[Done] DBZ Kai Kikuchi Rescore

[Diccolo-420]

Hey everyone, I just re-uploaded the TFC batch. Stridster sent me a new copy of the episodes which include more reverb for spots with inner dialogue, added sfx for scenes that had it cut, and lowered volume for certain tracks playing over dialogue that were a bit too loud.

Haven't had the chance to go over it yet, I was in the middle of my rewatch of TFC with his 1.0 batch, but I'll probably start from where I was and see how it looks.

Cheers!

[PeteOfDawn]

I was the guy who was attempt number 2. I didn't get very far. Only got 4 episodes done. But I was thinking about going to try again when I come across this project. First off congrats on finishing your project. This a major accomplishment. I watched the first few episodes and you did a great job with the mixing.

There are a few things I personally would've done different. I respect the idea of restoring Head-Cha-La. And it fits with the intro better than I thought it would. But I think keeping Dragon Soul would've been fine since it fits the pacing better. The transition commercials don't really time well with the music and visually don't really match so that's why I feel leaving it as was would've been better. And on that note the title card music seems noticeably lower quality. If I remember the BGM has the stinger in clear quality. These aren't major complaints just things I wanted to mention.

As far the actual episodes I like what I've heard. The placement seems pretty loyal to what I remember. Though there is some music placement I found a bit weird. In episode 3 when Gohan bursts out of the pod before the commercial break and towards the end when it fades from Vegeta and Nappa back to earth. I found when I was starting mine sometimes Kikuchis music just didn't always fit right with Kais scenes due to the pacing not being one to one. So I would refer back to Yamamotos score to see what parts were silent and how long the music lasts and work around that with the Kikuchi tracks as originally intended. Granted this is very early in the project so I'm not if this is something that changes later on.

Though your audio and reverb effects sound better than mine were when I started. That's one of the reasons I quit was because I wasn't good with effects like that at the time.

[Diccolo-420]

Honestly the difference to me between Dragon Soul and Cha-La just comes down to taste. I'm a big proponent of thematic use of tracks and cha-la fits the rest of the score IMO

The first few episodes were when I was still getting familiar with the kikuchi score, so there may be some things that stick out, but later episodes I think fix the issues that you describe.

[Metalwario64]

Man... just watched episode 61 with your rescore and it was perfect! Actually, I'm wondering if, with modern AI "stem separator" tools, if some day we could take the Japanese voices and slap them into the mix or if it's way more complicated than that due to other elements being on the voice channels in Kai's dub? Even still, for the dub, it just doesn't get better than this. Thank you so much.

[Diccolo-420]

Man... just watched episode 61 with your rescore and it was perfect! Actually, I'm wondering if, with modern AI "stem separator" tools, if some day we could take the Japanese voices and slap them into the mix or if it's way more complicated than that due to other elements being on the voice channels in Kai's dub? Even still, for the dub, it just doesn't get better than this. Thank you so much.

glad you liked it man! Yeah one would think at some point AI might be able to do it, though right now I doubt it could with the precision needed to isolate the voices and sfx from the music.

[Metalwario64]

Well it's not perfect, but I ran the scene where Goku turns Super Saiyan in Ultimate Vocal Remover 5, removing the vocals from your Kikuchi rescore and the music from the Japanese Yamamoto version, and mixed the two together. Aside from the voice crack from Schemmel still being in here, I think it sounds decent. Not the best but.. I might look into seeing if newer, better models exist that might be able to do an even cleaner job. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... 31c2cc483&

I also notice a choir from the Yamamoto score leaked in a bit too... Maybe I should retry with the Kikuchi score, but the last time I did a little bit some horns would leak through at times. Maybe if this is viable, it might be best to take the time to rip both and mix and match the best segments.

[Diccolo-420]

Well it's not perfect, but I ran the scene where Goku turns Super Saiyan in Ultimate Vocal Remover 5, removing the vocals from your Kikuchi rescore and the music from the Japanese Yamamoto version, and mixed the two together. Aside from the voice crack from Schemmel still being in here, I think it sounds decent. Not the best but.. I might look into seeing if newer, better models exist that might be able to do an even cleaner job. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... 31c2cc483&

I also notice a choir from the Yamamoto score leaked in a bit too... Maybe I should retry with the Kikuchi score, but the last time I did a little bit some horns would leak through at times. Maybe if this is viable, it might be best to take the time to rip both and mix and match the best segments.

Yeah the AC3s with the kikuchi score tend to leak through a lot, at least when I was trying to cut out the music for SFX for the dub. I had more luck with the AAC files that had yamamoto 1-52 and the rest kikuchi.

I also got a request a while back to see if I could do something with the spanish dub of kai and put in my kikuchi rescore, but the biggest obstacle is space on my mega drive which is almost at capacity with the three rescores I have on there. If I had the space, I'd look into uploading just the music selections to help with your project. I might look into starting a second mega drive, it's just that nowadays mega only offers 15 gigs of space vs 50 back in the old days, but 15 would theoretically be enough for something like this.

I'd only be able to provide 1-98 though, you'd have to ask stridster to do the same for TFC.

[Diccolo-420]

Ok so I made a music only AC3 of episode 1 containing ONLY my music placements.

https://mega.nz/file/QzIyQAYK#1OzjYZpux ... r1EqfTNrwk

I also included the japanese version of FLOW's Cha La intro here, can you try it out on the japanese kai episode 1? You'll need to reintroduce the japanese credits of Yeah! Break! Care! Break! since my copy was english and I cut it out.

[Metalwario64]

Okay! When I got the time again I'll give it a shot and see what I can do with it! If we can do this ,even if it's a slow project, I think getting a better Japanese Kai (if I had time, I'd do it with the Z broadcast voices but that would involve lots of retiming and custom placing and I don't have the time for that sadly). Oh wait... I can't separate the SFX with the voice remover... Any chance you could include those as well?

[Diccolo-420]

https://mega.nz/file/UrZQWAbb#ke82iDo3p ... mJpht6HMFg

This should have some SFX, best I could do since Eng voices overlap a lot. If that's a problem you may have to go about creating your own sfx for scenes. As for cutting the original jap audio, you'd have to isolate it too from the music that's already in there I think.

[Metalwario64]

Mmm.... Shouldn't be too bad. I think I can figure something out. Thank you so much for the assistance! I might even be able to isolate the missing sfx from the voice track of the 5.1 dub audio by using the vocal removal on that now that I think about that!

[Diccolo-420]

Mmm.... Shouldn't be too bad. I think I can figure something out. Thank you so much for the assistance! I might even be able to isolate the missing sfx from the voice track of the 5.1 dub audio by using the vocal removal on that now that I think about that!

Nice,

i forgot to mention tho that my sfx may be more hinderance than help because in extracting the audio (since i use audacity) theres a small micro fraction of a second delay generated, so it may cause problems.

[Metalwario64]

I see... Well... here's my workflow!
Top is your music + SFX mix (I had to manually silence some parts with dub voices leaking through), the one below is the remaining SFX from me separating the dub voice track with the sound effects with UVR 5, the one below is the Japanese voices separated, which still retains some bits of the existing sound effects, and the bottom is the parts from the official Kai JP audio. I did cutting around things to keep the scenes with silence since no reason to filter those up with AI!

I kinda rushed this... I don't know how to just... gate the super quiet parts... The remaining sfx from the separated dub + sound effect file I got has some SUPER quiet english vocal residue at parts. It's impossible for me to hear it, but boosting the volume of the track a ton I heard it. And there might be some issues here and there but... I think this is presentable! This is a compressed OGG now just as an example. I still have the Audacity project file to make adjustments as needed. Even now I'm hearing a few of the synth toms from the original track used on the beach scene.... Might need to either silence those parts or also use the Yamamoto version and pick the best parts from both. More work but... I try to do things to the best of my ability. OH, and the eyecatches I forgot to cut out of the JP track... Well I'm considering this a first draft and it's my first attempt.

Here is Episode 1's Japanese track with the Kikuchi rescore: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... a17a3e405&

[Diccolo-420]

Wow, I just gave it a listen to and that was extremely well done!

If you're going to make a project of this, I'll definitely go ahead and see if I can register a new MEGA drive specifically for this, but like I said I'll only be able to provide episodes 1-98.

[Metalwario64]

Yeah no problem, and I appreciate it! I am kinda in a bad spot rn so I can't really commit, but next month I will know if I can or not most likely. I really want to, to make Kai, in its original language, superior and accessie for people of all languages.

[Diccolo-420]

Yeah no problem, and I appreciate it! I am kinda in a bad spot rn so I can't really commit, but next month I will know if I can or not most likely. I really want to, to make Kai, in its original language, superior and accessie for people of all languages.

For sure, been there done that. These projects take a lot of commitment if you want to make them good, I know that I've sunk a lot of time into this one and my combo rescore as well.

Definitely if there's a good japanese audio with proper kikuchi placement then Kai would be the go to for watching Z in english or in japanese (though from what I gather the overall voice acting is still superior in original Z japanese)

[Metalwario64]

Wait... I just remembered... Kai has a few insert songs.. the vocal removal will surely retain those. Unless there's a way to like... Somehow layer the original song over them and cancel them out, I might have to retain some of them here. There might also be cases where neither Audi track is able to be perfectly isolated... So you n some cases the existing kikuchi placement may be necessary... Oh well. And sumitomo's score is full of choirs in some tracks...

[Diccolo-420]

Wait... I just remembered... Kai has a few insert songs.. the vocal removal will surely retain those. Unless there's a way to like... Somehow layer the original song over them and cancel them out, I might have to retain some of them here. There might also be cases where neither Audi track is able to be perfectly isolated... So you n some cases the existing kikuchi placement may be necessary... Oh well. And sumitomo's score is full of choirs in some tracks...

Yeah that would be an obstacle, it may indeed be possible to cancel them out by overlaying the tracks over the scene and see if that works.

[Diccolo-420]

Updated episode 36, I didn't like the way I initially cut Garlic Jr. Transforms for when Frieza finds the Z-fighters so I redid that.

[Diccolo-420]

Ok guys, big thanks to stridster for providing the voice files for this

I edited in Chris Ayres voice to Frieza in episode 1. It's not perfect as Linda's voice bleeds through in some instances, and the sfx in certain places are choppy, but i did the best I could.

If anybody has some suggestions on how to improve this please send them my way

Basically did the same from my combo score to here. LMK what y'all think