Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

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MarioSonicU
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Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by MarioSonicU » Wed May 22, 2019 3:34 pm

What the title says, as I want to encode the DVDs without that ghosting that plagues the Madman DVDs. Any AVISynth scripts or programs I should use?

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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by VegettoEX » Wed May 22, 2019 3:41 pm

Honestly I feel like you're better off just picking up a native NTSC release than going through the trouble of reverse-telecining a PAL-izied conversion. I'm hoping Madman at least did pitch-correction on the audio speed change, but even then it still sounds like a massive headache to the point that I'd almost bite the bullet and deal with a cropped version instead.
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MarioSonicU
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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by MarioSonicU » Wed May 22, 2019 3:43 pm

VegettoEX wrote: Wed May 22, 2019 3:41 pm Honestly I feel like you're better off just picking up a native NTSC release than going through the trouble of reverse-telecining a PAL-izied conversion. I'm hoping Madman at least did pitch-correction on the audio speed change, but even then it still sounds like a massive headache to the point that I'd almost bite the bullet and deal with a cropped version instead.
True, but I've heard that the Madman DVDs have better compression than the FUNi ones due to the US ones having macroblocking. and from what I can tell, the Ginyu Singles are slightly better due to having one Recap and NEP per disc, unlike FUNi's

LostTimeLord
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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by LostTimeLord » Wed May 22, 2019 6:07 pm

VegettoEX wrote: Wed May 22, 2019 3:41 pmI'm hoping Madman at least did pitch-correction on the audio speed change
Based on Madman (through Manga UK)'s other DVDs, you'd be dealing with either blended frames or speedup, not both. All the sped up Madman discs I've watched had pitch correction though, which actually makes Madman an exception rather than the norm (Avengers: Age of Ultron was on TV at Christmas; hearing Captain America's voice 4% too high was almost comical).

I've seen old non-anime sped-up transfers where each PAL frame uses a field from two different film frames in half the shots, but as Madman were apparently doing regular-speed blended-frame transfers this shouldn't be an issue with Dragon Ball. If it is, hopefully a smart deinterlacer would correct it.

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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by Robo4900 » Fri May 24, 2019 11:08 am

VegettoEX wrote: Wed May 22, 2019 3:41 pm I'm hoping Madman at least did pitch-correction on the audio speed change, but even then it still sounds like a massive headache to the point that I'd almost bite the bullet and deal with a cropped version instead.
For everything before the Orange Bricks, the pitch/speed is unchanged from the NTSC release.

The NTSC>PAL conversion process was that they took the interlaced 60 fields per second NTSC tapes, and ran them through a process to blend fields together and whittle it down to 50 fields per second, and upscale that to fit PAL resolution.
The encoding on the Madman discs is far better, but the field blending does screw the picture up a little.

Ultimately, the encoding on the NTSC discs isn't as bad as a lot of people claim, and the field blending doesn't look anywhere near as bad as it sounds, in motion... So, honestly, yeah, as you say, just pick up your native discs and watch them. Both are flawed, but neither are particularly better than the other for just owning/watching the discs.
From the OBs onwards, they just used speedup + upscale, so you can just dial the speed back by 4% on whatever your media player is and you'll be good (though in most cases they probably will have done pitch-correction, so you're best off just leaving it as-is in those cases; you'd have to figure it out by ear to determine whether or not a release has been pitch-corrected or not), but the OBs, where they first started doing speedup (well, kind of. Z movie 13 also used speedup) looked terrible anyway, and by the time those were done, Funi figured out how to encode properly, so you really gain nothing by importing from either side of the pond once Madman switched to speedup.

And the one case where you arguably do gain something (Madman's Z movie 13), the benefit is so minimal, it's really just not worth the effort or expensive.
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.

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LordCrumb
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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by LordCrumb » Sun May 26, 2019 12:55 am

Surely you can get a TV that can display PAL in the states by now.. ?

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TheOverlyMadHatter
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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by TheOverlyMadHatter » Sun May 26, 2019 1:39 am

LordCrumb wrote: Sun May 26, 2019 12:55 am Surely you can get a TV that can display PAL in the states by now.. ?
I think that's besides OP's point; Dragon Ball's native format is NTSC, and he's looking into how to undo the PAL conversion.

As for PAL being available in the US... well, you'd be surprised. TVs that support both formats (hell, three of them if you include SECAM) may have been
widely available since the turn of the century in Europe, but Multisystem TVs still make themselves very scarce stateside; as far as we're concerned, they're still mostly limited to professional video monitors, or (strangely enough) presentation monitors. It sucks.

But you can still use an external scaler to upscale to HD, at which point the different formats aren't really an issue.

LostTimeLord
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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by LostTimeLord » Sun May 26, 2019 8:09 am

Yeah, apparently PAL/50Hz incompatibility is still enough of an issue in the USA that "PAL" content has to be converted to "NTSC" for Blu-ray by either slowing it down to 24Hz or converting it to 60Hz. In some cases, a 'worldwide' disc is made and the UK audience is stuck with an inferior transfer too.

Meanwhile, Madman's Australian Dragon Ball Super DVDs are in NTSC.

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Re: Madman DVDs - PAL to NTSC

Post by DrBriefsCat » Mon May 27, 2019 11:13 am

I'm in the USA and was able to play the Madman Saga of Goku set on an NTSC TV with a special Oppo player that converted the PAL signal. It doesn't look much different than when played on a computer monitor. The field-blending is minor compared to some other PAL anime DVDs that used NTSC-sourced masters.

Cheap DVD players that converted PAL were once common in the US a decade ago, but now they seem to be harder to find.

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