Seed of Might: Dragon Ball Z Color Correction trailer

[Scsigs]

The main release does include the fixed lines. It generally uses the SS, but switches to 30A when appropriate IIRC. The OB mix was considered, but ultimately unused because it has way more problems such as missing SFX, fake stereo, and various glitches, whereas the BD mixes are just brickwalled (which is barely noticeable anyway IIRC).

Well, that's good.

It didn't help that casual fans believed, and still believe, that the orange sets are the best thing to ever be produced.

George Carlin: "'The greatest thing since sliced bread.' So this is it, huh folks? Couple hundred thousand years, the fuckin' pyramids for Christ's sake! Panama Canal! The great wall of China! Even a lava lamp, to me is greater then sliced bread. What's so great about sliced bread? You got a knife, you got a loaf of bread, SLICE THE FUCKING THING! And get on with your life."
This was the first thing I thought of because if those people genuinely think that those sets are the greatest thing since sliced bread, they need serious help.

[The Dark Knight]

George Carlin: "'The greatest thing since sliced bread.' So this is it, huh folks? Couple hundred thousand years, the fuckin' pyramids for Christ's sake! Panama Canal! The great wall of China! Even a lava lamp, to me is greater then sliced bread. What's so great about sliced bread? You got a knife, you got a loaf of bread, SLICE THE FUCKING THING! And get on with your life."
This was the first thing I thought of because if those people genuinely think that those sets are the greatest thing since sliced bread, they need serious help.

Maybe not as good as the things you mentioned here, but there is a shard belief among casual fans that the orange sets are the best Z has ever looked. That whole "remastered" and "the way it was intended" marketing bull crap Funimation used really stuck with a lot of people. There are many fans who believe that grain and 4:3 are outdated, and that saturating the colors into oblivion to the point that actual lines disappear and chopping the video to 16:9 is a modern way of watching the show. Don't even get me started on the dub and Bruce Faulconer, I'll probably get banned for the language I'd use.

[coola]

Merry Christmas and thank you for doing Toei's work There is one thing i've been wondering, color grading, why after sometime early episodes look pinkish and later episodes become more yellowish? Same thing happened with both DB and DBZ

[The Dark Knight]

Merry Christmas and thank you for doing Toei's work There is one thing i've been wondering, color grading, why after sometime early episodes look pinkish and later episodes become more yellowish? Same thing happened with both DB and DBZ

It probably had to do with how and where the episodes were stored. My understanding of how film works is that the way and place you store it has a major impact on how it's preserved.

[Spyro Chris]

Yeah I'm glad the quality remains as "near master" with the encode settings. This allows anyone to re-encode to whatever x265 settings they want for the level of quality they deem acceptable. Want to remove some audio tracks you'll never listen to? Want to convert them to a lossy format to save more space? You're free to do so.
You can't "undo" any quality loss, blocking, etc. problems from a lower bitrate x265 encode. I'm not sure where this idea came from that Seed of Might uses x264 over x265 for compatibility in 2025. x265 doesn't handle lower res or grainy sources as well as it handles modern 4K sources. It seems kinda silly to skip watching something because the encode is "too high quality". Those happy with the high quality settings, and even those who want to adjust the release to their preferred settings, have the right attitudes.

I might have a lot of space on my storage drive, but i shouldn't be wasting an entire terabyte for one show, not even a show I love, especially at 480p per episode. Asking people to do that is ridiculous, particularly those who can't or don't know how to convert them over to x265. I don't see how x265 is a problem, but compatibility is usually the excuse for using x264.

Like I said, no excuse for not using x265 in 2025.

Aside from the fact that, like Vanner explained, x264 is better for lower res video sources like these, who's stopping you from encoding the entire thing to x265 yourself, or compressing it, especially since you said you have plenty of space available?

[Ajay]

x265 isn't suitable for grainy 480p material. You absolutely aren't going to see any tangible benefit in size without dramatic compromises to the video.

It's designed for clean, higher-resolution video, so when it sees film grain at low res it registers it as noise and tries to smooth it out because of how it handles blocks. x265 looks at big blocks of the image at once, and the grain ends up getting smeared or turning into flickery blocks instead of natural texture.



Yes, you can obviously tune the encoder to mostly get around this, but at that point, you'll see that file sizes actually end up bigger than x264.

x264 is just significantly better at handling low res grainy material. If you wanted to shrink these master files down, you'd still have better results using x264 just by virtue of the encoder's flexibility.

So yeah, x265 isn't a black magic encoder everyone must be using in 2025 lol. It's spectacular for clean shows at any res and absolutely groundbreaking for 4K, but it's not at all suitable for the Dragon Box.

You can more in the flaws section here.

[Scsigs]

Maybe not as good as the things you mentioned here, but there is a shard belief among casual fans that the orange sets are the best Z has ever looked. That whole "remastered" and "the way it was intended" marketing bull crap Funimation used really stuck with a lot of people. There are many fans who believe that grain and 4:3 are outdated, and that saturating the colors into oblivion to the point that actual lines disappear and chopping the video to 16:9 is a modern way of watching the show. Don't even get me started on the dub and Bruce Faulconer, I'll probably get banned for the language I'd use.

The old dub & Bruce Faulconer music, I've long made piece with existing as an unfortunate side effect of when the series was dubbed. It was the standard back then when dubbing anime to not translate a lot of dialogue well, replace the soundtrack, etc. Where it gets annoying, however, is when older fans treat that dub as the only or definitive version of the show that portrays everything the best when it's not. It was a dub specifically made to appeal to American children directly rather than uphold the integrity of the original version of the show. Every dialogue & character change they made actively goes against what the Toei writers & Toriyama intended for the show. You can enjoy it out of a sense of nostalgia if you do & I won't take that away from you, but you shouldn't act like the dub is how the show was intended to be judged. I don't know how you can do that since a lot of the acting in the dub is really bad or incredibly inconsistent, but that's objectively how it is. Chris Sabat & Sean Schemmel have even said as much on Twitter. Kai, while it has minor dialogue flubs here & there for no reason, is a much better impression of the intended version of the show & dialogue. I really wish that Crunchyroll & Toei would pay to redub DB, Z, GT, & the older movies & specials in the Kai style with better translated & written scripts as well as better voice acting from the current actors. Let them do that over the course of the next year or 2 & rerelease the shows with at least the Dragon Box masters (if Toei doesn't get the episodes remastered properly like they should), the specials with the HD remasters Toei did, & the movies with the Amazon Prime masters (all properly white balanced) & we'd have the most perfect releases of the older pre-Kai stuff ever. Include the old dubs on the discs for the nostalgia blind so they'd have nothing to complain about & there'd be no reason for any new remasters, just rerelease those.

Spoiler:

x265 isn't suitable for grainy 480p material. You absolutely aren't going to see any tangible benefit in size without dramatic compromises to the video.

It's designed for clean, higher-resolution video, so when it sees film grain at low res it registers it as noise and tries to smooth it out because of how it handles blocks. x265 looks at big blocks of the image at once, and the grain ends up getting smeared or turning into flickery blocks instead of natural texture.



Yes, you can obviously tune the encoder to mostly get around this, but at that point, you'll see that file sizes actually end up bigger than x264.

x264 is just significantly better at handling low res grainy material. If you wanted to shrink these master files down, you'd still have better results using x264 just by virtue of the encoder's flexibility.

So yeah, x265 isn't a black magic encoder everyone must be using in 2025 lol. It's spectacular for clean shows at any res and absolutely groundbreaking for 4K, but it's not at all suitable for the Dragon Box.

You can more in the flaws section here.

I can get this & I'm not gonna fight you on this, Ajay. Since this isn't an HD upscale or something & the intent is to retain as much of the grain in the image as possible from the DVD rips, that makes sense. My thing, though, is that you posted an image comparing live action material whereas we're talking about a cartoon from the 80s & 90s. I know there's probably not much of a difference between them, but we're not talking FUNimation's bullshit remasters that intentionally scrubbed away as much grain as possible from the frames. As I said, I didn't notice a huge difference between the full sized files & my compressed versions. If I did, I wouldn't be doing it.

[Ajay]

I can get this & I'm not gonna fight you on this, Ajay. Since this isn't an HD upscale or something & the intent is to retain as much of the grain in the image as possible from the DVD rips, that makes sense. My thing, though, is that you posted an image comparing live action material whereas we're talking about a cartoon from the 80s & 90s. I know there's probably not much of a difference between them, but we're not talking FUNimation's bullshit remasters that intentionally scrubbed away as much grain as possible from the frames. As I said, I didn't notice a huge difference between the full sized files & my compressed versions. If I did, I wouldn't be doing it.

It's a visual example of how the two encoders work fundamentally - the underlying image there is entirely irrelevant. It's just showing you how data is broken down.

I'm glad you've found something that works for you, but the entire point of the release is to serve as a master format. Zero compromise, highest possible quality. People being able to create versions to their level of perception and taste is great, but it can never be the starting point. You can't easily work backwards from heavy video compression.

As with all SoM releases, someone will create a passable mini encode within a few weeks if you don't want to do it yourself.

[Diccolo-420]

Yeah I'm glad the quality remains as "near master" with the encode settings. This allows anyone to re-encode to whatever x265 settings they want for the level of quality they deem acceptable. Want to remove some audio tracks you'll never listen to? Want to convert them to a lossy format to save more space? You're free to do so.
You can't "undo" any quality loss, blocking, etc. problems from a lower bitrate x265 encode. I'm not sure where this idea came from that Seed of Might uses x264 over x265 for compatibility in 2025. x265 doesn't handle lower res or grainy sources as well as it handles modern 4K sources. It seems kinda silly to skip watching something because the encode is "too high quality". Those happy with the high quality settings, and even those who want to adjust the release to their preferred settings, have the right attitudes.

I might have a lot of space on my storage drive, but i shouldn't be wasting an entire terabyte for one show, not even a show I love, especially at 480p per episode. Asking people to do that is ridiculous, particularly those who can't or don't know how to convert them over to x265. I don't see how x265 is a problem, but compatibility is usually the excuse for using x264.

Like I said, no excuse for not using x265 in 2025.

Aside from the fact that, like Vanner explained, x264 is better for lower res video sources like these, who's stopping you from encoding the entire thing to x265 yourself, or compressing it, especially since you said you have plenty of space available?

expecting your audience to do the work for you to make your work manageable or acceptable isn't exactly a good standard to be setting. I may be able to encode it to x265, but what about the average fan who doesn't know how to do it at all?

Again, a terabyte of space for one show is ridiculous

[jjgp1112]

I might have a lot of space on my storage drive, but i shouldn't be wasting an entire terabyte for one show, not even a show I love, especially at 480p per episode. Asking people to do that is ridiculous, particularly those who can't or don't know how to convert them over to x265. I don't see how x265 is a problem, but compatibility is usually the excuse for using x264.

Like I said, no excuse for not using x265 in 2025.

Aside from the fact that, like Vanner explained, x264 is better for lower res video sources like these, who's stopping you from encoding the entire thing to x265 yourself, or compressing it, especially since you said you have plenty of space available?

expecting your audience to do the work for you to make your work manageable or acceptable isn't exactly a good standard to be setting. I may be able to encode it to x265, but what about the average fan who doesn't know how to do it at all?

Again, a terabyte of space for one show is ridiculous

I mean at the end of the day this is all fans doing stuff for free on their own time. They, a group of fans, wanted to release it at the maximum quality possible and didn't want to stretch themselves thin doing another lower-quality encode, and in this space there will inevitably be another fan or set of fans autistic interested enough to take the time to do it themselves. That's how we arrived at these in the first place.

This entire operation is being driven by fans who are taking it upon themselves.

[Diccolo-420]

Aside from the fact that, like Vanner explained, x264 is better for lower res video sources like these, who's stopping you from encoding the entire thing to x265 yourself, or compressing it, especially since you said you have plenty of space available?

expecting your audience to do the work for you to make your work manageable or acceptable isn't exactly a good standard to be setting. I may be able to encode it to x265, but what about the average fan who doesn't know how to do it at all?

Again, a terabyte of space for one show is ridiculous

I mean at the end of the day this is all fans doing stuff for free on their own time. They, a group of fans, wanted to release it at the maximum quality possible and didn't want to stretch themselves thin doing another lower-quality encode, and in this space there will inevitably be another fan or set of fans autistic interested enough to take the time to do it themselves. That's how we arrived at these in the first place.

This entire operation is being driven by fans who are taking it upon themselves.

I don't think that reference to autism was entirely necessary, but ok.

It's not like doing the encode would have been that much more work than the project itself, asking for an actual core release that suits the average fan is not a huge ask

Yes, it's done by fans, but that doesn't mean that just because it's done by fans we say everything by it is good, that's like saying any mod for skyrim is good because it's done by fans when there are mods that are better done, sometimes because the author understands the audience and is trying to reach a broad amount of people

[Spyro Chris]

expecting your audience to do the work for you to make your work manageable or acceptable isn't exactly a good standard to be setting. I may be able to encode it to x265, but what about the average fan who doesn't know how to do it at all?

Again, a terabyte of space for one show is ridiculous

I mean at the end of the day this is all fans doing stuff for free on their own time. They, a group of fans, wanted to release it at the maximum quality possible and didn't want to stretch themselves thin doing another lower-quality encode, and in this space there will inevitably be another fan or set of fans autistic interested enough to take the time to do it themselves. That's how we arrived at these in the first place.

This entire operation is being driven by fans who are taking it upon themselves.

I don't think that reference to autism was entirely necessary, but ok.

It's not like doing the encode would have been that much more work than the project itself, asking for an actual core release that suits the average fan is not a huge ask

Yes, it's done by fans, but that doesn't mean that just because it's done by fans we say everything by it is good, that's like saying any mod for skyrim is good because it's done by fans when there are mods that are better done, sometimes because the author understands the audience and is trying to reach a broad amount of people

I think it would take you less, or roughly the same amount of time, to re-encode it yourself and upload it than to complain to them about doing it on their own, then waiting for it to happen, when they clearly don't wanna do it, quite honestly. This isn't even constructive criticism at this point. No one's stopping you, and then everyone’s happy.

[Diccolo-420]

I mean at the end of the day this is all fans doing stuff for free on their own time. They, a group of fans, wanted to release it at the maximum quality possible and didn't want to stretch themselves thin doing another lower-quality encode, and in this space there will inevitably be another fan or set of fans autistic interested enough to take the time to do it themselves. That's how we arrived at these in the first place.

This entire operation is being driven by fans who are taking it upon themselves.

I don't think that reference to autism was entirely necessary, but ok.

It's not like doing the encode would have been that much more work than the project itself, asking for an actual core release that suits the average fan is not a huge ask

Yes, it's done by fans, but that doesn't mean that just because it's done by fans we say everything by it is good, that's like saying any mod for skyrim is good because it's done by fans when there are mods that are better done, sometimes because the author understands the audience and is trying to reach a broad amount of people

I think it would take you less, or roughly the same amount of time, to re-encode it yourself and upload it than to complain to them about doing it on their own, then waiting for it to happen, when they clearly don't wanna do it, quite honestly. This isn't even constructive criticism at this point. No one's stopping you, and then everyone’s happy.

Like i said, not everyone has the understanding, the capability, and/or the PC to do it. If you have a problem with me complaining then maybe you just can't accept simple criticism? Everything has room to improve my guy.

[The Dark Knight]

Like i said, not everyone has the understanding, the capability, and/or the PC to do it. If you have a problem with me complaining then maybe you just can't accept simple criticism? Everything has room to improve my guy.

You do realize they did all that for FREE, right ? You also realize they don't owe you anything, right ? You and anyone else who doesn't like how they did it are more than welcome to go enjoy the orange sets and PAY for them.

[Diccolo-420]

Like i said, not everyone has the understanding, the capability, and/or the PC to do it. If you have a problem with me complaining then maybe you just can't accept simple criticism? Everything has room to improve my guy.

You do realize they did all that for FREE, right ? You also realize they don't owe you anything, right ? You and anyone else who doesn't like how they did it are more than welcome to go enjoy the orange sets and PAY for them.

So just because something is done for free it's exempt from criticism? I'm literally pointing out how they're missing out on a significant amount of people who can't or don't know how to convert to x265.

I have my own project I've worked on so I can say I understand what it takes to put something in that takes years to do, that being said in my case I try to make sure that it's something everyone can easily get access to based on file size.

If you have a problem with criticism, which is meant to improve a product, then I don't know what to say here.

[The Dark Knight]

I have my own project I've worked on so I can say I understand what it takes to put something in that takes years to do, that being said in my case I try to make sure that it's something everyone can easily get access to based on file size.

The whole point of what Seed of Might does is to preserve the classic era of the franchise in the highest quality possible, not necessarily reach the largest number of fans. Fans who are interested enough will either wait for someone to reduce the size, or simply find a way to download it as is. We already have Funimation butchering these series with the excuse of reaching as many people as possible, we don't need fan projects making the same mistakes.

[Diccolo-420]

I have my own project I've worked on so I can say I understand what it takes to put something in that takes years to do, that being said in my case I try to make sure that it's something everyone can easily get access to based on file size.

The whole point of what Seed of Might does is to preserve the classic era of the franchise in the highest quality possible, not necessarily reach the largest number of fans. Fans who are interested enough will either wait for someone to reduce the size, or simply find a way to download it as is. We already have Funimation butchering these series with the excuse of reaching as many people as possible, we don't need fan projects making the same mistakes.

I'm sorry but x265 encodes are hardly butchering, this is just a misrepresentation. At the end of the day, if you're the one providing the product maybe you ought to consider that not everyone has a terabyte of space lying around.

[The Dark Knight]

If you're the one providing the product maybe you ought to consider that not everyone has a terabyte of space lying around.

I don't want to keep going in circles, so I'll say this one more time: This project is not for everyone, so those of us who don't have the required space will just have to wait a bit for someone to provide a smaller version of it. The people who worked on this for FREE do not owe you or anyone else anything, you can either take what they put out or leave it.

[Scsigs]

So, I'll play the enlightened centrist in this argument because it seems to be going nowhere.

Seed of Might has taken it upon themselves to do a full color correction of the first 3 DB series, the 2 Z TV specials, & the first 17 movies over the last several years. This was a huge undertaking, shifting color hues, properly white balancing, & whatever else for all of the episodes as best as possible outside of Toei re-scanning the old film reels to properly remaster them into HD & reset the color values for a proper HD release of them. Although, knowing Toei, they'd still fuck it up somehow.

As for this specific project, it's of 2 minds for me.
For 1, the video files being up to 4GB is a lot. Your average fan of DB just wants to be able to watch the episodes, specials, & movies in as simple & easy a format as possible, which is why so many of the casual fans are still fine with either the shitty FUNi Blu-Rays regardless of how bad the remasters are, or watch the series through streaming. Even with people who completely understand why the files are the size they are, this is a big ask. If you wanna store the episodes of all of these shows, you need a few thousand gigabyte external hard drive to do so, which unless you have a lot of extra stuff you need to store off a computer, most people aren't liable to have. Thus, not readily having an option to download smaller-sized versions of the files is a big gate to people who would otherwise wanna download this fan remaster, whether you wanna accept that or not. 291 episodes of Z alone, the most popular & well-loved series among fans btw, being over a terabyte of data is so much to people. And expecting the average Joe to know how to compress files down & what the best way to do it is is also a pretty big ask. It's good that others will remedy this problem, but at release, it's not great for those people. The large file size also makes it take a while to download. It took me 3 days to download all of the episodes (& even then, that was thanks to the other people seeding it) & now I'm compressing them to be able to put them on a large flashdrive I have to be able to watch them on my TV, as well as a more longterm storage on an external hard drive.

For 2, In the future, if anyone wants to do projects like an AI upscale or videos talking about the franchise, these files will be great for people who have no idea how to color correct videos. Compression WILL set in when they export the videos if they make any, but having a higher quality source as the base will be good. The same with an HD upscale, as having as much detail as possible is important for something like that. For quality purists, they'll make the space to have the videos at the full file sizes. I also think having a consistent look across the series is good, as I think other attempts to color correct the episodes haven't quite got the look down for how the series should look. The example I'm thinking of is Totally Not Mark's team's color correction of the Buu Bits from Team Four Star 2 years ago where, while the colors were better, something's just off, a side effect of trying to upscale them for HD I imagine. I much prefer how the remastered footage in Kai looks, even if it's a little blurry, which this release looks closer to. The release also blows any release by FUNimation out of the water, as it doesn't try to make the show look "modern" or whatever bullshit. Instead, it makes the show look as it should, which is always great.

So, I think arguing about this at this point is unnecessary. There are clear valid points from both parties that make sense. I think this should be done with these & move on to talk about the results of the project themselves like how the episodes look & what's included with them.

[jjgp1112]

I have my own project I've worked on so I can say I understand what it takes to put something in that takes years to do, that being said in my case I try to make sure that it's something everyone can easily get access to based on file size.

The whole point of what Seed of Might does is to preserve the classic era of the franchise in the highest quality possible, not necessarily reach the largest number of fans. Fans who are interested enough will either wait for someone to reduce the size, or simply find a way to download it as is. We already have Funimation butchering these series with the excuse of reaching as many people as possible, we don't need fan projects making the same mistakes.

I'm sorry but x265 encodes are hardly butchering, this is just a misrepresentation. At the end of the day, if you're the one providing the product maybe you ought to consider that not everyone has a terabyte of space lying around.

Dude, your beef with this revolves entirely around storage space. That's simply the cost of wanting to put this out in the highest quality possible. With this beng a free release by the fans, for the fans...simply wat for the inevitable re-encode that will only exist because of fans taking it upon themselves to put this out in the first place.