Old Fullscreen DB Movie Releases in Japan... Revealed!

[takarajima]

諸行無常・・・・・・・

[KiddoCabbusses]

This is kind of an odd coincidence, but I just found a VHSRip of DBZ movie 1 [somewhere].
Although, one thing I noted when looking at the OP in particular, it looked more "Zoomed in" than FUNi's fullscreen releases, from what I could tell.

Can you show the DB movies, in comparison?

[Kibito_Kai]

I was just wondering... how bad are the singles funimation released? I own all of the double features on DVD but since they are all cropped I wanted to venture into the movie singles...

[KiddoCabbusses]

That'd depend on the movie and what dub is on it.
In the case of Z movie 1, a very detailed thread was made a long while back.
Twas here, if I remember right.

I'll take a few random grabs from the rip I obtained to compare it with some stills that are common around the net, although mine probably won't look as good as takarajima's. It was encoded in 320x240, for example.




The most notable and obvious difference between this and FUNi's are the colors - the VHS is a lot brighter, and has a good amount more orange. FUNi's are so dark the dark details can become hard to see, and oranges mostly look red.

The VHS tape colors also appear to be very close to, if not matching, what I can find of footage of the colors of the Japanese Laserdisc version.

[Mountain]

Although Kei says that he saw some of the movies in theaters projected in a 1.33:1 ratio (and I don't doubt him), it should be noted that most films were released on VHS in 4:3; it's no basis for a film's original aspect ratio.

[KiddoCabbusses]

Although Kei says that he saw some of the movies in theaters projected in a 1.33:1 ratio (and I don't doubt him), it should be noted that most films were released on VHS in 4:3; it's no basis for a film's original aspect ratio.

IIRC the point is meant to be solid proof that the movies had a 4:3 release in Japan at all, as neither the Laserdiscs or the DBox were such. It's also interesting on it's own merits for comparing the zoom-in against FUNi's 4:3's and the colors against all the future releases.

[MarcFBR]

I'm not sure why anyone thought they wouldn't have had such a release.

That's why films were animated in open matte.

[TripleRach]

I'm not sure why anyone thought they wouldn't have had such a release.

That's why films were animated in open matte.

I thought this was common sense too, but I've seen a lot of people insist the Japanese tapes were 16:9.

I think part of the problem was old VHS fansubs for the movies. Those were often 16:9, but that was because they used the Laserdiscs as source footage.

[VegettoEX]

I'm having trouble understanding what some of the claims here are, perhaps because they're coming in and out of English.

There's no debate that some of the early movies had 4:3 releases. Especially when going through the "Overview Special", it shows DB movies 1-3 and DBZ movies 1-3 in full screen, and then switches to widescreen from there on out.

So is someone saying that ALL the VHS releases for the movies were a full-frame 4:3 without any cropping? 'Cuz that's not true.



That's directly from the Japanese VHS.



Again, I'm not saying they weren't all ANIMATED in the full-frame (we know that to be the case due to 4:3 international releases) and some theaters potentially aired them that way as well, so am I just mis-reading something here? It's likely, but I'm not sure! All the examples in the first post fall within the DB 1-3 / DBZ 1-3 cases where they were indeed 4:3, so... onward... not so much .

[TripleRach]

There's no debate that some of the early movies had 4:3 releases. Especially when going through the "Overview Special", it shows DB movies 1-3 and DBZ movies 1-3 in full screen, and then switches to widescreen from there on out.

So is someone saying that ALL the VHS releases for the movies were a full-frame 4:3 without any cropping? 'Cuz that's not true.

The issue is the opposite, I think. In debates about the proper aspect ratio for the movies, I've seen people insist that every Japanese home release was 16:9, including VHS. But obviously there were some 4:3 VHS tapes.

Though I had always thought every VHS was 4:3, so I find it very interesting that some of the tapes were letterboxed. I learned something today.

[takarajima]

諸行無常・・・・・・・

[Ashura]

It's the age of Blu-Rays. When Funimation decides to re-release all these films on BR, they should have an option for both 4x3 and 16x9, and then people can stop complaining one way or the other.

[Ashura]

Also, on the subject of color correction, I've been doing some research on the color shifts in the Dragon Box in general and have started to find a pattern emerging in terms of the tonal shifts between the many different versions. A lot of the research here comes from working with the original Dragon Ball (non-Z) Dragon Box, and lead to a roadmap that oddly enough the VHS is close to. So with that said, this is about as educated of a guess you can make as to what's happened to the colors on the Dragon Boxes:

Starting here:



There's a color cast, so obvously you apply color cast removal. What removing the color cast does is evens out what's supposed to be a grey tone to an actual grey. Most of the episodes I've seen, the greys are actually sitting more yellow or green... you'll see it if you color drop eyes in most Dragon Box episodes. This is similar to doing a white balance, but it's far less destructive on the luminance since you're not equalling a slight grey and above into a white, but pulling out the extra color. You're middling it out back into a grey; getting rid of some of of the color shift.



It seems that in whatever manner the films aged, they've lost a lot of their blue information, pushing a lot of it into the green territory. Note though how much better the oranges look already. So from here, in correction you would have to adjust this next, adding to the cyan and blue hues and pushing them up a bit.



Finally, the reds are often punched up way higher than they should be in terms of saturation, and the red itself is usually a bit off. To get it closer to the last shot, you do a slight adjustment in red hue upward more into the oranges, and then drop the saturation a little to bring it back. Note that this is an adjustment derived more from the other comparisons I've done and just not the comparisons here, though it's odd how much closer this looks to the VHS...



Now it's very close to the VHS, accounting for the extra saturation in it:


Personally for me, I might color correct to about here:


This is less of a saturation pull on the reds and a bit more blue, though it doesn't match the VHS as much, or comparing the Dragon Box to other paraphernalia. Some people might push up the reds in the gi a lot more than I have here, and personally I would probably fiddle with the reds more to get a bit better balance between the gi and skin tones... especially since the reds are one of the first things to go screwy in VHS tapes.

Please note that due to the blocking in the DVD images, the edges aren't perfect; you can see some of the sea-green it didn't catch in the tail of Kintoun because there's yellow blurred into the sea-green due to the mpeg2 compression. This is pretty quick and dirty color correction.

Like I said, I've been working on these values using the original Dragon Box and photos of cels, other countries' VHS and DVDs, people's caps, books, etc. etc. These aren't ever going to be a perfect match to the original airing, but looking at a lot of sources they're likely a lot closer to the original colors than what they were originally and likely gives us a general idea of how the colors have shifted over the years. You can't dispute that the Dragonbox's colors are so far from everything else published and released from the 80's onward.

http://www.twistygadget.com/stuff/db/cc/dbox01.jpg
http://www.twistygadget.com/stuff/db/cc/dbox02.jpg
http://www.twistygadget.com/stuff/db/cc/dbox03.jpg
http://www.twistygadget.com/stuff/db/cc/dbox04.jpg
http://www.twistygadget.com/stuff/db/cc/dbox05.jpg

Note that I've worked hard to preserve luminosity and color balance here.

EDIT:

Here are some further shots using the same exact adjustments as the first (generally I would compare 4 or 5 shots when doing this kind of correction, but this is all based on the one):





Like I said, I'd probably work a little more on the skin and gi tones in a real environment, but I still think this gives a good idea what exactly's gone on.

[mikezilla2]

interesting to say the least

i was never a huge grain fan but its a bit of a shock to go back and watch the orange bricks on about the first episode were theres a lot less stuff ups suffice to say they are pretty lacking ( i was watching it for the English music track)

[redlinks]

I guess we'll never know for sure what the true aspect ratio of these movies are unless somebody saw these way back when they first came out in Japan. Oh well. Anyway, can you do a scan of the front, side, and back of those movie vhs tapes? They've got some very nice artwork on them.

[Pokewhiz7]

I guess we'll never know for sure what the true aspect ratio of these movies are unless somebody saw these way back when they first came out in Japan. Oh well. Anyway, can you do a scan of the front, side, and back of those movie vhs tapes? They've got some very nice artwork on them.

It is 1.85:1.

[VegettoEX]

I guess we'll never know for sure what the true aspect ratio of these movies are

But we do know. They were all animated at 4:3, all of them received a 4:3 release or display at some point or another (whether in more-local theaters or home releases somewhere in the world), but they were all also (particularly DBZ movie 4 onward) animated with the intent to have them display theatrically cropped down to 16:9.

There's not actually anything up-in-the-air about this.

[TonyTheTiger]

There kind of is. My issue, at least, is with the idea of "intent." Whenever I read that the movies were "intended" for 16:9 it comes with the implication (intentional or otherwise) that they were specifically not intended for 4:3. That doesn't necessarily have to be true. There are countless examples where filmmakers (both live action and animated) planned for two distinct framings, fully aware that the films will be seen in 4:3 at home but, since theaters usually employ 16:9, they were also framed to accommodate that, too.

16:9 is, without question, the original aspect ratio in that under most circumstances they were originally viewed in theaters in 16:9. But that doesn't mean it was the intended aspect ratio. It could just as easily be argued that Toei pulled a Stanley Kubrick and, given home viewing tendencies at the time, planned for people to watch the films in 4:3 and the 16:9 framing was done out of sheer necessity given it would be shown in theaters. Sure, that may not be the case but there's no real reason to say it's definitely not, either.

The issue I take with the assertion of "intended aspect ratio" is that it seems to presume one is legitimate while the other is less valid. There's no reason to assume that. There can be more than one intended aspect ratio. Both framings could be considered just as valid as one another. And the fact that Movie 3 was distributed in 4:3 (the most commonly cited film supporting 16:9 as the intended framing) only serves to suggest that there really isn't a single "right" aspect ratio. The movies simply have two as far as I figure.

[takarajima]

諸行無常・・・・・・・

[KiddoCabbusses]

The issue I take with the assertion of "intended aspect ratio" is that it seems to presume one is legitimate while the other is less valid. There's no reason to assume that. There can be more than one intended aspect ratio. Both framings could be considered just as valid as one another. And the fact that Movie 3 was distributed in 4:3 (the most commonly cited film supporting 16:9 as the intended framing) only serves to suggest that there really isn't a single "right" aspect ratio. The movies simply have two as far as I figure.

Actually, since that movie was mentioned, I should bring up that screencaps of the infamous Masenko shot in that would be interesting to see in the VHS version.
As I have brought up, Toei's VHS tapes are -more- zoomed in than FUNi's verision. It's very possible they were zoomed in in enough to hide that clipped Masenko.