Various Questions: Color Manga, Movie Sets, Heroes Animation

[Jabberwock xeno]

I have a few various questions:

- Has the color manga been released physically by viz in NA yet? If not, when is it supposed to be? For the digital releases, what is the resolution of the manga? Do we know if either is censored? Also, I'd like to know the resolution of the standard black and white manga and if that is censored in digital formats as well.

-What's the on disc resolution of the remastered movie blur ray 2/3 packs that were released with and shortly after the orange bricks? If anybody physically owns a set if they could check on this I would appreciate it.

- Does anybody know if there is a press/new/media site where I could download the Dragon Ball Heros and heros galaxy mission animated trailers without dealing with the compression that is on youtube? I know that a lot of video game publishers have press sites that you can go to and download really high res screenshots, renders, box art, and very good qality trailer footage, and was wondering if there was something similar. If not, does anybody know a place where all of the trailers can be viewed at a location that is owned by the publisher vs. me having to watch re-uploads by random YouTube users with horrible quality and stretching? An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQqKJ6WAbu4

[VegettoEX]

Viz just wrapped up the Saiyan arc of the "Full Color" manga -- both digital AND physical -- and that's all they've announced so far. We reviewed the first release right here on Kanzenshuu. The art itself is uncensored (save Popo's lips), but the translation is identical to what they've been using for years. The company's own digital reader on their website (vizmanga.com/shonenjump.com) displays each page at roughly 480x715, but I'm not entirely sure if there's more data within there. The app isn't responsive design, so it just sticks at that size if you resize the window.

Not quite sure what you're getting at with your Blu-ray resolution question. They're encoded as 1920x1080 as far as I'm aware. What is it that you're actually trying to figure out here?

There are no formal releases of most of the Heroes animation material beyond what Bandai Namco tosses out online. Some of the opening sequences were included on 2011's "Special Selection" DVD, and another small batch are set to be included on the "Limited Edition" version of the "Kuu-Zen-Zetsu-Go" CD single next week. I've seen no evidence that the company has provided full resolution versions to any press outlets. I certainly don't have access to it, anyway.

[Jabberwock xeno]

The company's own digital reader on their website (vizmanga.com/shonenjump.com) displays each page at roughly 480x715, but I'm not entirely sure if there's more data within there. The app isn't responsive design, so it just sticks at that size if you resize the window..

Oh wow, 480x715 is a lot smaller than I expected.

Looking at https://www.comixology.com/Dragon-Ball- ... mic/106440 with the inspect element tool in chrome, we can see that the resolution for the page previews they have are 1031 × 1650 , which is significantly higher then 480x715. Meanwhile the cover is 640 × 1025. If anybody who has them purchased either through viz directly and/or through comixology and has the know how to try to get the media displayed or downloaded at a higher resoluton (I don't know the details of how these work, I assume you don't get a local, normal image format downloaded to your viewing device), and can get that info, that'd be awesome.

Actually, looking at the free preview for the color manga on viz's site, it shows the pages using flash player, so obviously I can't play with the urls to try to get a higher res version. Assuming that the comixology one does download as image files, I wonder if they would be jpgs or pngs. I can't image it'd be a uncompressed format like bmp due to size issues. The previews they give are jpgs, so one could assume the actual full thing is as a well, but 90% of everything online is a jpg, so that could just be what they uploaded the preview as.

Unfortunately it seems like the only way I'm going to get a definite, detail answer is for me to purchase them myself from various places and figure it out on my own. I wish these companies would just release everything at the native resolution they are working off of in house. Can you imagine being able purchase the manga digitally, at the same resolution and quality level they use for printing the manga volumes?

Not quite sure what you're getting at with your Blu-ray resolution question. They're encoded as 1920x1080 as far as I'm aware. What is it that you're actually trying to figure out here?

Just trying to get an idea of the resolutions and quality levels of various releases of both the manga and anime/movies. Whenever there's a new release of the anime people always want to know about the aspect ratio and audio options and color correction, but for whatever reason nobody ever focuses on the actual resolution compared to other releases, and that information is a lot harder to come by, since it's not listed on the amazon page for these things, and if you try to find it on youtube people mislabel everything (Hey, guys, look! 1080p ultra super hi definition 4k quality DBZ! ) and so on.

There are no formal releases of most of the Heroes animation material beyond what Bandai Namco tosses out online.

Do you know where they they toss those trailers out then? The only place I've been able to see them is via re-upload by random youtube users, and obviously I don't want to be watching something that's gone through youtube's compression 6 times and back.

2011's "Special Selection" DVD[/b], and another small batch are set to be included on the "Limited Edition" version of the "Kuu-Zen-Zetsu-Go" CD single next week. I've seen no evidence that the company has provided full resolution versions to any press outlets. I certainly don't have access to it, anyway.

Alright, thanks for that info. I'll have to look into those then. However the last point you brought up got me thinking: Does Kanzenshuu/ Did Daizenshuu EX get press assets from Namco-Bandai/Toei/Funimation for various video game/anime/manga stuff?

[VegettoEX]

Unfortunately it seems like the only way I'm going to get a definite, detail answer is for me to purchase them myself from various places and figure it out on my own. I wish these companies would just release everything at the native resolution they are working off of in house. Can you imagine being able purchase the manga digitally, at the same resolution and quality level they use for printing the manga volumes?

Yeah, unfortunately I think it's going to be a case of just testing out various suppliers. I mean, I tried all the same things you did, but there's not much you can do with the Flash player. You can download the stuff to the Viz app on iOS for example, but taking a screen shot on your phone or tablet just takes it at the native resolution of the display, not the resolution of the image there within the app.

Just trying to get an idea of the resolutions and quality levels of various releases of both the manga and anime/movies. Whenever there's a new release of the anime people always want to know about the aspect ratio and audio options and color correction, but for whatever reason nobody ever focuses on the actual resolution compared to other releases, and that information is a lot harder to come by, since it's not listed on the amazon page for these things, and if you try to find it on youtube people mislabel everything (Hey, guys, look! 1080p ultra super hi definition 4k quality DBZ! ) and so on.

There's really nothing to say here, though. Most Blu-ray content is encoded at 1920x1080. There's no conversation to be had there and nothing to be learned or otherwise gained. Yes, you can encode content to Blu-ray at 1280x720, but most companies will just upscale and encode whatever they have to 1080p regardless of what the content is. It's only with some things like old DVD bonus features ported to Blu-ray re-releases that companies tend to keep at the old 480 resolution. So again, there's really nothing to be said here.

Do you know where they they toss those trailers out then? The only place I've been able to see them is via re-upload by random youtube users, and obviously I don't want to be watching something that's gone through youtube's compression 6 times and back.

Their own website for the game, primarily. A lot of the internal video stuff gets region-locked, and they don't tend to upload things even at 480, never mind 720. This is starting to change, as you can view the JM4 special video in 720 on YouTube.

Does Kanzenshuu/ Did Daizenshuu EX get press assets from Namco-Bandai/Toei/Funimation for various video game/anime/manga stuff?

I have a good amount of certain material archived, yes.

[Luso Saiyan]

Assuming that the comixology one does download as image files, I wonder if they would be jpgs or pngs. I can't image it'd be a uncompressed format like bmp due to size issues. The previews they give are jpgs, so one could assume the actual full thing is as a well, but 90% of everything online is a jpg, so that could just be what they uploaded the preview as.

From what I know, you don't (otherwise I would have bought a lot of things on it). The app just allows you to view the pages, not extract them.

Just trying to get an idea of the resolutions and quality levels of various releases of both the manga and anime/movies. Whenever there's a new release of the anime people always want to know about the aspect ratio and audio options and color correction, but for whatever reason nobody ever focuses on the actual resolution compared to other releases, and that information is a lot harder to come by, since it's not listed on the amazon page for these things, and if you try to find it on youtube people mislabel everything (Hey, guys, look! 1080p ultra super hi definition 4k quality DBZ! ) and so on.

Blu-ray is always 1920x1080 for movies/TV series and similar media (of course, the actual image is limited by its respective aspect ratio). Unless you're talking about the source material used for the Blu-ray masters.

[dbboxkaifan]

Blu-ray is always 1920x1080 for movies/TV series and similar media (of course, the actual image is limited by its respective aspect ratio). Unless you're talking about the source material used for the Blu-ray masters.

Then there's also that BDs could be Interlaced or Progressive, like the Cowboy Bebop TV Series Blu-rays were 1080i although All the Anime (UK distro) stated on the cover as "1080p" even though it wasn't the case, still, I didn't really notice the interlace at any point though.

[MarcFBR]

Blu-ray is always 1920x1080 for movies/TV series and similar media (of course, the actual image is limited by its respective aspect ratio). Unless you're talking about the source material used for the Blu-ray masters.

Then there's also that BDs could be Interlaced or Progressive, like the Cowboy Bebop TV Series Blu-rays were 1080i although All the Anime (UK distro) stated on the cover as "1080p" even though it wasn't the case, still, I didn't really notice the interlace at any point though.

Close, but not quite.

The vast majority is 1080p, a small amount is 1080i (and as Vegetto mentioned, more than a few bonus materials are 480i/p.)

A few German companies have experimented with throwing catalog titles in SD on Blu-ray and selling as is (it's about as terrible as you'd expect.)

There are also rare occasions when some company is crazy and does a 720p Blu-ray (last I recall there are literally like 10 of these in the world) and there was one time when a company was crazy enough to upscale 480i material to 720p (and it looked like shit.)

Blu-ray can also support 1440x1080 with an anamorphic flag which has to do with compatibility with a few things, although I can't recall a commercial disk that has used it (I'm sure something used it for an extra somewhere though.)

[Vegard Aune]

There are also rare occasions when some company is crazy and does a 720p Blu-ray (last I recall there are literally like 10 of these in the world)

I don't really see what's so crazy about this. If anything I'm wondering why there aren't more of these on the anime-scene. I mean, very few anime are actually animated at higher resolutions than 720p anyway, so wouldn't encoding it in 1080p only be taking up unnecessary space on the disc? And possibly making the image somewhat less sharp due to the upscaling? I mean, for cel-animated stuff like Dragon Ball, or the very few recent anime that were actually animated at 1080p, sure, encode the BD at 1080p but... what on earth is the point in a 1080p BluRay for One Piece? (Incidentally to prove this point I went and took a 1080p screencap from one of the One Piece BluRays, downscaled it to 720p, upscaled it back to 1080p, and made a split-screen comparison between the two... One can't even tell that it is a split-screen comparison in the first place unless one looks at the credits very carefully. The detail-level on the left and right side of the image is literally identical, making it impossible to even tell where the split IS unless one looks at the sharpness of the text.)

[MarcFBR]

There are also rare occasions when some company is crazy and does a 720p Blu-ray (last I recall there are literally like 10 of these in the world)

I don't really see what's so crazy about this. If anything I'm wondering why there aren't more of these on the anime-scene. I mean, very few anime are actually animated at higher resolutions than 720p anyway, so wouldn't encoding it in 1080p only be taking up unnecessary space on the disc? And possibly making the image somewhat less sharp due to the upscaling?

This is a common misconception that comes up a lot among people who don't understand how the technology works.

Generically speaking, Blu-rays are designed to be roughly as good as they can get with the technology available in the specification. So in the case of Blu-rays and resolution, 1080p.

A 1080p screen will ALWAYS display content at 1920x1080, it's purely a matter of how it gets there. I don't know if it's changed over the years, but especially early on, many of the players did not scale BD content up with anything except nearest neighbor. So throwing 480 or 720 content on a disk had less than good results. And even now, most automated scaling chips in players generally won't do as good a job as professional equipment will (generally the best you see for SD digital anime scaling is when Funimation does something in house.) So except on the most basic animated content animated 'around' 720p-ish, it just won't look as good in general.

I mean, for cel-animated stuff like Dragon Ball, or the very few recent anime that were actually animated at 1080p, sure, encode the BD at 1080p but... what on earth is the point in a 1080p BluRay for One Piece?

This is explained above, but it's also a point of pride on the technical aspects for the company. It also means that technically speaking, you can remove one aspect from the chain of what may go wrong during playback.

(Incidentally to prove this point I went and took a 1080p screencap from one of the One Piece BluRays, downscaled it to 720p, upscaled it back to 1080p, and made a split-screen comparison between the two... One can't even tell that it is a split-screen comparison in the first place unless one looks at the credits very carefully. The detail-level on the left and right side of the image is literally identical, making it impossible to even tell where the split IS unless one looks at the sharpness of the text.[/url])

Well yeah, but you also picked a scene that just visually, has very few lines, very little detail in the first place, and has large blocks of static color (it also doesn't help that Toei has never made the best disks in the first place.)

And of course, in many Japanese disks, it's not like they are doing quality encoding most of the time anyways. They set their 2 or 3 episodes to fit on the disk and hit go (a gross simplification of the process, but much closer to what they do than you think.) Just because of that them doing stuff in 720p wouldn't matter because they don't need the spare disk space anyways.

[Vegard Aune]

Well yeah, but you also picked a scene that just visually, has very few lines, very little detail in the first place, and has large blocks of static color (it also doesn't help that Toei has never made the best disks in the first place.)

Basically I just went with that scene because I've seen evidence that, at least for some series, the opening is of higher quality than the rest of the show. Plus the presence of the genuinely-1080p credits provides some contrast where you can actually somewhat notice a difference. True, the image doesn't have a lot of detail or lines, but I really just wanted to emphasize the sharpness or lack thereof in those lines, as that to me is probably the simplest way to get an idea as to what resolution it was actually made at.

Thanks for the details on why they actually do this though. I did not know that. Though I still find it a bit ridiculous how often I see people demanding 1080p releases from fansubbing-groups of content that wasn't really done at 1080p to begin with...

[MarcFBR]

Well yeah, but you also picked a scene that just visually, has very few lines, very little detail in the first place, and has large blocks of static color (it also doesn't help that Toei has never made the best disks in the first place.)

Basically I just went with that scene because I've seen evidence that, at least for some series, the opening is of higher quality than the rest of the show. Plus the presence of the genuinely-1080p credits provides some contrast where you can actually somewhat notice a difference. True, the image doesn't have a lot of detail or lines, but I really just wanted to emphasize the sharpness or lack thereof in those lines, as that to me is probably the simplest way to get an idea as to what resolution it was actually made at.

Well, the subtitles weren't even added in all that well to be honest, all sorts of edge enhancement around it.

Thanks for the details on why they actually do this though. I did not know that. Though I still find it a bit ridiculous how often I see people demanding 1080p releases from fansubbing-groups of content that wasn't really done at 1080p to begin with...

That has nothing to do with how things appear on retail disks.

[Jabberwock xeno]

Does Kanzenshuu/ Did Daizenshuu EX get press assets from Namco-Bandai/Toei/Funimation for various video game/anime/manga stuff?

I have a good amount of certain material archived, yes.

Are you allowed to make that material publicly downloadable/accessible, and if so, would you be willing to do so? I'm sure it's probably a lot of stuff to upload, so I understand that it'd take a lot of time to do so I am aware it's not as simple as hitting a button and then people can access it.

[VegettoEX]

No, that's not the intent of the material. It's provided for editorial coverage, not to be put out as an archive as-is. That's the agreement.