The Latin dubbing of Dragon Ball Z has not been well preserved. The sound tends to be very saturated, or muffled. In Toei’s “remastering” (from Funimation), all episode previews dubbed by Cloverway and Intertrack are eliminated and they mutilated the video cropping it to 16:19 for current standards.
This new project aims to restore all the content removed by Toei and Funi using the best quality audios available to date.
In the same way that Japanese fans recovered better quality audio than the official Toei version thanks to the VHS recordings of the original broadcast of the show, there are high quality recordings of the original broadcast in Latin America, which I have decided to christen as “Latin Spanish Broadcast Audio”.
Audios:
These new Latin Spanish Broadcast Audios come from digitalizations of tapes recorded in the late 90’s and early 2000’s of the original Dragon Ball Z broadcast by Megavisión in Chile (in Hi-VHS, Hi8, LD and DVD formats in the case of the episodes). We exclusively have a copy of the DAT master tape for the openings and endings Intertrack dubbing. Listen to these audios in a quality far superior to any TV capture (all audio credits to Lorum).
Likewise, these TV captures were made with the digital PCM track, and this makes the material have higher quality than any other current capture. As a reference, the current captures have a low kHz level in comparison. For example, Ecuavisa IPTV (8~10kHz), Canal 5 (16kHz), Willax (10~15~16kHz), TVX (16kHz), ETC TV (10~12kHz), Canal 5 HD (16~17kHz but with retakes) and City TV (12kHz), while the captures used in our project are in the range of 20~22kHz, (the human ear can hear up to 20kHz).
Here’s a comparison between the different audios:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLji00x5ZtE
This new Latin Spanish audio has been carefully synchronized, scene by scene, to the point of being a better synchronization than the Dragon Box and the official Toei Latin America edition (from Funimation). Subsequently, each episode has been reviewed in its entirety.
For the Japanese audio, we are using the Broadcast Audio present in the last synchronization (V3) of Team Mirolo (with audios from Fuji TV, Tokai and Ishikawa):
Both audios are in lossless format (FLAC) at 16 bits and 48 Hz. The Latin Spanish audio is in Stereo, while the Japanese audio is in Mono. Mirolo’s audios remain untouched.
Video:
In the case of the video, the latest iKaos RAWs are being used, which correspond to the Japanese DVD Boxes, being the most reliable edition as far as the original material is concerned. Its technical characteristics are:
MPEG4 Video (H264) 720x480 (4:3) 23.976fps
Episode previews:
Episode 1 through 35 have previews made from loops of the episodes themselves and they were remixed with the soundtrack (as they were never officially dubbed into Latin Spanish). As we progress episodes 36 through 60 will have previews made the same way.
61 and beyond already have dubbed previews in their recordings. A few episodes do have missing previews and will be replaced with the loop method we will use for the first 60 episodes.
The loops were carefully selected and adjusted to maintain consistency with the previews while preserving an appropriate volume level between the voices and the soundtrack.
Subtitles:
English subtitles are included for all episodes, corresponding to the Funimation’s editions (thanks to iKaos).
Dubbing:
Being an “analogous and old” dubbing, which began in March 1997 and ended in August 1999 (episodes 1 to 291), it has some editing errors, such as missing OSTs and/or sound effects and some misplaced loops. All these errors were also repaired (including an intact Broadcast version for the more purist, with the OSTs missing). As an example, we mention the song Battle-Colored Warriors from episode 20 (修羅色の戦士), which was removed by Intertrack in the dubbing.
Episode 95 is also included as a bonus.
This project aims to be a legacy for all Dragon Ball fans in Latin America and the highest quality version to date, both in audio and video.
