue, but causes another. it'll fix goku's gi, but cause actual reds (like jeice's skin, or gohan's red belt) to appear orange. so what we need is a tool that can precisely distinguish red-oranges from actual reds and add the yellow only to the red-oranges. Q-tec could do this because the raw film offers them to work with higher color space while we only have the 8-bit video but yeah...upon doing those things, you've pretty much fixed the DBox colors. Only other thing i can think of is goku's blue top looking a bit too purple and less aesthetic than the purer blue seen in Kai and some cels...but, i've seen the purple-ish tint of the blue top inn non-film based shots such as toei vod thumbnails

reveal dark details from dbox will result in showing encode artifact , about kai why did you tell that goku's top is blue? on kai it's a bluish purple like you can see there.

eyes are very terrible but even if we cannot match 100% cels my goal is only to be the closest i can.
even goku's gi isn't as orange as lot of people used to make (probably why the red became orange) if you look this kai screenshot i think the gi is like it should be

[tellyzbad1]

about kai why did you tell that goku's top is blue? on kai it's a bluish purple like you can see there.

no...you're wrong. in Kai his blue top in no way makes me think it has a purple tint. it just looks blue.
[spoiler][/spoiler]
here, as you can see in Kai, goku's top is much less purple than the toei VOD thumbnail and in Dragon Box it's even more purple usually.

edit: also i just realized you're wrong because either you're trying to mislead, or you just don't realize your own mistakes.
[spoiler][/spoiler]
That purple-ish color you scribbled was from the wristband...not the blue top. The 2nd scribble I done is the color of his top and as you can see, it's not purple

[Robo4900]

What else can they use? I mean this is simple logical reasoning. You compare the color of the season to all their previous releases, orange bricks, singles, and you can't find anything that look similar, then where do you think this season color come from? It has to be new.

I'm not saying the colours come from somewhere else, I'm saying the season BD masters aren't originally from Steve Franko's scans. As for exactly what scans they did use...

Robo might be onto something. They may have used the scans they did for the orange bricks. Though they originally claimed the orange bricks had a 1080p scan before being downscaled for DVD, maybe FUNi no longer kept the 1080p data of the scans and just re-upscaled the downscaled scans (and i'm saying they'd kept the downscaled data because much easier for digital storage).

I'm pretty sure Funimation do have the 1080p brick footage; FunimationNow uses the orange brick footage for the 1080p viewing option. But, the orange brick footage uses a different crop to the season BDs, and it has the problems with the grain removal screwing up some of the lineart, so I don't think the BDs used the processed brick footage as their base, although I think you very well might be on the right track in general.

A lot of pure assumption going into this but I have my reasons. The "cleanup's" and "enhancement's" intensity is just too high. It wasn't this extreme even on the orange bricks...possibly because orange bricks weren't an upscale project, but these season blurays are? Also, just look at FUNimation's bluray movies. Yes, I know they were 35mm, but the difference between 35mm and 16mm doesn't warrant FUNimation to apply all those filters they did. But an upscale might make them think it's needed.

Honestly, because of how bad the BDs are, I'm convinced they're an upscale of some sort. There's no way of truly knowing what source, but all I can really say I'm certain of is that it's not a natively 1080p source. Perhaps it's the DigiBetas, but I think this is more likely: The raw scans the orange bricks were made from were kept at standard def, with only the final, processed brick footage being kept in 1080. So, they upscaled the standard def backups, and put together the new crop and "Remastering" based on this master.
I think one point in the favour of the upscale theory is that the season BDs went back to using the old orange brick/DigiBeta era title cards, rather than the recreated ones they started doing for the Levels, which does point to some upscaling going on. The blurrly lineart and lack of image detail also support this.

[HakkaiBills93]

about kai why did you tell that goku's top is blue? on kai it's a bluish purple like you can see there.

no...you're wrong. in Kai his blue top in no way makes me think it has a purple tint. it just looks blue.
[spoiler][/spoiler]
here, as you can see in Kai, goku's top is much less purple than the toei VOD thumbnail and in Dragon Box it's even more purple usually.

edit: also i just realized you're wrong because either you're trying to mislead, or you just don't realize your own mistakes.
[spoiler][/spoiler]
That purple-ish color you scribbled was from the wristband...not the blue top. The 2nd scribble I done is the color of his top and as you can see, it's not purple

kai don't have been colored the same way as old series was.
I think it's the main reason why kai have better soft colors.

you forget two things :
- you compare two shots which have 200 more episodes gasp even the sky color isn't the same, from one part to another from the same episodes, the color can change a little (brighten, darken etc depending the day etc.....each things alter the colors) when goku turns ssj his cloth became far more orange than before it's an example.
if i take kai color and just play with saturation , luminosity etc the blue get darker and when the blue get very dark for me it look purple

if i take toei vod and soften colors luminosity etc it look more blue than before


why for me it look like purple and not blue just look on this for the kai shot with saturation luminosity like the vod cels (at the left it's for me how look blue and on the right the top colors which look very dark and purple to me


if you watch colors aren't exactly the same all along the series

[spoiler]



here you can see that it vary a little all along
[/spoiler]

[lansing]

I think one point in the favour of the upscale theory is that the season BDs went back to using the old orange brick/DigiBeta era title cards, rather than the recreated ones they started doing for the Levels, which does point to some upscaling going on. The blurrly lineart and lack of image detail also support this.

Man you are making things up now, that's completely false. And the lineart is sharper than blu-ray kai.

orange brick
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray
[spoiler][/spoiler]

[tellyzbad1]

HakkaiBills93

I honestly don't know what all your analysis there is. My point is in DB Kai, Goku's blue top has no significant purple tint compared to DBox and other things like the vod thumbnails.

[HakkaiBills93]

HakkaiBills93

I honestly don't know what all your analysis there is. My point is in DB Kai, Goku's blue top has no significant purple tint compared to DBox and other things like the vod thumbnails.

i confusely wanted to explain you why it's not a great things to compare a screenshot with another that isn't from the same episodes as color vary
i admit i can be wrong anyway i don't know if someone really know how really look exact colors (like you said matching exadecimals colors)
for me i seen this blue as a dark blue little purple but it's not a matter , so for you what is the best source to match?

cels aren't equals in color terms just look goku's gi and top colors
[spoiler]








[/spoiler]

[Robo4900]

Man you are making things up now, that's completely false. And the lineart is sharper than blu-ray kai.

Okay, I was wrong about the title cards. I don't own the BDs, so I'm basing most of this on what I've heard, what I've seen in clips and trailers, and my understanding of all other things Dragon Ball.
Shoot me.

Anyway, this still leaves the possibility that they based it on the scans the Orange Bricks were made from.

[lansing]

Man you are making things up now, that's completely false. And the lineart is sharper than blu-ray kai.

Okay, I was wrong about the title cards. I don't own the BDs, so I'm basing most of this on what I've heard, what I've seen in clips and trailers, and my understanding of all other things Dragon Ball.
Shoot me.

Anyway, this still leaves the possibility that they based it on the scans the Orange Bricks were made from.

WHAT!? Have you even look at the screenshots? Even their background are different! Are you serious?

[Robo4900]

WHAT!? Have you even look at the screenshots? Even their background are different! Are you serious?

Allow me to reiterate:

My current theory is that the season BDs come from the scans the orange bricks were made from.

That's not to say the orange brick footage was filtered to make the BDs, what I'm saying is that the scan of the film that Funimation filtered and cropped to make the orange bricks was returned to and re-filtered/re-cropped to make the season BDs.

An additional part of my theory is that they don't have the scan in its full HD resolution, and that they upscaled it from a lower-resolution backup. Maybe it was 1080p(Which would have to be upscaled to about 1440p to crop it to widescreen), maybe it was just 480p. We don't know.

[lansing]

WHAT!? Have you even look at the screenshots? Even their background are different! Are you serious?

Allow me to reiterate:

My current theory is that the season BDs come from the scans the orange bricks were made from.

That's not to say the orange brick footage was filtered to make the BDs, what I'm saying is that the scan of the film that Funimation filtered and cropped to make the orange bricks was returned to and re-filtered/re-cropped to make the season BDs.

An additional part of my theory is that they don't have the scan in its full HD resolution, and that they upscaled it from a lower-resolution backup. Maybe it was 1080p(Which would have to be upscaled to about 1440p to crop it to widescreen), maybe it was just 480p. We don't know.

How is that even called a "theory" when every one of your points was proven wrong!? You are just making things up out of thin air.

[tellyzbad1]

WHAT!? Have you even look at the screenshots? Even their background are different! Are you serious?

Allow me to reiterate:

My current theory is that the season BDs come from the scans the orange bricks were made from.

That's not to say the orange brick footage was filtered to make the BDs, what I'm saying is that the scan of the film that Funimation filtered and cropped to make the orange bricks was returned to and re-filtered/re-cropped to make the season BDs.

An additional part of my theory is that they don't have the scan in its full HD resolution, and that they upscaled it from a lower-resolution backup. Maybe it was 1080p(Which would have to be upscaled to about 1440p to crop it to widescreen), maybe it was just 480p. We don't know.

How is that even called a "theory" when every one of your points was proven wrong!? You are just making things up out of thin air.

What Robo is saying, about them using what they scanned way back for the OB's, isn't contradicted by you showing the differing title cards. Those title cards were most likely replaced through digital video editing software before transcoding it all to Bluray format.

[lansing]

Allow me to reiterate:

My current theory is that the season BDs come from the scans the orange bricks were made from.

That's not to say the orange brick footage was filtered to make the BDs, what I'm saying is that the scan of the film that Funimation filtered and cropped to make the orange bricks was returned to and re-filtered/re-cropped to make the season BDs.

An additional part of my theory is that they don't have the scan in its full HD resolution, and that they upscaled it from a lower-resolution backup. Maybe it was 1080p(Which would have to be upscaled to about 1440p to crop it to widescreen), maybe it was just 480p. We don't know.

How is that even called a "theory" when every one of your points was proven wrong!? You are just making things up out of thin air.

What Robo is saying, about them using what they scanned way back for the OB's, isn't contradicted by you showing the differing title cards. Those title cards were most likely replaced through digital video editing software before transcoding it all to Bluray format.

Okay I'm tire of this stupid debate, let me put an end to this upscale bullshit.

orange brick
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray resized to 480p
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Look at the darker building windows on the back,
orange brick: no detail, a flat dark blue surface
season blu-ray: clear vertical lines across all darker buildings. Even its 480p downscaled version is showing the lines

Now tell me how the fuck is this season blu-ray an upscale from a 480p orange brick? How the fuck are they coming from the same source?

[Robo4900]

Look at the darker building windows on the back,
orange brick: no detail, a flat dark blue surface
season blu-ray: clear vertical lines across all darker buildings. Even its 480p downscaled version is showing the lines

Now tell me how the fuck is this season blu-ray an upscale from a 480p orange brick? How the fuck are they coming from the same source?

Your premise is flawed. You're comparing the final orange brick footage with the final season BD footage. I'm saying they come from the same source scan, and that the two were filtered differently. For the OBs, they obviously ended up crushing the blacks in that part, and for the BDs, they obviously ended up pushing the colours up bright instead.

On the plus side, by downscaling the BDs to 480p, you've found a way to make those awful things look almost half-decent, so congrats there.

[thaman91]

It's possible that the Blu-rays came from the same scan as the Orange Bricks. That would even make sense since we know that the film was scanned in HD to begin with.

But the far-fetched part of the theory to me is that the Blu-rays are upscaled versions of a 480p version of that initial HD scan. I just can't see that being the case because the Blu-rays have so much more detail than than a simple upscale of a SD source could yield. Just compare screenshots of the Dragon Boxes to those of the Blu-rays. The Dragon Boxes are basically 480p versions of the master film source, meaning they should be as detailed as a SD source can possibly look. But even they don't have as much detail as the Blu-rays, which are based on a multi-generation film that FUNi has. This makes is unlikely that the Blu-rays are from an upscaled SD source.

[lansing]

Look at the darker building windows on the back,
orange brick: no detail, a flat dark blue surface
season blu-ray: clear vertical lines across all darker buildings. Even its 480p downscaled version is showing the lines

Now tell me how the fuck is this season blu-ray an upscale from a 480p orange brick? How the fuck are they coming from the same source?

Your premise is flawed. You're comparing the final orange brick footage with the final season BD footage. I'm saying they come from the same source scan, and that the two were filtered differently. For the OBs, they obviously ended up crushing the blacks in that part, and for the BDs, they obviously ended up pushing the colours up bright instead.

On the plus side, by downscaling the BDs to 480p, you've found a way to make those awful things look almost half-decent, so congrats there.

Don't try to hide the fact that you have absolutely nothing to support what you said. You said that the season blu-ray was an upscale of the orange brick, and the screenshots I posted are prove that it wasn't, because the season has detail that the orange brick didn't have, you cannot upscale more detail onto somethings that the original didn't have.

For the OBs, they obviously ended up crushing the blacks in that part

No video production company in this world would purposely crush the blacks on their videos, you are losing your mind.


Theory is make base on known facts. Given known facts, then you start to connect them with a theory. You cannot make something up that is based on nothing, that's not a theory but your own imagination. Since you are the one that said the season blu-ray was an upscale of the ob, that it has a blue-ish cast, you should be the one to back yourself up! And I'm not even asking you to prove it, just show me some facts that can back up what you said.

Here's some more facts I can add that tell they're different scan

orange brick
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray(frame 30966)
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Same frame, ob with dust, season with no dust

[tellyzbad1]

Okay I'm tire of this stupid debate, let me put an end to this upscale bullshit.

orange brick
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray
[spoiler][/spoiler]

season blu-ray resized to 480p
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Look at the darker building windows on the back,
orange brick: no detail, a flat dark blue surface
season blu-ray: clear vertical lines across all darker buildings. Even its 480p downscaled version is showing the lines

Now tell me how the fuck is this season blu-ray an upscale from a 480p orange brick? How the fuck are they coming from the same source?

Here's what, i clearly stated earlier was my "ASSUMPTION" on why it could be an upscale of "some sort". No one said the season BD's are an upscale of the orange bricks...no one said that. Let me lay out for you why me and Robo are even bringing up OB's and the word "upscale".

-When FUNimation were remastering DBZ for the orange bricks, they claimed they transferred the film of every ep at 1080p for the orange bricks.
-I'm saying it'd be well within reason to think once FUNimation scanned the film in 1080p, and had it in some form of digital video, they downscaled the film scan to a lower resolution before processing it with filters and their color correction. Why would I suggest a downscale is possible here? A) The final product is intended to be SD so B) it'd be much easier/less time consuming for their tools to filter/color correct lower resolution video of the film scans than filtering the original 1080p scans. I highly doubt they did all their filtering and color correction in 1080p and then downscaled it to 480p for DVD--the OB's would have looked much better. So my gut is telling me they downscaled the film scans after the initial 1080p transfer (OR they lied about it and there wasn't any 1080p transfer to begin with.

-Now, if I carry on with the reasonable belief that FUNimation now has both a 1080p and lower resolution version of the film scans in a digital video format, I think it's also reasonable to think FUNimation felt no need to keep the 1080p scans on their hard drives anymore and so got rid of them and kept the lower-res version of the film scan. Why would they even keep the lower-res ones? I would assume they would want to keep it for if it's needed in the future and this would save them having to scan again.

-Now where my theory comes in, is that the season Blurays were upscales of these raw 480p film scans they may have had in storage since back then. So of course, they went through an entirely new filtering process + color correction process than the orange bricks, but the film was ultimately digitally upscaled back to 1080p rather than them re-doing a HD scan like they did for the level sets. So yes, with raw (but downscaled) film scans they are able to bring out more dark details than the orange bricks have, but that in no way denies it being an upscale of potentially non-HD film scans.

Now no one's saying the blurays WERE indeed an upscale job. But we are proposing theories, and theories are essentially explanations for observations. our observation being that the season blurays are filtered far too much for something that was originally "true HD", and so potentially it's an "upscale of some sort".

No video production company in this world would purposely crush the blacks on their videos, you are losing your mind.

Are you also going to tell me "no video production company in this world would purposely eradicate all fidelity from the original source, and wash-out things as important as the line art in animation, you are losing your mind." Because that too is what happened in a FUNimation-governed release of DBZ: your very own season blurays.

[tellyzbad1]

It's possible that the Blu-rays came from the same scan as the Orange Bricks. That would even make sense since we know that the film was scanned in HD to begin with.

But the far-fetched part of the theory to me is that the Blu-rays are upscaled versions of a 480p version of that initial HD scan. I just can't see that being the case because the Blu-rays have so much more detail than than a simple upscale of a SD source could yield. Just compare screenshots of the Dragon Boxes to those of the Blu-rays. The Dragon Boxes are basically 480p versions of the master film source, meaning they should be as detailed as a SD source can possibly look. But even they don't have as much detail as the Blu-rays, which are based on a multi-generation film that FUNi has. This makes is unlikely that the Blu-rays are from an upscaled SD source.

yeah you guys aren't really getting it.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
The first picture there is how it looks right out of film and the 2nd is how it looks when I color correct the above raw image. Hard to believe, but it's true. Color correcting film with high color depth is nothing like color correcting the dvd footage we mess with.

Whether the scan is HD or SD doesn't significantly affect the dark colors. It's to do with the color space of the scans and the way they're color corrected. So, if they did indeed use supposed 480p scans for the season BD's, as long as the color space of those scans wasn't decreased, then yes during color correction those dark details can be made visible. In Dragon Box, they chose not to touch the color of the film at all, hence why you see faded dark areas. Literally, if they scanned the DBox in HD and released them on bluray with the same post-processing we prob wouldn't see any new dark details.

[thaman91]

It's possible that the Blu-rays came from the same scan as the Orange Bricks. That would even make sense since we know that the film was scanned in HD to begin with.

But the far-fetched part of the theory to me is that the Blu-rays are upscaled versions of a 480p version of that initial HD scan. I just can't see that being the case because the Blu-rays have so much more detail than than a simple upscale of a SD source could yield. Just compare screenshots of the Dragon Boxes to those of the Blu-rays. The Dragon Boxes are basically 480p versions of the master film source, meaning they should be as detailed as a SD source can possibly look. But even they don't have as much detail as the Blu-rays, which are based on a multi-generation film that FUNi has. This makes is unlikely that the Blu-rays are from an upscaled SD source.

yeah you guys aren't really getting it.
Whether the scan is HD or SD doesn't significantly affect the dark colors. It's to do with the color space of the scans and the way they're color corrected. So, if they did indeed use supposed 480p scans for the season BD's, as long as the color space of those scans wasn't decreased, then yes during color correction those dark details can be made visible. In Dragon Box, they chose not to touch the color of the film at all, hence why you see faded dark areas. Literally, if they scanned the DBox in HD and released them on bluray with the same post-processing we prob wouldn't see any new dark details.

I'm not talking about the dark details. I'm just talking about details in general. The Blu-rays have details that even the Dragon Boxes don't have.

Take these frames for example:
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]

Here's what the snake head looks like if we zoom in. Pay special attention to the circled area:
[spoiler]Dragon Box:
Blu-ray: [/spoiler]

As we can see, the Blu-ray version has line detail that the Dragon Boxes simply don't have the resolution to display. This isn't about dark details or color depth. It's just about details in the image. If the 1st generation film masters downscaled to 480p looks like the Dragon Boxes, then Funimation's multi-generational film masters downscaled to 480p and then upscaled to 1080p could not possibly have more line detail then the Dragon Boxes. Therefore, my conclusion is that the Blu-rays have not been upscaled from a 480p source and were instead made from an HD scan, because that's the only way that FUNi's film masters could show more detail than the Dragon Boxes.

[ect5150]

As we can see, the Blu-ray version has line detail that the Dragon Boxes simply don't have the resolution to display. This isn't about dark details or color depth. It's just about details in the image. If the 1st generation film masters downscaled to 480p looks like the Dragon Boxes, then Funimation's multi-generational film masters downscaled to 480p and then upscaled to 1080p could not possibly have more line detail then the Dragon Boxes. Therefore, my conclusion is that the Blu-rays have not been upscaled from a 480p source and were instead made from an HD scan, because that's the only way that FUNi's film masters could show more detail than the Dragon Boxes.

This^^^

Even with the horrible clean up job done on some episodes, not all the details are lost. Other episodes simply display more information on the screen than is possible at 480P. The evidence stands against any the Season Set BluRays from being an upscale of any 480P release.