Info: Dragon Ball Z, and the Dragon Ball series in general... — Page 4

I don't see the point in combining the Dragon Box Z-hen with the Levels, apart from previews, or full authenticity on credits and titles.  Unless you mean audio - and I don't think the Levels' Japanese audio is actually different from the Dragon Box?

I released episodes 1-17 some time ago with Levels video source (except previews) and high quality broadcast audio.

If the Dragon Box and the Level sets use the same audio source, I'd bet the Level sets would sound just a little better coming from the Level sets because of being lossless.

By combining, I mean overlaying the details of both video sources (downscaling the Level sets to SD) to get the best of both worlds. There might be more detain in the Level sets in some scenes, and the Dragon Box on other scenes. Basically align the two sources and have them overlay each other, then make sure everything matches.

You have 1-17 with Level video and broadcast audio? I know I haven't finished the original Dragon Ball yet (currently up to but not including episode 77) but you got my attention. How did you get the broadcast audio? I thought kei17 had most of it locked up.

Can you PM me where I can find this awesome combination? If you can, can you please only do so if said combination has subs?

I got it from him years ago.  And yeah, it's got the DBox subs.  Should be on nyaa.

I have just finished episode 78. I’m going to take a break from the main series so I can see the four DB movies.

If someone said that episode 78 was the last episode of the whole franchise, I probably would have believed them, as it seemed like almost everything was resolved. It was pretty emotional seeing Oopa’s dad get raised to life, along with Grandpa Gohan’s brief appearence. Of course, as the series goes on, I’m sure it will get more epic, and resurrection-by-dragon-balls won’t make as much of an impact xD.

edit:

Just finished “Curse of the Blood Rubies” in Japanese. Honestly, it was a little rushed 😛

Apparently it is the only movie of the original DB to have a dub using the new Funi cast. I’m going to give that a try.

Am I right in saying that the Funi dubs for the other three DB movies share the same, um, “quality” as the actual series dub?

edit 2: Ermm, the voices sound better than the Funi series dub, but it isn’t very faithful to the subtitles. Having decent voices is nice, but if your translating something and it isn’t accurate to the source material and the bad translation isn’t popular enough to be considered informative to the fandom at large…

I stopped the dub at the 10 minute mark, btw.

So, one movie down. Three to go…before I watch…filler. 😛

edit 3: I finished the first two movies. I’m going to hold off on the other two until later, considering there are characters from episodes I haven’t watched yet.

I have finished episode 114. It’s amazing how silly the show was at the beginning and how serious it is at this point in time.

On another note, I tried registering for the Kanzenshuu forums, but I haven’t passed the manual activation. I wonder why…

I guess I’ll ask the questions I was going to ask there here.

At what point do the funimation dvds stop having macroblocking issues (As in, releases after a certain year? Or do all the dvds of a certain range have macroblocking?)? Are all of the “Big Green” dvds open matte? How is the quality of the “Big Green” dvds compared to the “Ultimate Uncut” 1-3 movies? Are there any good open matte releases of DB Movie 2 (most recent set has half the framerate. The older releases most likely have macroblocking. And of course, Dragon Box is cropped.) Which movies have no issue being open matte? Which of them have minor issues (only effect a couple scenes, and can be cropped or zoomed in as necessary)? Which of them have major issues (effects the vast majority of scenes) to the point that cropped is better? Last but not least, as bad as they are, do the “Big Green” and Speedy dubs of the movies and specials (not counting DBZ 1-3. Uncut Ocean wins in accuracy.) have moments where they are more accurate then the corresponding Funi dub?

Pretty sure all the Big Green DVDs are open matte.

I finished episode 132, and feel comfortable watching DB movie’s 3 and 4. Movie 3 seems to suffer from the same problem that Movie 1 does…warp speed pacing. Movie 2 was a little on the fast side as well, but the pacing is much better. I have yet to see movie 4 and episode 133 on…

edit: I think Movie 3 is actually worse than Movie 1. At least Movie 1 only adapted one saga (Emperor Pilaf saga). Movie 3 took portions of the Tournament Saga, the Red Ribbon Army Arc, and the Tien Shinhan Saga, put them in a blender, and called it a day.

edit 2: I’ve seen enough of Movie 4 to have an opinion on it. I like that it isn’t as rushed as Movie 1 is. There were some odd moments though, like Android #8 attacking Goku and then saying he hates fighting, Muten Roshi’s voice is weird, and some of the music is off. Also, Goku’s first Kamehameha is too big imo. Also, the General Blue of Movie 3 and the Red Ribbon Arc would never have let soldiers arrest him for his execution like his Movie 4 counterpart does. These complains may be nitpicks, but the inconsistency turns me off a little.

Movies 1-3 are consistent with each other, but 1 and 3 try to adapt previous plots and rush through them. Movie 2 uses a plot from the series as a base, but most of it is original. Movie 4 has a better pace than 1 and 3, and possibly to a lesser extent 2, but the inconsistencies with the main series makes it harder to enjoy then it should be. Then again, should I be this critical? It’s not like the LOTR movies are ultra faithful to the books. xD

So, grading the original DB movies, 2 and 4 are the good ones, 1 and 3 are the bad ones.

What is this, the Star Trek movie curse?

I’m almost finished with the wedding dress filler. Why did the anime writers think a sexist mountain should exist? 😆

For DBZ and DBGT, I’m going to follow the guide here, all in Japanese. Whatever decision I make after that depends on how well I can handle DBZ’s pacing.

Edit: aaaaaaaaaaaaand that’s a wrap for original DB.

I’ve seen a lot since my last post.

Good grief, episodes 284-286 should have been one episode. The Genki Dama/Spirit Bomb stuff was dragged out to the point where I was fast forwarding the vast majority of those episodes 😛

IMO the episode should have went with Vegeta asking everybody for everyone’s energy, almost everybody ignoring said request, then Mr. Satan asks almost immediately afterwards, rather than everything that happened in between.

Unpopular opinion coming up, but that scene was worse in pacing than the Freeza vs Goku battle. Even though it was much longer, at least most of the stuff going on there was interesting. With the Buu Saga’s climax though, you knew that Fat Buu couldn’t hold a candle to Kid Buu. I didn’t really care about what was going on in the background at that moment.

The fact that the Buu saga of Kai was inferior to regular Kai and probably didn’t even bother fixing this issue, even in the Japanese TV version, doesn’t help matters.

The Buu Saga is just ridiculous. Too long, and quite boring. My personal preference with Dragon Ball, is to just watch the whole TV series (DB-DBZ, in Japanese with English Sub; no movies), and stop after the Namek Arc ends (Ep. 107). The rest of the series just ruins everything that happened beforehand for me. Handing out Super Saiyans like candy, Goku isn’t special anymore, villains surpass the boundary of ridiculous, art style becomes quite ugly IMO, etc. But I guess that’s probably just me.

I don’t mind things being silly. I thought pretty much all of the Afterworld Tournament filler arc was awesome.

To me, the Buu saga was very uneven. I didn’t like the idea of Goten and Trunks being Super Saiyans. I probably would have only accepted them being SSJ1 only as Gotenks, and not allow them to reach SSJ2, let alone SSJ3. That said, Gotenks vs Super Buu is a hilariously awesome fight.
One scene I remember is when we see Buu lift people off the ground and turn them into candy, in a very stylized, cartoonish way, as if it was all harmless fun, and then we see the destruction, the devastation, the hopelessness. If the Buu saga wasn’t so silly, it probably would have been the darkest DBZ ever gotten, and in a way it still is.

The Great Saiyaman saga got old really fast.

As for the movies that I have seen (not counting Father of Goku or History of Trunks, both really good btw)…
Dead Zone and Tree of Might were both very good, but had rushed endings. World’s Strongest seems forgettable. Lord Slug managed to rip off both the King Piccolo saga and Tree of Might and manage to be worse than both of them. I didn’t like how Namekians can’t stand Human whistling, though it does give the Speedy dub one of its most memorable lines.

I thought Cooler’s second movie was better than the first. Super Android 13 is the worst of all of the dbz movies that I saw so far. Thankfully, Abridged redeems it. I loved the first half of the first Broly movie, but once it got to the fighting, it got boring quickly. Bojack Unchained was really good most of the time, but I didn’t like how the climax ripped off the climax of the Cell saga. Broly Second Coming is trash. Bio-Broly, while not the best DBZ film, is not the worst either. In fact, I thought it had the best fights out of the three Broly Films. Fusion Reborn felt just like the saga it was trying to imitate. It had unique and funny fights, and it had the same pacing issues that the Buu saga had. IIRC it had a better climax though.

I’m glad that DrDre’s color correction tool was mentioned. I was thinking that could be used for either the Dragon Box with an accurate color source (perhaps the Hong Kong VCDs?) or even Rock the Dragon with the color-accurate Pioneer singles.

About the first half of Rock the Dragon could be redone using Levels footage.

It would require a bit of hacking - I use Avisynth/Avspmod for all my editing which isn’t exactly a good tool for the job, and of course I don’t have the means to recreate the “WordArt” ep title cards. (Gimping out the text is another matter; if you’ve seen my encodes on nyaa, I’ve had little to no trouble doing that with the Funimation cards.)

With regards to the Rock the Dragon set, I was referring to the washed out, desaturated look to it. Maybe this wouldn’t require the color tool per se, but it would be nice if the colors in that set were matched to those of the original Pioneer DVDs. It’s not as imperative as color-correcting the Dragon Box to me though.

Looks like shots of Movies 10/11. A double feature, perhaps?

All this Ocean Z footage is giving me a headache. I just got new copies of a few episodes from a FOAF on IRC.

I lost my rebuilt ED, I think, so I’m going to have to redo that, and that’s going to be a pain. Once I do, though, I think it won’t be difficult to throw together a few test episodes, for the maybe 10 or 12 episodes where I think I have the whole episode, the recap, the preview, and a title card taken from the R1 singles (this is the magic).

I just released 3 episodes of Z on Nyaa.

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The extent of my DNR is a filter called MDegrain2.

Those names are not familiar. Someone linked me a Mega folder, but the vast majority of his rips were the exact same as I had, which I downloaded in 2011.

The three episodes I did were from the best cap source available at the time, one that had somewhat flickery colors, but was complete and slightly undercut, from Toonami UK.