Seed of Might is proud to present our final version of Dragon Ball. In this fan-created work you'll get the best of the best for the Original Dragon Ball series when it comes to:
Video
By far the most ambitious portion of this final version is the color correction process. 30 people spent over a full year to white balance, color correct and filter all 153 episodes (and two specials!) of Dragon Ball. That’s about 3750 minutes or 5,400,000 frames of footage. Many past online efforts have lacked a proper white balance, and you can see what a difference a good white balance alone makes before any further corrections
After the white balance was completed, we referenced hundreds of examples coming from the original cel production materials. This was important to ensure the end result was actually accurate in addition to being nice to look at. Being an all-volunteer group with no corporate deadlines to meet, we had the greatest resource of all; time. We used that time to go over the results of our work again and again until we achieved the greatest overall result possible. If you’d like to learn more about specifics, you can read the write-up of the color correction process here (We even have a “Night-Mode” version of the document)
Don’t feel like reading all that? Well, these images speak for themselves:
Spoiler:
Keep in mind that some general video filtering and aspect ratio correction was done as well to bring out the best in the video clarity, pushing it beyond what DVD is capable of. It would be a damn shame if the video encode was of low quality and hurt details, so we provided optimal settings to ensure viewers won’t miss a thing. While focused on our DBZ “Merge” project, this document covers these details pretty well
Audio
For Japanese audio, gone are the muffled sounds of the optical audio present on home releases. In its place you'll get high quality Broadcast Audio tracks captured, shared, cleaned, and synced by fans over the years. If you're unfamiliar with the home release audio problems and what the difference broadcast audio makes, check out an example video here.
If you're really interested in the history of why this is, this video offers a great explanation:
For fans of the English dub, that is also included and synced losslessly. For the first time ever (that we can tell), the original stereo Funimation dub has been synced to the DBOX release, using a mix of Hi-Fi VHS audio when available as well as DVD audio. Those familiar with our old release will still get to enjoy the 5.1 Surround Sound Funimation dub from the Blue Bricks DVD. Both of these tracks have the Japanese insert songs reintroduced or replaced with higher quality versions. We've also included English dubs outside of Funimation! The BLT dub is available on the first 13 episodes and Harmony Gold on the first five.
Due to size consideration and group priorities, we have not included any other language dubs. However, this is one reason why it was important for us to use Toei's DBOX video as a sync. It can be considered the most "universal" since studios would likely license this version from Toei themselves. This gives other fans around the world the chance to sync their preferred dub track to what we've made.
Subtitles
Generally satisfied with the official subtitles made by Clyde Mandelin, we've applied some small tweaks to ensure Toriyama's favorite puns are preserved as well as other minor corrections.
Our default subtitle track takes advantage of the Advanced SubStation Alpha format to create dynamic subtitles with the size, color, and font designed in a way to make it look like the signs are part of the video.
Spoiler:
Prefer more traditional subtitles? A simplified version of the translation is also available. If you only want these cool signs and listen to the English dub, we even have a subtitle track that only has these great signs. Speaking of the English dub, we synced and corrected a “Dubtitles” track. Subtitles that match exactly what is being said in the English Funimation Dub. For the final subs track, we even included Japanese Kanji fully synced from the Japanese Closed Caption rebroadcasts (if anyone is actually weeb enough to use it).
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FAQs
Let me take this time to answer some questions I anticipate people may have.
Q1. Why did you use the Dragon Boxes to Color Correct? Couldn’t you have used the (version you specifically purchased)?
A1. The Dragon Box version is the latest and complete version created by Toei animation for home release. As stated earlier, fans of other dub languages can use this version to sync their audio instead of syncing to a specific version created by Funimation. While the Saga Sets do look rather nice for the first 28 episodes, most episodes suffer from “crusty” video as a result of how media at the time was stored and encoded. It’s impossible to bring out true detail from a low quality source with acceptable colors, so we instead decided to improve the colors on the home release that had the best detail.
In addition, the Dragon Boxes do not suffer from Artificial Intelligence upscale artifacting that resulted from upscalers used in past home releases. If we had instead worked on something like the SelectaVision or AB Video releases, we would “lock in” AI upscale problems. When a better upscaler comes out in a few years, our work would become outdated at that point. Think about what we've actually created as a new video master that could one day be upscaled as well as or better than AB Video, though not necessarily by Seed of Might, with a better final result.
Q2. Why didn’t Seed of Might upscale this one? Surely it would look better in HD right? Bigger numbers in resolution means a better picture right?
A2. Most software upscalers tend to create decent results in single images but fall apart in motion. It’s not a coincidence that most upscales you see shared are only of still images or occasionally low-quality video that masks these issues. This criticism applies to the best current upscales with trained models that take time and decent processing power, so “easy” fan upscales where people say they will just “throw it in Topaz '' look even worse. As a group we feel that MPV with Spline36 accomplishes great upscaling with no detail destruction. People have viewed this video on large 4K TVs, and the real-time Spline36 upscale creates an incredibly good image.
Q3. OK that’s nice and all, but this project sounds pretty ambitious. I’ve seen tons of projects that go nowhere. When do you expect to finish all of this?
A3. Now. As in literally right now. It’s done. Enjoy.
