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[Metalwario64]

Kai's picture quality for Mecha Freeza arc, Android arc and Cell arc looks awful at times, more bad than good, which was also one of the reasons I dislike the later Kai

This is about the tenth time you've said that, but I still don't see it.

How are these:



Any worse than these?:



I notice now you said "at times", but I have no idea what you're talking about, unless you're referring to some crappy reanimated shots.

On that note, after getting all of the DVDs, I now am of the opinion that Kai is the best the series has ever looked (in terms of the film). It's about as sharp as the US Dragon Boxes and there's also much better detail in the dark colors, which is why Raditz' hair looks more blue than ever, but it also extends to shading details, which give the show more depth than ever, and looks almost like straight up rescans of the cels at times:

Kai:


DBOX:


I also really love that you can see all of the colors, dust, fingerprints, and other details in the source material that has never really been visible outside of the cels until Kai, which makes it look even more awesome to me. I never knew the sky was supposed to be dark blue in that shot before! That makes up for the slight softness to me.

[djkalteraphine]

Dragon Ball Kai uses DBZ's animation but it's been chopped, rushed, badly remastered and uses inappropriate music for a series that's supposed to be modern and cinematic.

Most of this is opinion rather than fact.

And I'm not here to debate whether or not Kai is good; I'm only asking if we really need yet another release of DBZ. For my part, I'm quite satisfied with my Dragon Boxes.

[astarisborn94]

I'm hoping so. I'd be willing to wait for a restored Blu-Ray release (and no, I don't have the Orange Bricks nor the Dragon Box and I don't intend on getting either).

[dbboxkaifan]

Dragon Ball Kai's picture quality is blurry, not sharp/crystal clear, clean or in proper HD.

I really wish Toei Animation had spent more time working on remastering Kai properly like FUNimation did to DBZ on the Level sets.

[Ketchup_Revenge]

The only way I can see this working is for Toriyama to sell Dragon Ball to an entirely different company than Toei. Toei already put so much money into the series, the only logical thing is to hand it off to someone completely different, but Toei is proud of it's role in Dragon Ball's success and I can't see how they'd ever share rights to it, and they'd probably try to sue Toriyama right away if he ever tried to jump ship. There's also the whole behind-the-scenes contract issues that people seldom know about.

But on the other hand, as far as I know, Toriyama is still sole owner of the Dragon Ball franchise. Toei may have the rights to produce merchandise and further animated series and animated movies, but they can't do it without getting legal permission from him first. But that only covers the animated part. For all we know, they could choose to make another live-action movie (or even live-action TV series) and there wouldn't be a damn thing that Toei could do about it.

[Corpsecreate]

[
On that note, after getting all of the DVDs, I now am of the opinion that Kai is the best the series has ever looked (in terms of the film). It's about as sharp as the US Dragon Boxes and there's also much better detail in the dark colors, which is why Radditz' hair looks more blue than ever, but it also extends to shading details, which give the show more depth than ever, and looks almost like straight up rescans of the cels at times:

Kai is not even close to the same sharpness as the DBOX's...

[kei17]

Speaking of the blurry footage of Kai, I thought they're blurring it to make it look more digital, but it turned out that they had done the same thing to Hokuto no Ken's HD remastered DVD box.

Kentai's FIlms
http://www.kentaiblog.com/2008/11/hokut ... n-day.html








I guess it's Q-TEC's practice, so if they released HD remastered blu-rays of the old series, they'd be likely to look as blurry as Kai.

[Metalwario64]

Kai is not even close to the same sharpness as the DBOX's...

Not the Japanese sets, which were razor sharp, but the US ones have lost detail (except for boxes 6 and 7. which are just as sharp). Comparing them side to side, Kai's usually pretty close to the US sets. The Kai DVDs also seem to be better encoded than the US Dragon Boxes, because I spot checked some scenes that I noticed macroblocking on the Dragon Boxes, and there was never any in the Kai DVDs.

Not as big of a deal as I see people make it out to be in my eyes, especially since I've never heard someone mention the better dark details Kai has which I think makes up for any softness it has. Maybe that makes me biased in that regard, but whatevs .

proper HD.

Proper HD? Are you implying it's an upscale?

Speaking of the blurry footage of Kai, I thought they're blurring it to make it look more digital, but it turned out that they had done the same thing to Hokuto no Ken's HD remastered DVD box.

Y'know, I always thought Discoteks HnK's sets (which used Q-Tec's HD-remaster) were always more in line with Kai than the Dragon Boxes, and now I know why. Though, somehow, Discoteks SD encodes seem a bit sharper than the actual HD sets.

Now I'm wondering how Q-Tecs remasters have much better dark detail than the previous Pony Canyon remasters of Z and HnK (they did HnK didn't they?). Is it simply better, more modern equipment?

[sangofe]

I'd happily buy Dragonball all over again if it was properly remastered in HD.

[Metalwario64]

I'd happily buy Dragonball all over again if it was properly remastered in HD.

Yes, with the sharpness of the FUNi Blu-rays and dark details of Kai please.

[bkev]

Toei's Galaxy Express 999 (movie) remaster is also pretty blurred; I don't know who they outsourced that one too, though. They're likely choosing to overprocess during remastering to fit modern aesthetics. See, it's not just a US movie studio problem!

The one thing I can't stand about Kai is the amount of dust. It just takes away from the sharper look of the film and makes the blurriness stand out to me.

[Kuwabara]

Toei's Galaxy Express 999 (movie) remaster is also pretty blurred; I don't know who they outsourced that one too, though. They're likely choosing to overprocess during remastering to fit modern aesthetics.

That's disgusting and literally nonsensical. Kai is different since it's treated as a separate product, but what's the point of making an old film look new? The Fist of the North Star remaster isn't awful to look at it, but I would have preferred something more along the lines of Bandai's Yu Yu Hakusho HD remaster (DNR while still maintaining sharp line work).

Corpsecreate's color corrections are my favorite look for the series, perfect colors, razor sharp, no jitter etc. Could you imagine all of that in HD?

[AnimeMaakuo]

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[Kojiro Sasaki]

Has anyone ever tried to send TOEI a letter in regards to any future plans of restoring the entire series?

I asked them by various inquiries from various sites - they are not responding. The series definitely needs restoring. For me, almost everything is bad:
Video:
- bad colors
- blurred
- too zoomed in
- small resolution (DVD is from 1997 - now we have Blu-ray. Almost all of us have 720p/1080p TV or monitor)

Audio:
- Mono Japanese audio track sourced from photographic film (analog optical track) - i will accept it only if they officially say that there is no original masters and voice-only magnetic tapes.
- FUNimation uses low quality mono tape for their 5.1 mixes, when Columbia is keeping multitrack tapes in the basement - no comment.

Listening to music from BGM CD's and comparing it to episodes makes me mad You can only imagine how properly mixed in stereo sound effects would sound...
I'm even not talking about "Orange Bricks" - they are the biggest disaster in history of telecine. Level sets have pretty good video quality - this is what 16mm film is capable of! Only defect is that dark parts are completely black sometimes.

[ABED]

Maybe I'm setting the bar low, but DBZ is never going to look great. It's a poorly animated TV series from the late eighties to mid nineties by a cheap animation studio. Just enjoy the Dragon Boxes.

It could be cleaned up very well, but to do so would require a lot of capital and even as popular as the show is, I doubt it could ever bring in enough revenue to justify the investment. Only something like the Bond films could justify that kind of capital investment. By the way, those early Bond films look gorgeous all cleaned up.

[eledoremassis02]

Is FUNimations Kai the only one thats Blurry? I've seen TV rips that arnt blurry. Can't say for the Japanese releases.

[dbboxkaifan]

Is FUNimations Kai the only one thats Blurry? I've seen TV rips that arnt blurry. Can't say for the Japanese releases.

Most likely they were filtered to look somewhat better, because raw tv rips are blurry too.

[Kojiro Sasaki]

Is FUNimations Kai the only one thats Blurry? I've seen TV rips that arnt blurry. Can't say for the Japanese releases.

Do you remember which episode it was ? Episodes 73-80 of Z were done on 35mm film. Toei (Pony Canyon) probably digitized them in bigger resolution (when Dragon Boxes were produced), and material sourced from those masters for Kai is much sharper. Other episodes were probably telecined to DVD Video resolution and were upscaled for Kai*.

But these are only my thoughts - maybe someone who knows more will say something about it (I'm curious myself).

* - not true. It was a new transfer.

[Cold Skin]

As far as the original series go, you have to choose between grain or blur. So blur it shall be!
Grain's gotta be out by any possible mean, it's disgusting, if feels like you're watching an old video tape instead of something digital. Just because something was made at the time of VHS doesn't mean it has to look like one nowadays.
But that's not a specifically "Dragon Ball"-related issue, the same goes with Silent Hill games: you just have to take out the grain in the option menu to avoid throwing up, like "guys, I don't see grain in real life, how can you possibly think I'll feel more immersed with the image on my TV feeling dusty, it only makes me feel I'm watching an old video tape on an old TV set! Next time, why don't you blackout half the screen since we're playing the try-to-mimic-unnatural-vision-imperfections game and trying to make the image un-nice?"

Kai is perfect as a final remastering, it does just enough blur, enough new music (before replacement) and enough color correction so that you actually reduce the feeling of watching something old to the max for a simple remaster, making the show acceptable nowadays (which I thought was a lost cause before Kai came to save the day). Cause who wants to feel like he's watching something old? It's like "today, you could watch a gorgeous waterfall, we have the technical means to do that, but let's actually make it just water coming out from a small old pipe, cause it's so much more intense that way!"

The remastered orange brick had a good idea with erasing the grain, but it was just exagerrated to the point of erasing important elements of pictures: you don't take away an element that breaks your immersion if it results in a new element that just breaks the immersion even more! They couldn't find the right limit, Kai could, there's no need for more when it comes to simple remasterings.

So after Kai, any re-release would be minor improvement - or even step back -, the only possible next step for a re-release is a full remake, completely digital of course (bye bye clumsy manual drawings, bye bye grain, bye-bye any old score, etc...).
A full remake is the only way to get a possibly perfect, 100% digital, 100% beautiful, 100% filler-free, 100% well-paced, 100% well-scored anime release of Dragon Ball.

[AnimeMaakuo]

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