EmmaWinters wrote:Whoa, did I miss a remaster hate-jerk? I'm infatuated with how this looks and would love a breakdown of why it sucks.
Yeah, from day one we've said this sucks.
So TOEI abandoned QTEC, the guys in charge of Kai's previous remaster, in favour of doing their own work on the cheap this time around. So far we've seen some pretty glaring issues:
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Heavy green tint
For some reason the entire broadcast of this show has had this strong green tint to it. We don't know whether this will be present on the home release as there were some
Battle of Gods trailers that featured a similar tint not present in the final release.
(Top – Kai, Bottom left – Dragon Box, Bottom right – colour-corrected Dragon Box)
This was something I put together back towards the start of the series. If you compare my quick colour corrected version of the Dragon Box to Kai, you can see the different pretty clearly. Check out Shapner's lime green hair compared to the intended blonde below it.
Another example involving Videl with a white point reference comparison:
Green shifted white point vs. Absolute white.
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Lazy, amateur colour correction
It was pointed out by
Kei17 that artifacts and leftover colour casts can be seen throughout areas of the picture as a result of poor colour correction:
That ringing comes from not choosing the correct range of colours to correct. Whoever colour-corrected it will have gone to select the range of the sky and not considered the bleed into the clouds.
Z for reference:
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Crushed Blacks
Once again, stealing another example Kei; it was picked up that the blacks are crushed meaning you're losing a lot of detail in darker areas.
Check out Gohan's back!
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16:9 Only?!
So, with Kai 1.0, the show was broadcast in 16:9 to adhere to TV regulations. Not a problem since the home releases were in the intended 4:3 ratio. However, it seems this time around, there is
only a 16:9 version of the show. This was discerned from the home release listings being tagged with a ratio of 16:9 instead of 4:3 like the other sets on the site. In a recent podcast, it was theorised that the only reason Kai 1.0 was in 4:3 is because they were already underway with the original aspect ratio before they were told that 16:9 was mandatory.
Kai's cropping is mostly fine but the act itself is always going to be destructive and run into inevitable issues:
What can they do here? The shot is specifically composed for a 4:3 frame. You're either losing all of Dabra or you're getting Bobiddi's mouth cut off.
That's just covering the purely visual side of the remaster! Kai 1.0 had the infamous redrawn shots to remove/reduce the flashing scenes since nobody wants a repeat of the
Porygon incident. However, since there are zero redrawn shots outside of one or two colour fixes, they've opted to simply remove the brighter frames from the flashing sequences. This results in super jerky animation or camera zooms/pans depending on the scene.
It's just been a total mess to add to the pile of problems this continuation has.