FUNimation Dragon Box Z #1 (In-Hands) Discussion

[MarcFBR]

What gives you the idea the masters for the dbox aren't digital?

You just love only explaining part of what you're trying to say and watching everybody react, don't you?

No one ever said the masters weren't digital, and I've said 100 other times they were.

It's not my responsibility to repeat shit an infinite amount of times because people choose to ignore what I say (and said MONTHS AGO in the podcast.)

[Innagadadavida]

What gives you the idea the masters for the dbox aren't digital?

You just love only explaining part of what you're trying to say and watching everybody react, don't you?

No one ever said the masters weren't digital, and I've said 100 other times they were.

It's not my responsibility to repeat shit an infinite amount of times because people choose to ignore what I say (and said MONTHS AGO in the podcast.)

Okay, here's the deal, I don't remember 99% of what you say because you're just some guy. Obviously you think your word should be held in a higher regard for one reason or another (I guess because you think you know a lot about this stuff), but people are not going to remember everything you say.

Also, you basically just said "Who said they're digital?" then "Who said they're not digital?"

[MarcFBR]

Also, you basically just said "Who said they're digital?" then "Who said they're not digital?"

People take 'digital' to mean 'the greatest thing ever', when the fact of the matter is, the 'digital masters' for the dragonbox would take up far to much space to ever actually send, and the actual 'DVDs' of the dragonbox are to low quality to send to make a product from (you don't make a DVD from a DVD because minute changes turn into GIANT changes.)

People need to stop seeing the word 'digital' and assuming it is the be all end all...

I never referred to the masters not being digital, I was referring specifically to the more and more common belief that if it's digital that it's perfect or somehow automatically 'better'.

And expecting people to pay fucking attention has nothing to do with me. It's generally smart to read through preexisting information before spouting off like a moron.

[Metalwario64]

And expecting people to pay fucking attention has nothing to do with me. It's generally smart to read through preexisting information before spouting off like a moron.

Moron?

That's what I thought. I mean, why would they go through all of the trouble of remastering it, and then transfer it onto film, which would over time undo all of that hard work?

...Except I was right about them being digital. It is a fact that if the masters were stored digitally, then they wouldn't fade and decompose like film does... I made that point because someone was assuming that the masters had "faded" already, when as you've said numerous times that differences in encoding and many other things could affect the image, and that expecting it to be a perfect copy of the Japanese version is asinine.

Unless you would like to prove me wrong on that front and tell me how I'm "praising the digital medium and saying it's all perfect and 0mg like totally ovar 9000 kewl lol111!!!"

[Jon Jon]

Also, you basically just said "Who said they're digital?" then "Who said they're not digital?"

People take 'digital' to mean 'the greatest thing ever', when the fact of the matter is, the 'digital masters' for the dragonbox would take up far to much space to ever actually send, and the actual 'DVDs' of the dragonbox are to low quality to send to make a product from (you don't make a DVD from a DVD because minute changes turn into GIANT changes.)

People need to stop seeing the word 'digital' and assuming it is the be all end all...

I never referred to the masters not being digital, I was referring specifically to the more and more common belief that if it's digital that it's perfect or somehow automatically 'better'.

And expecting people to pay fucking attention has nothing to do with me. It's generally smart to read through preexisting information before spouting off like a moron.

Out of curiosity, what would the estimated size of these masters be?

[MarcFBR]

Unless you would like to prove me wrong on that front and tell me how I'm "praising the digital medium and saying it's all perfect and 0mg like totally ovar 9000 kewl lol111!!!"

Never had a hard drive or flash drive fail I take it?

[Metalwario64]

Unless you would like to prove me wrong on that front and tell me how I'm "praising the digital medium and saying it's all perfect and 0mg like totally ovar 9000 kewl lol111!!!"

Never had a hard drive or flash drive fail I take it?

I was going to make a point about that, but it was irrelevant. Once again, I've never said it's perfect. I stated that the colors and picture quality wouldn't age and fade like film does.

There is a difference between film fading, and completely losing the masters due to a hardware failure.

[Jon Jon]

Unless you would like to prove me wrong on that front and tell me how I'm "praising the digital medium and saying it's all perfect and 0mg like totally ovar 9000 kewl lol111!!!"

Never had a hard drive or flash drive fail I take it?

Well this is why there are servers with raid arrays ;D. I assume every company that has vital data has it spread across a series of arrayed servers...

This is why I am asking about the total size of these masters.

[SSJ2bardock]

By "they" do you mean the masters that were used... for the FUNi release? Compared to how the Dragon Box footage looks? That argument doesn't hold much water.

Um, yeah, of course that's what I meant. Did you think I was talking about the orange bricks or something? And what argument are we talking about, this is just my opinion, it holds as much damn water as I want it to. If you can't see the difference between the two then you should get your eyes checked.

Sorry, I honostly just wanted to be clear. And since the footage for the FUNi box wasn't taken the same way from the same masters, with the same techniques, there will most likely be some differences. I'm sure the masters have degraded to some miniscule degree since 2003, but I'm not sure if the FUNibox is evidence of that.

I realize my post was kind of an asshole-post, and I really didn't mean it to come across as such, seeing as how this thread has already had more than enough of that. I was just really hungry, and grumpy, when I posted that. My bad.

It's cool, no sweat.

[MarcFBR]

Out of curiosity, what would the estimated size of these masters be?

Based on certain color settings, ABOUT 25 to 45 gigs an episode if the math I'm doing in my head is correct.

And that isn't including audio at all.

However Toei goes about storing them, no licensing company would ever get their hands on them.

edit- Actually I did the numbers in my head based on 8bit color, DVD is 24.

24bit video at 480p.... that's closer to 60 to 100 gigs an episode (I haven't done uncompressed video math in awhile though, so it's possible someone else will have better numbers.)

[Jon Jon]

Out of curiosity, what would the estimated size of these masters be?

Based on certain color settings, ABOUT 25 to 45 gigs an episode if the math I'm doing in my head is correct.

And that isn't including audio at all.

I'd say that's do-able to back up now. It's expensive, but do-able.

But for 2003-2004? Absolutely not.

EDIT:

According to my math, 45gb x 291 episodes = 13,095gb

So, roughly 13tb for just the video alone. I assume another 5 or so tb for the audio?

So let's over-estimate. 20tb to back up the entire series' masters.

That's incredible do-able to back up today. But for 2003-2004 absolutely not.

The price for 2TB hard drives today is roughly the same as a 200gb-300gb hard drive back then I'd assume. I remember when I built this machine I paid roughly $150 USD for my 300gb hard drive and this was in 2005.

In a massive server with a high quality raid controller, you could probably back up the masters across 20 2TB hard drives in a nice mirrored Array set up.

Only using this machine when you want to access the data, I think the back up is covered ;D

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[MarcFBR]

Edited my post, did some numbers wrong.

[isucamper]

A brighter picture generally means a narrower color spectrum (less full) which is probably the result of more compression (in the same way that more compressed sound is quieter). We're seeing the direct result of Funi cramming an extra episode on the disk and this is EXACTLY why we didn't want even more disk space taken away from the video for a 2nd English track with dub music. I hope this is clear to everyone now who couldn't fathom why we wouldn't want more audio options.

The episodes look nice, I'll grant you... but knowing they could have looked even better is kind of disappointing. I wonder why Funi felt they had to do 6 disks instead of 7? Did it really save that much money?

[Jon Jon]

Edited my post, did some numbers wrong.

My idea still makes a bit of sense, just double the amount of hard drives XD.

But realistically, for a major studio, the cost for this is pennies, especially when it's one of the highest grossing shows they've ever produced.

How does Toei go about storing their masters anyway?

EDIT: My idea works better when using multiple RAID controllers...sorry.

[SSj_Rambo]

Wouldn't the masters of this series, by definition, be the original product? And excluding the cels themselves, doesn't that make the 16mm film reels next in line to be considered the "masters"? I know the term "master tapes" is often used to describe the video source used in the TV airings and such.

And I don't see how the size of the 'digital masters' would make it beyond reason to consider sending and using them for subsequent Dragon Box film releases from say an American company. Couldn't the data simply be copied to separate drives and storage devices, and then shipped to Texas?

[MarcFBR]

Wouldn't the masters of this series, by definition, be the original product? And excluding the cels themselves, doesn't that make the 16mm film reels next in line to be considered the "masters"? I know the term "master tapes" is often used to describe the video source used in the TV airings and such.

And I don't see how the size of the 'digital masters' would make it beyond reason to consider sending and using them for subsequent Dragon Box film releases from say an American company. Couldn't the data simply be copied to separate drives and storage devices, and then shipped to Texas?

When people are referring to masters in this case they specifically mean the masters for the dbox itself, not the original film masters for the series.

And the 'copied and shipped to Texas' assumes far more of a respect for companies that license their product and customers that buy it than Toei is known for.

[Jon Jon]

Wouldn't the masters of this series, by definition, be the original product? And excluding the cels themselves, doesn't that make the 16mm film reels next in line to be considered the "masters"? I know the term "master tapes" is often used to describe the video source used in the TV airings and such.

And I don't see how the size of the 'digital masters' would make it beyond reason to consider sending and using them for subsequent Dragon Box film releases from say an American company. Couldn't the data simply be copied to separate drives and storage devices, and then shipped to Texas?

When people are referring to masters in this case they specifically mean the masters for the dbox itself, not the original film masters for the series.

And the 'copied and shipped to Texas' assumes far more of a respect for companies that license their product and customers that buy it than Toei is known for.

So how do you suppose they supplied FUNi with these masters? Your comment implies that they just ship gimped versions...

[MarcFBR]

A brighter picture generally means a narrower color spectrum (less full) which is probably the result of more compression (in the same way that more compressed sound is quieter). We're seeing the direct result of Funi cramming an extra episode on the disk and this is EXACTLY why we didn't want even more disk space taken away from the video for a 2nd English track with dub music. I hope this is clear to everyone now who couldn't fathom why we wouldn't want more audio options.

The episodes look nice, I'll grant you... but knowing they could have looked even better is kind of disappointing. I wonder why Funi felt they had to do 6 disks instead of 7? Did it really save that much money?

That is what I used to think in regards to DVD also, but the logic doesn't fit.

The general bitrate that people have stated are consistent for Funimation DVDs generally regardless of episode count. They went for that disc number because that is the number of discs they needed for the episodes as they were going to encode them.

Adding another disc doesn't automatically mean better quality, and considering they would have had to modify custom packaging that they had (likely) already order, and change around authoring, it is quite likely that it would have cost quite a bit more for them to do.

[MarcFBR]

So how do you suppose they supplied FUNi with these masters? Your comment implies that they just ship gimped versions...

My assumption (same guess I made on the podcast, which is purely my assumption, could be completely wrong) is they were probably provided with digibetas or another similiar digital video device.

Nothing wrong with digibetas mind you.

Based on the caps thus far, I'd say Toei sent quite good quality masters.

My comment was in relation to the relatively well known 'quality' of releases Toei has given to multiple companies over the years (ignoring all the problems we already know about the DB related masters, ADVs special uncut Sailor Moon boxes were missing an episode, were laserdisk quality video, and I believe had the dub spliced in for a few seconds somewhere. And ADV only had access to what Toei gave them for a 'sub only' box.)

Part of my point in general was, the releases were never going to be 1:1, ever.

If you (not you specifically, I mean 'you' as in anyone reading) were expecting pixel perfection from Japan to the USA (and I'm aware most people WEREN'T), well... that's a bit delusional.

[Kendamu]

I wonder if, by acquiring the Dragon Box footage, Funi also got the OVA-that's-not-really-an-OVA and, if so, what they are going to do with it. Get Daimao to sub it and be done with it, like they're doing with the previews, or go the whole 9 yards and do a full-on dub of the thing?

I never really liked that not-so-OVA. I don't see what the excitement is about.