Thanks very much for that review. I was wondering when this was going to get released. I’m rather disappointed by the news honestly. I was hoping it would have been closer to the French masters. I already own the UK set, so now I’m wondering what to do. I’d certainly appreciate the NTSC, but with the image itself looking no better, I wonder if it’s worth the money. It sounds like your presentation will likely be the best presentation when it is finished. I have a 55" 4k TV, and a good DVD can still look outstanding on it upscaled. More compressed videos like avi can definitely be more of an issue for my TV, with compression artifacts being much more apparent. Since you are of course re-encoding these, I wonder how much compression will factor in?
If they had used the French masters I would have pounced on this official release.
I was hoping more that it would offer more to my project. My remaster at this point is probably as good as it’s going to look. The scenes that come from the UK DVD I enhanced, but still stand out pretty bad compared to the sharpness of the French and Japanese DVD masters.
My rips are m4v and ripped in Handbrake, most approximately at 600-800MB. I don’t notice any differences, whatever loss is minimal and whatever problems on my videos are also present on the DVD. The reason they’re not MPEG, I don’t know why but most free rippers for Mac are such a pain and don’t offer MPEG as a ripping option. I’ve previously had them as avi’s and later converted to mp4 when I had to switch from Windows to Mac. As my eye for quality and better understanding of framerates evolved when working on this, I re-ripped them back in 2015. If you’d like, I can send you the raw MPEG 8 minute test render I did of episode 1 last year to see if it holds up for you. Just PM me for it.