Dragon Box Z Vol. 4 Discussion

[The Time Traveller]

Do people really hate that picture? I like it... is it his hair? Because it's meant to look like that, it's blowing!

[Daimo-Rukiri]

All I see is that the US version has brighter colors. Sure, Vegeta's hair isn't defined but really... you're going to bitch about something that goes into a DVD/Blu-ray player?

Hopefully my copy arrives tomorrow as I really want to watch box 3 and box 4 at the same time, the same as I did with box 1 and 2.

I may just watch the first season of Hell Girl and watch DBZ all night ^^

Does anyone know if UPS updates their site on Sundays? I mean I STILL have no information on my shipment. It's never taken this long before.

[Greenman]

Looking at Kei17's JP VOB and Greenman's US...I'd give the edge to the JP Box. The picture is a little bit sharper and looks like the drawings are coming right at you. But the US Dragon Box still stacks up very well and the difference is minuscule. Perhaps Puto can provide a clip from the French set for laughs?

And although this doesn't matter to me, I actually prefer the quality of the US JP track over the audio quality in the original. The sound is a little bit blaring at times in the original, while in the Funi box, it's just right.

The US Dragon Box holds it's own really well. Especially when you consider the price, the differences in the video quality are almost negligible.

The Japanese Dragon Box is on top:

EDIT: Un-embedded to save loading time since jjgp1112 posted them again below.
http://imgur.com/aTwDq.png
http://imgur.com/cxgzf.png
http://imgur.com/7eqeu.png
http://imgur.com/KGmnH.png
http://imgur.com/ocPRn.png
http://imgur.com/Wn2Tg.png
http://imgur.com/QOut3.png
http://imgur.com/5koC5.png
http://imgur.com/8OKSc.png
http://imgur.com/3Ewbf.png
http://imgur.com/T1EZW.png
http://imgur.com/osjFL.png

[jjgp1112]

Those caps are rather...soft looking. Does your MPC apply noise reduction to the video or something?

[Greenman]

Those caps are rather...soft looking. Does your MPC apply noise reduction to the video or something?

I don't think so. I didn't apply any filters or anything. I just compared the video playing in WMP to the screens taken with MPC-HC and the sharpness and grain look the same to me. The screens were taken/resized the way MarcFBR recommended.

[Daimo-Rukiri]

I'd use VLC(PC) or Apples DVD player(mac), wmp has problems some times.

[jjgp1112]

Here are my caps of the scene:

[Greenman]

I think we are good. Here's both mine and yours. You can open both in seperate tabs to flip quickly between them or save them and view in a image viewer. EDIT: For future reference I took the screenshots using the way MarcFBR reccomends, which is what I always do.

http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/332/ ... 010320.png
http://i.imgur.com/osjFL.png

[AnimeMaakuo]

.

[Daimo-Rukiri]

That's because Japan has a darker feed than we do.

[AnimeMaakuo]

.

[BluezaBladeNZ]

Definitely the Japanese style, though FUNimations is well enough for people (like me ) who don't want to shell out lots on the Japanese boxes.

[Daimo-Rukiri]

For something that's literally identical I think people are going to go with the US Boxes mainly because it saves them $1500..

[Greenman]

The brightness is noticeable lol.

Yup that's by far the most noticeable thing. Supposedly there's a reason for that:

Our forum member james039 pointed out to us that a minor difference between what is marketed as "NTSC-J" and standard American releases is a 10% brightness difference due to the way the signals are transferred and presented on the final video hardware. Sure enough, applying a 10% brightness increase to a frame captured from an R2 source brings it to near-identical with the R1 release.

For something that's literally identical I think people are going to go with the US Boxes mainly because it saves them $1500..

Even if they were closer in price I'd still buy the US Boxes because I want the subtitles.

[Rory]

The brightness is noticeable lol.

But doesn't detract from the overall experience. It's noticeable if you squint at two screenshots next to each other.
It however isn't noticeable if you're simply watching the sets, because they still look fucking gorgeous.

[MarcFBR]

I'll clarify a few points that may help the discussion a bit.


I recommend the bicubic filter on resize to fix the aspect problem because it is the one that gives you the result most accurate.

But every programs bicubic filter has slightly different calculations so there will be slight differences

Screencaps can also be affected by the specific MPEG2 codec that was being used to decode the video at the time of playback, currently in Shark007 pack there are 3 DIFFERENT ones to choose from (more if you include DXVA versions!) (I've since dumped CCCP due to numerous issues which I won't get into discussing here since it's off-topic. I'll simply add that I've designed a much better system of dealing with codecs on peoples systems that aren't mine, which is talking with them and designing a codec setup for their own system based on it's os, hardware, and software. Anyone is welcome to PM me or jab at me in the chatroom and I'll do what I can for them. If I have free time this week I may also write up a new guide for proper video playback and snapshots, I forgot the methods pointed out in my old posts were obsolete.) (It also helps in that on slower systems doing it one on one has helped performance from a few people by up to 30% on their CPU.)


To say it shortly though- DVD screencapping will always be inexact... ALWAYS. It's simply a matter of paring down as many of the problems as we can.



As for the brightness. 10% difference is normal for NTSC USA/JP material, although it's questionable if it is still relevant (short answer- it probably isn't, but then everyone has a TV with different brightness settings ANYWAYS...)

[SuperSaiyan3Goku]

My Dragonbox Four is still stuck in DES MOINES, IA. It's been like that since Saturday, I believe. No-one works on Sunday, so that's obvious.

... That is until checked it, and it has finally updated! It arrived in Philadelphia at 11:05 AM.

I should have it today, tonight at the latest!

[NEG]

Just a general Dragon Box question: fiddled with the tv options and dvd player options (both sony), can't seem to find a way to make the picture 16:9, no matter what I do, it always ends up widescreen (but showing a little more, a little less, etc). The actual option is there (16:9) but its greyed out, saying its not an option for the current signal.

That would make me assume its something I have to fiddle on the dvd player, but I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm using a HDMI input? (it upscales to 1080i)

[Codarik]

Can someone please put up the Dragon Box version of this screenshot. It's so epic.

[jjgp1112]

Can someone please put up the Dragon Box version of this screenshot. FUNimation's remastering ruined the epicness of it.

*snap*

I'm pretty sure the loss of epicness is a result of that being a heavily compressed downloaded file.