Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[lansing]

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".

An upscale of "some sort"? An upscale of what? What else could you refer to beside the orange brick? You and Robo ARE talking about the orange brick, don't play that game with me.

-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.

...

Bullshit after bullshit. NONE of the stuff you said was a fact except that the orange brick has a 1080p scan and it was downscaled for the DVD releases. You are implicitly saying that the season blu-ray is an upscale of the orange brick simply because the ob has a 1080p scan. WTF? Your logic is beyond absurd!

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.

This is a stupid argument. Everyone knew it by now that the use of DNR was to cut production cost, that is the purpose. Now tell me what's the point of crushing the black purposely, like you said?

[tellyzbad1]

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.

That is compelling and is reducing my suspicions a bit. But remember: there's a possibility of them having scanned the original film for Orange Bricks at 16:9. if that was the case (or even if they cropped it at the original 1080p res before downscaling), then it means their 480p scan would have been more zoomed in than a 4:3 480p scan. That is, DBox's 4:3 resolution would be 640x480, while a 16:9 480p film scan would be ~853x480 and only some of those ~853 pixels will be extra content 4:3 doens't have and the rest will be filled in by zooming in. So...the 16:9 film will inherently show a bit more of the small details that the Dragon Box misses out thanks to the zoom-in, be it either the zoom-in happening during film transfer or just before it was supposedly downscaled to SD.

Also remember that scanning at SD and digitally downscaling HD to SD are different. Digital downscaling will not lose as many details as a scanning in SD (also depends on the scanning tools). Here's some proof:
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
So first you have Level Sets downscaled to 480p, and then the official 480p DBox DVDs. As we can see, digital downscale of 1080p to 480p is NOT the same thing detail-wise as an initial 480p scan. Boost your sense of details preserved with the zoom-in thing I mentioned and it should show to be very much within reason to suspect the Season BD's of maybe being upscales of something that was at some point SD during the whole process.

And besides all that, the screenshot here is from an episode that had a transfer existing for Level Sets. I've read discussion about them having taken advantage of the transfers they managed to do for level sets but idk.

And lansing wow... I think I'm done discussing with you, tbh. You're literally ignoring what I'm saying and repeating yourself like some weirdo. I'm going to continue this discussion with the people who are actually responding to what I'm saying. You can't seem to even distinguish between what a film transfer is and what the orange bricks are. Really?

[tellyzbad1]

DB episode something

[HakkaiBills93]

DB episode something

it feel strange by watching borders on yours

[tellyzbad1]

DB episode something

it feel strange by watching borders on yours

what borders

[HakkaiBills93]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

[tellyzbad1]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

That's the "deband" filter to get rid of noise/graine. It's got nothing to do with the CC.

[HakkaiBills93]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

That's the "deband" filter to get rid of noise/graine. It's got nothing to do with the CC.

ok and which one did you use for the white balance?

[tellyzbad1]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

That's the "deband" filter to get rid of noise/graine. It's got nothing to do with the CC.

ok and which one did you use for the white balance?

Vegas Pro 14

[HakkaiBills93]

okay thanks

[Robo4900]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

That's the "deband" filter to get rid of noise/graine. It's got nothing to do with the CC.

Yeah, don't do that. Putting aside the issue of degraining being a stupid idea in the first place(Yeah, sure, it's fine to reduce the noise a little like Funi did on the Level sets, but no one really has anything against film grain aside from the video mastering guys at Funimation, so all grain removal does is make your image look blurry), you're working with DVD footage. Not only is it standard def, but it uses an outdated compression scheme, which requires a ridiculous bitrate to look any good, and basically due to this and many other factors, the DVD format overall barely holds up these days.
Put a denoiser on that, and you immediately uncover the myriad flaws of DVD that are typically hidden just beneath the surface.

Plus, isn't debanding an entirely different thing?

[tellyzbad1]

around arale and others it feels strange around lines

That's the "deband" filter to get rid of noise/graine. It's got nothing to do with the CC.

Yeah, don't do that. Putting aside the issue of degraining being a stupid idea in the first place(Yeah, sure, it's fine to reduce the noise a little like Funi did on the Level sets, but no one really has anything against film grain aside from the video mastering guys at Funimation, so all grain removal does is make your image look blurry), you're working with DVD footage. Not only is it standard def, but it uses an outdated compression scheme, which requires a ridiculous bitrate to look any good, and basically due to this and many other factors, the DVD format overall barely holds up these days.
Put a denoiser on that, and you immediately uncover the myriad flaws of DVD that are typically hidden just beneath the surface.

Plus, isn't debanding an entirely different thing?

Yo, you need to chill with your use of "stupid".

First of all, notice how I quote the "deband" when I say I used a "deband" filter. Because, that was exactly what it was called and what I used to get rid of the noise. It's not my dedicated grain remover (which by the way is 100x superior--I'll show examples later). Why did I use this "debanding" filter? Well, in the coloring workstation I use, this was the only filter that removed noise.

Why would I remove noise? Because old anime, without the filmic colours, without the film scratches, without the film dust, without the film flickering...actually does look much better without film grain. Sure, it's subjective. But in that case please don't prioritize your taste of "keeping the grain" over my taste for getting rid of it, by calling my taste "stupid". I assure you, degraining/denoising is a very complex process that can be carried out in various ways and produce various results and I doubt your experience of funimation's denoising has turned you into some kind of expert degraining critique to be asserting it as being a "stupid" process. Degraining really does not hurt anime/cartoons the way it hurts real life footage. It's mostly solid colours and very soft gradients in BG art, and so denoising can be done. Also, you're sorely if all degraining is in its essence, is blurring the image...quite sad. I'll redeem your view on degreaining later on

[HakkaiBills93]

I have seen some degraining like corpsecreate or ect s degraining where i can t say that there is loss even when zooming them ...sure real HD footage would bé better but i don t think toei Will bother doing réal rescan for series having more than 100ep cause it s too expensive so any mastered encodé or cc is good to take. I even seen good upscale...after that for sure you alter things but it s just à matter of taste doing or not doing...funimation is à very bad exemple considérant they used réal film print and pro tools it s just à big waste when i see thé bluray

[Robo4900]

Yo, you need to chill with your use of "stupid".

Yeah. That was pretty harsh of me. Sorry about that.

First of all, notice how I quote the "deband" when I say I used a "deband" filter. Because, that was exactly what it was called and what I used to get rid of the noise. It's not my dedicated grain remover (which by the way is 100x superior--I'll show examples later). Why did I use this "debanding" filter? Well, in the coloring workstation I use, this was the only filter that removed noise.

Why would I remove noise? Because old anime, without the filmic colours, without the film scratches, without the film dust, without the film flickering...actually does look much better without film grain. Sure, it's subjective. But in that case please don't prioritize your taste of "keeping the grain" over my taste for getting rid of it, by calling my taste "stupid". I assure you, degraining/denoising is a very complex process that can be carried out in various ways and produce various results and I doubt your experience of funimation's denoising has turned you into some kind of expert degraining critique to be asserting it as being a "stupid" process. Degraining really does not hurt anime/cartoons the way it hurts real life footage. It's mostly solid colours and very soft gradients in BG art, and so denoising can be done. Also, you're sorely if all degraining is in its essence, is blurring the image...quite sad. I'll redeem your view on degreaining later on

Whether or not degraining is a good or bad thing doesn't enter into this debate; you're degraining DVD footage here, and that's what I'm taking issue with.

Plus, as I say, isn't debanding an entirely different thing?

[HakkaiBills93]

talking about dragon box footage i think it's impossible to recover everything by color correction for example here is an untouched shot from the dbox

and here almost the same shot from an old footage episode

as you can see it miss a mountain behind piccolo cause to the excessive brightness of the dbox
if someone is able to recover it by color correction it will be my god and i'll knee down lol

[ect5150]

Sweet Jesus! What episode is that?

[Kenichi512]

Sweet Jesus! What episode is that?

DB Episode 109

[HakkaiBills93]

Sweet Jesus! What episode is that?

109 but lot of DB, Z and maybe GT have this kind of issues (there is sometimes the opposite where it is far too dark)

[HakkaiBills93]

original dbox


the best that i can do for this issue

[clutchins]

original dbox


the best that i can do for this issue

I wonder if you can dial back some luma and maybe recover those lines that are getting dissolved on the background rock.