GonbeFAN

I'd recommend watching Dragon Ball in Japanese. Then Dragon Ball Z in Japanese, or Dragon Ball Z Kai and Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters either in Japanese or English. The Final Chapters isn't officially translated in English yet however, so you might want to opt to watch DBZ episodes 200-291 in Japanese instead of The Final Chapters.

Dragon Ball GT isn't based on the manga, and is completely ignored by the new TV series sequel Dragon Ball Super, but if you want to watch it, I recommend either the Japanese version or the Blue Water dub.

Character names tend to be more or less the same. The hugest terminology differences lie with attack technique names, but honestly those tend to be obvious and shouldn't stop anyone from enjoying the series.

The English subtitles for the Japanese version included with Funimation's official home video releases are good stuff.

I'm not the greatest avisynth wizard/witch/whatever, but here's a quick attempt in avisynth:

changefps("ntsc_film")#29.97 -> 23.976 from a hardblended source

aaa.aaa#reduces jaggies

SmoothD2(quant=4, num_shift=3, Matrix=8, Qtype=4, ZW=0)#deblocking

Do mind that my usage of aaa seems to make it darker without that being the intention, you might want to use daa or daa.daa instead. Should be looked into. Unfortunately (some of the) ex-jaggy parts now look as if they're dancing. :S

There probably is a better way of converting this unfortunately hardblended source to 23.976, the method I used keeps blended frames. Not sure if changefps("ntsc_film") or TFM.TDecimate wpuld do a better job here (you probably don't even need to use TFM on this as nothing in the source probably doesn't look interlaced, though MediaInfo tells me this is interlaced?), though the result is very likely to be the same with both filters because of the nature of this source. It might be better to just leave the framerate as it is in order to not possibly lose frames that should be kept. x.x

And of course mandatory deblocking because this is has noticeable macroblocking at parts. This does make this thing even smoother though, which is an unfortunate side-effect. Settings might need to be tweaked.

TL;DR: With this filtering it looks less jaggy and blocky, but also unfortunately smoother and formerly jaggy parts now look as if they're dancing. I'm sure someone else would be able to make a much better and hopefully less destructive filterchain. Though keep in mind only so much can be done with a bad source like this (DVD is terribly encoded, the source got seriously messed up in the process). Also feel free to correct any possible faults here.

Pretty sure that's a problem caused by the digital processing they did. Looks like they did a bad job of deinterlacing/IVTCing their source. Such issues can arise when watching or transcoding interlaced sources, but seems like here it's done by the DVD publishing company. Best you could do is making the issue less bad by filtering in avisynth, but the proper method of going about this would be working from source files you don't have access to. :/

I'll be best be able to judge it with a screenshot during a not too dark scene.

I'll be able to better judge how well it's removable when I see (a) screenshot(s). To make the actual logo mask, the video source file is required though, at the original resolution and without any quality loss and such; so preferably a cut, but non re-encoded file. About 15 minutes of footage tends to do the job, and if there's places in there where the screen is completely pure black, that helps a lot too.

I'm one of the people who provides Molly with such logo masks, if you need help with it. ^_^

EDIT: Here's a sample (sorry, no comparison :<) of delogo'd ITV4 Batman I had handy. The ITV4 logo was at the top left corner. http://imgur.com/a/IL2gd (Ignore the replaced FOX bumper.) The less grain and less macroblocking there is, the better it works. Another important factors are 1) how and with what settings the delogo mask was made and 2) the opaqueness/transparency and the colours in the logo.

*BUMP*

So, while ITV4 has (temporarily ?) stopped airing them for quite a while now and unfortunately there are way too many episodes I haven't capped.

I have however been recording it from the American channel Me-TV via a friend's capture box (no, not Molly, someone else) — from a quick look, these seem to be quite better quality than the ITV4 recordings, because of the higher bitrate and they should be mostly delogoable except for the few first and last seconds, which I guess could patch with a different source.

Also someone contacted me via PM a while back saying that they have capped quite a bunch of episodes from ITV4. Along with the 'Studio Master' VHS masters that have recently been uploaded, I might eventually start making HQ uncut hacks? Now, to just find myself the motivation and time to do so. :)

I remember seeing the movie on the TV channel 2BE two years ago. I didn't record that, but...

1) It probably wasn't this 'Sci-fi TV cut' you speak of, anyway

2) Would have Dutch hardsubs

3) I only had analog TV back then, so it would've been a letterboxed DVD capture gone through analog

Though I have no idea what this specific TV cut actually is,

maybe I might remember if it had the differences?

And obviously I have no idea how it even looks like on the official DVD.

If this ever reruns again on 2BE, I might be able to record it digitally,

and now the channel is also in H264. (which is a huge improvement over

the old MPEG2 stream, because it being low bitrate)

Though I'd need to be reminded, since I don't go check their

TV guide that often. It would be anamorphic, but it would

be hardsubbed in Dutch and not in HD, and like I said,

it probably isn't this TV cut you're looking for.

drngr said:

ilovewaterslides said:

drngr said:

Any interest in this still?

 

BTTF is DNR-free on Shaw on Demand and I can record it over HDMI, but I'm not sure if it will be better or worse than the H264 Russian capture. This is just MPEG-2 source.

 

 So, did you have the chance to capture it recently?

I need some tech support before I can.

The device I am using is the BlackMagic Design HyperDeck Shuttle 2. The damned 10-bit uncompressed QuickTime files won't play on Windows for me. Error message about a component missing.

What player are you using? The latest version of CCCP, mplayer, mplayer2 or even VLC might work? Though I kinda have the feeling that all you're lacking is just a certain codec. Like ilovewaterslides said, upload a short sample for us would help a lot.

Joral said:

Somewhat offtopic:

 

I don't suppose there's an HD version of uncropped version of entire trilogy, is there?

Would love to have that one in HD as I grew up watching it and whenever I see widescreen version I just can't help but feel constantly that stuff is missing...

 

Granted, in some shots you actually get to see more of the picture in widescreen, but in most you end up losing more than you gain.

 

Here are some comparison pics:

[WHOLE BUNCH OF PIC URLS]

To make the difference even clearer, I made this comparison:

http://i.imgur.com/SHPTktT.jpg

To me this cropping feels like the cropping in the Dragon Ball Z Digitally Remastered 'orange bricks', if anyone here is familiar with them; losing a whole amount of picture from the top and bottom and gaining barely any on the sides. I've gotta agree with you that a proper decent quality HD fullscreen remaster from proper filmstock (without over-the-top DVNR for the love of all that's good) would be a huge improvement over the HDTV and BD masters. Though for now it seems that the HDTV one is the best for now.

At least these movies are still perfectly watchable in widescreen, though I'd prefer more picture any day.

I'm very much interested in any restorations of any Mad Max movies. Though I don't have much material myself. All I have is PAL DVDs of 'Mad Max' and 'The Road Warrior'. If I remember correctly the first movie's DVD had two English audio tracks, an en_AUS and an en_US one. The 2nd movie's one just has one English audio track though. Both have some other audio tracks too iirc. The Road Warrior DVD also starts with some old Warner logo and it has a "The Road Warrior" title card, but no "Mad Max 2" one it seems? Are there multiple English tracks for this movie and how rare are these tracks? Am I fair to assume that the two DVDs I have don't contain any rarities at all? The 2nd movie's DVD has no extras, and I think neither does my DVD of the 1st movie.

Have some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/zvjT4 (Excuse me for not aspect ratio correcting these)

kepardi said:

Guys, supposedly the uncut version airs every summer at Super RTL. They list running time as 75min (which would mean ~79min in non-PAL - additional 10 minutes of footage). Anyone here see the channel so they could record it this summer?

I think I actually have that TV channel. Though would they still air it in 2013? Someone please PM me or something if they will with details of when they will broadcast it again and I'll see if I can record it for you folks.

You never may know...

Mass5160 said:

GnobeFan, those screenshots look fantastic, much better than anything I managed to cough up haha. I believe the old FOX logo is featured somewhere on the "Holy Batmania" DVD set, so if you have that, it might be worth checking out. I've got a copy somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where it is.

Just for the record, here is the "Maybe Now" song which is usually missing from "Scat Darn Catwoman"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRvF5VABOAo

Far as I know, it's missing from ALL TV versions, this is the only major cut to itv 4 broadcasts though.

I don't have that DVD which you're speaking of, unfortunately.

If anyone could cut that logo in .VOB format and

send it to me via PM, that'd be awesome.

Wow, thank you very much.

Yet another old dub that got rescued.

I've finally solved the issue I had when capping and now my

caps should now be 100% superior to ITV4 caps via terrestial.

But since those airings are apparently not uncut, I'd be willing

to hack it with the best uncut footage available.

If anyone has masters which are more uncut,

like those 'Studio Masters' VHS tapes, or digital transfers

(for example: DVD transfers), please contact me.

Good quality rip of the old FOX logo would also be appreciated.

For screenshots to see the picture quality and how

well my delogo script works: http://imgur.com/a/IL2gd

fleggett said:

I'm probably going to get in heaps of (technical) trouble for this, but I also have the box set.  I actually completely forgot that it came with several of the Streamline dubs as the second audio track.  Be warned that the Streamline track is in mono.

The only way I have to capture the audio is to run it to my DVD-recorder.  I'll have to double-check, but I think I'm running optical out to the recorder (if that makes any difference).

Probably not the best solution, but there you have it.  Oh, my LD player is a CLD-R7G.  A thing of beauty.

Even a capture via a DVD recorder would do in my opinion.

The audio quality probably isn't that good anyhow. And then

at least we'd have something. I obviously would prefer something

better, but I'd already be glad if there was a lower quality capture out.

I recommend getting some GUI for mplayer or even just good ol' VLC.

Admittedly, VLC isn't the best thing in town, but it certainly is a huge

improvement over friggin' QuickTime Player. I was gonna recommend

CCCP and MPCHC (which comes with CCCP), but it seems you use Mac OS X.

So anyway, that might fix your problem.

I'm the friend Molly meant. And about macroblocks, I have no idea what you mean.

There really shouldn't be anything that bad surely.

I think you might just be doing something wrong.

Unless you think some of the intact noise are macroblocks?

Or perhaps your player is poorly upscaling when playing in full screen?

Which can happen if you don't have some certain DirectX updates installed,

which CCCP should nag you about when installing that codec pack.

At any rate, it should just look like this:

http://i50.tinypic.com/20rlbbs.png