Like many, I was looking forward to this release, as there would hopefully be a version that surpassed both the Pioneer and Madman versions.
The encoding was certainly an improvement, minus the cropping it received, but for some strange reason, they increased the brightness by at least 10-20%, so it made the blacks etc look grey-ish when compared to the earlier releases:
Rock the Dragon:
Madman:
Rock the Dragon:
Madman:
I've only looked at discs 1 and 9 but from what I've seen, the brightness increase is constant throughout.
But for some reason, episode 4 did not have this boost (unsure whether other episodes didn't either). Here's a comparison between episode 3 which had the boost, with the same shot in the recap on episode 4:
Episode 3:
Episode 4 recap:
With this, it made good reference to how it originally looked before the brightness boost without having to use the Pioneer or Madman version, so I brought the two images into Photoshop and attempted to tweak the brighter version to match the original version.
to
This was simply a 10 second job using the Levels tool, but I wanted it to work within VirtualDub also and I was unsure whether there was a Levels plugin for it, but there was a Curves plugin, so I attempted it again with the Curves tool.
It took a tad longer but I finally got the same result.
Now with the Curves preset, it could then be loaded into VirtualDub and applied to the video. Here's some tweaks with Tree of Might using the Curves preset:
And here's the curves preset for anyone else who was bothered by the brightness increase and wanted to do this themselves: http://www.mediafire.com/?grm3q5g0r4u1wgz
And the Curves plugin for VirtualDub if you're missing it: http://members.chello.at/nagiller/vdub/index.html
