Dragon Ball Z "Seasons" On Blu-ray: News & Discussion

[Luso Saiyan]

Apparently the vertical edges of the film are where most of the bad stuff is in most shots. A lot of the work went into seamlessly removing all the dirt, dust, gunk, tape, tears, etc. that are on those edges. Like with the Orange Bricks, a 16:9 transfer simply cuts most of that stuff out altogether and removes the need to actually fix those areas. It makes remastering DBZ a lot cheaper.

IIRC, the transfer on the orange bricks have a lot of DNR applied (and not because of the edges), which is the cheapest and lowest quality solution to get these out fast and easy without much effort.

[qjz123]

Why doesn't Funimation just give us raw 1080p film scans I took these from the video where Funimation talks about how they were remastering level 1.1.
They look really good.

Are those really the film masters? They made me believe the masters required quite a bit of work, thus the high restoration cost of the Levels sets.

Yes they are really the film masters I'm sure some scenes look worse/more damaged than others but if it comes down to either a crappy automated remaster or raw film scans I'd take the raw film scans.

[Kendamu]

Apparently the vertical edges of the film are where most of the bad stuff is in most shots. A lot of the work went into seamlessly removing all the dirt, dust, gunk, tape, tears, etc. that are on those edges. Like with the Orange Bricks, a 16:9 transfer simply cuts most of that stuff out altogether and removes the need to actually fix those areas. It makes remastering DBZ a lot cheaper.

IIRC, the transfer on the orange bricks have a lot of DNR applied (and not because of the edges), which is the cheapest and lowest quality solution to get these out fast and easy without much effort.

Oh, definitely! Hence what I was saying about how, for years, I've just wanted FUNimation to give me raw film scans with subtitles and call it a day. They'd almost never hear from me again unless I wanted a format update (Blu-ray, etc.). It was probably their Orange Brick remaster that made me start thinking that way, actually. Hopefully, this time around, they'll tone it down a bit and just give us something that looks competent rather than blasting it with highlighters to the point that detail disappears regularly.

[qjz123]

Why doesn't Funimation just give us raw 1080p film scans I took these from the video where Funimation talks about how they were remastering level 1.1.
They look really good.

Are those really the film masters? They made me believe the masters required quite a bit of work, thus the high restoration cost of the Levels sets.

Look at these scenes
http://imageshack.us/a/img15/6995/mnzi.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img818/9137/onzi.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img38/2787/7zng.png
Cropping them to 16:9 would greatly reduce the amount of work, at least thats what Funimation's thinking.
http://imageshack.us/a/img585/928/chi8.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img29/6952/0qcg.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/2959/jebq.png

[qjz123]

Raw film scan
http://imageshack.us/a/img841/48/kyo1.png
Vs Kai
http://imageshack.us/a/img198/8821/ih5y.png
Raw film scan
http://imageshack.us/a/img69/5716/pw9f.png
Vs Kai
http://imageshack.us/a/img542/5382/8wsm.png

[Kendamu]

I made a video regarding my thoughts on the matter. I kinda wish the ones with the damage were uploaded before I made the video, but I gave you credit, qjz123 and linked to this thread in the description.

[Luso Saiyan]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but who's Steve (from Steve's transfer)?

[Kendamu]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but who's Steve (from Steve's transfer)?

Steve Franco is the guy who originally did the Orange Bricks remaster that a lot of us disliked. In the first Blu-ray attempt, his role was simply to make a new digital remaster while another team went about cleaning everything up and correcting the colors frame-by-frame. Not sure how things are going to work out with this upcoming second attempt at Blu-ray.

[qjz123]

I gave you credit, qjz123 and linked to this thread in the description.

Thanks

[Ajay]

<snipped links>

And that extreme denoise and resulting blur is why I struggle to rewatch Kai. It just reminds me of the shitty YouTube encodes of Z where all the grain and clarity is lost from a lack of bitrate.

[Daimo-Rukiri]

Why doesn't Funimation just give us raw 1080p film scans I took these from the video where Funimation talks about how they were remastering level 1.1.
They look really good.

Are those really the film masters? They made me believe the masters required quite a bit of work, thus the high restoration cost of the Levels sets.

Look at these scenes
http://imageshack.us/a/img15/6995/mnzi.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img818/9137/onzi.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img38/2787/7zng.png
Cropping them to 16:9 would greatly reduce the amount of work, at least thats what Funimation's thinking.
http://imageshack.us/a/img585/928/chi8.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img29/6952/0qcg.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/2959/jebq.png

The MSRP is $44.99 of course we can get it at $25-30 depending on who ya order from. Reducing 20% of film restoration over 291 episodes as I've said before could easily pay for a good chunk of the series on it's own. I mean c'mon, funimation even hated the bad remastering of the bricks... And since we know 1.1-2.2 are done(we can assume 2.2 as it has a release date) we know what these season sets will look up to up until that point but beyond that is a guess, Then comes the question, how bad are the masters BEYOND 2.1? Remember how bright Season 2 was? That may have been intenional to hide damage... that was really the only super messed up season, they were all bad until later on at the cell games but that was still bad.

Even judging from those shots the focus hasn't changed, but we should see a trailer soon.

[Kojiro Sasaki]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but who's Steve (from Steve's transfer)?

Steve Franco is the guy who originally did the Orange Bricks remaster that a lot of us disliked. In the first Blu-ray attempt, his role was simply to make a new digital remaster while another team went about cleaning everything up and correcting the colors frame-by-frame. Not sure how things are going to work out with this upcoming second attempt at Blu-ray.

Steve Franko I think that everybody should watch this video, before making an opinion about new "season sets".

For years I've been saying, "I wouldn't have a problem if they just shoved that raw footage on DVDs, threw some subtitles on it, and sold it to me.

This. I would definitely like this kind of damage more than this, which was done on purpose (aka remastering).

It's a shame that the experts do not decide about how the remastering should be done (Orange Bricks). If they don't have money to restore it properly, they shouldn't do it. They always can just reprint the Dragon Boxes (with some color correction ). But still - the main problem will remain:

Spoiler:

[Ajay]

They always can just reprint the Dragon Boxes (with some color correction ). But still - the main problem will remain:

Spoiler:

Totally agree.There's no point in releasing only SD quality nowadays. We need a proper 4:3 Blu-Ray release and then they can just leave it alone. Maybe add a DVD version for those still stuck with SD but BD is what matters.

[dbboxkaifan]

It's a shame that the experts do not decide about how the remastering should be done (Orange Bricks). If they don't have money to restore it properly, they shouldn't do it. They always can just reprint the Dragon Boxes (with some color correction ). But still - the main problem will remain:

Spoiler:

Are you implying that 4:3 AR shows up like that on an HDTV? That's a false assumption.

It originally shows in 4:3 AR with bb's but in DVD's case you can stretch the img, though that wouldn't do much good because it'd degrade the PQ, the AQ remains intact though. I'd rather have 1:1 copy over a mediocre remaster (OBs).

[ect5150]

I agree with everyone here -- given those shots of Steve's transfer, just give me that in 4:3. I'll take the rips at the bottom. I don't mind that much grain as long as the bitrate on the video encode is high enough.

The forums really did hammer Steve about the Orange bricks... but his transfer seems to be pretty sweet.

[Rukura]

The forums really did hammer Steve about the Orange bricks... but this transfer seems to be pretty sweet, unlike the one he did in 2007

Went ahead and fixed that post for ya. Ain't no taking back what he did before.

[ect5150]

The forums really did hammer Steve about the Orange bricks... but this transfer seems to be pretty sweet, unlike the one he did in 2007

Went ahead and fixed that post for ya. Ain't no taking back what he did before.

I don't think they re-hired him to the job again. He just transferred the film to a digital format. Unless I'm wrong about that, someone at FUNI took the digital transfer we see in the screenshots above and edited the hell out of them - altering the colors on a massive scale and denoising the image far beyond the need to do so. Which explains why the Orange Bricks weren't as bad for seasons 8 & 9 but horrifying in season 2.

[Kojiro Sasaki]

Are you implying that 4:3 AR shows up like that on an HDTV? That's a false assumption.

Is it really so hard to understand what this image is showing?

[Ajay]

Are you implying that 4:3 AR shows up like that on an HDTV? That's a false assumption.

Is it really so hard to understand what this image is showing?

Yeah, it's pretty clear it's showing that SD resolution is shitassdick compared to full 1920x1080

[Rukura]

The forums really did hammer Steve about the Orange bricks... but this transfer seems to be pretty sweet, unlike the one he did in 2007

Went ahead and fixed that post for ya. Ain't no taking back what he did before.

I don't think they re-hired him to the job again. He just transferred the film to a digital format. Unless I'm wrong about that, someone at FUNI took the digital transfer we see in the screenshots above and edited the hell out of them - altering the colors on a massive scale and denoising the image far beyond the need to do so. Which explains why the Orange Bricks weren't as bad for seasons 8 & 9 but horrifying in season 2.

The first time, Franko did the transfer and remastering. The second time (for the original Z Level Blu-rays) Franko did a new transfer and the actual remastering was done in-house(?) by their video engineers. From what I understand, having followed both events semi-closely. (EDIT2: As evidenced by Franko himself stating that he was asked to "re-scan" the footage, referencing his first job with it in 2007)

EDIT: My point was that, this time, they can use a better transfer than what they were left with in 2007 and maybe not make it look crappy.