Info & Help: Dragon Ball "Best of Breed" hybrid... maybe

I’m kind-of clumsy at this color correcting bit.

On one hand, the R1s (“Blue Brick”) seem to have more or less the right colors from the 80s and are sharper, while the R2s are very much shifted to green (Z and GT have this shift on the R2s as well; GT even has it on the R1s).  On the other hand, the R2s (“Dragon Box”) have more detail and more image, plus better audio; and it is possible to get a R1-like look (minus the colors) out of the R2s if you know what you’re doing.

My attempt to color correct the R2s was a disaster, and I’d like to try to improve it before I try to restart my project in earnest, which originally was just merging crudely the old pre-Brick R4 and R1 singles with the R2 video and audio.

As you see…I screwed up hard.

Man, DragonBall fans are a creative breed. Someone's always trying to fix something (and, IMO, rightfully so.) I wish you the best on this project.

It would be interesting to see the FUNi colors applied to the DragonBox, but I think a middle ground would be a better approach. I've always felt the blue bricks were a tad too yellow... and there's all sorts of video artifacts (rainbowing etc.) that take away from the quality whether it's correct or not.

Yeah, I know about the rainbowing.

The closest we got to perfection was the Z 1-34 (and 35-39 on xbox live).

I have original broadcast audio of 2-17, it sounds great, better than the R2Js, and almost as good as DBK...what happened to Toei and Fuji's copies?

^Toei literally threw them out. Standard practice of theirs at the time.

Mind sharing your sources on the broadcast audio? I know the folks on Daizex who have 'em tend to keep it to themselves unless they attempt to offer their 1st-run tapes to Toei or FUNimation.

Too bad the Levels sets were canceled and we're getting a widescreen blu-ray set instead :/

Yeah, I got it from someone who got it from someone else, and was asked to keep the flacs close to the vest.  I think GonbeFAN was my proxy, but he went through someone else too.  (I'm not at liberty to say who the other people were, but I think they might both be from Daizex too.)

And Daizex, well... they're a bit uptight about these sorts of things (they cost us a chance of getting the AB dub of Blood Rubies), in addition to the mentality I see among the fandom that Toei's colors must be right, even if they're OBVIOUSLY wrong.  Because Toei...or something like that.

And DBZ... yeesh.  At least DB and DBGT get some respect, while Z keeps getting mangled and mangled and mangled.

I own the Blue Brick set.

There's rainbowing?! Was it taken from a composite source?

Unlike Z, FUNimation never received film masters for that show.  The blue bricks are cleaned up digibeta masters - with mixed success.  They're grain-scrubbed, which results in a bit of blurriness, but in some cases it does look better than their two-disc sets from beforehand (if you're not a stickler about the Japanese title cards.)

In fact I think FUNimation had to request film for Z, I'm pretty sure their originalsingles came from tapes too...

bkev said:

Unlike Z, FUNimation never received film masters for that show.  The blue bricks are cleaned up digibeta masters - with mixed success.  They're grain-scrubbed, which results in a bit of blurriness, but in some cases it does look better than their two-disc sets from beforehand (if you're not a stickler about the Japanese title cards.)

In fact I think FUNimation had to request film for Z, I'm pretty sure their originalsingles came from tapes too...

Man... yuck...

FUNimation always seems to fuck up Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z releases.

Even when they get it right, they get it wrong.

The blue bricks are good enough.  I have pretty low standards for a cartoon from the cheapest animation studio still around.

As long as it's uncut and 4:3 I'm satisfied.  Strangest thing to me is when streaming the show on their website the sources seem to be completely different depending on what language you choose!  Cropping is equal, but the dub video track looks far - far - superior.  If you watch the sub, the colors (especially red, which is already a problem with their masters) bleed like crazy and the blacks get even more crushed.  I have no possible explanation for this, and my attempts to take screenshots seem to be a lost cause.

Are you still interested in working on this, Molly?

Sure.  I just don't know if I have the knowhow to do it justice.

I've got ISOs on hand for the entire series R1 "Blue Brick" and R2 (doesn't matter the edition, the only diff is the menus).

A friend suggested trying to procure the R4AU for eps 1-13 as he says they may be the best source.  He's also got at least one episode original broadcast audio, dunno if he'd be able to get more.

Molly said:

Sure.  I just don't know if I have the knowhow to do it justice.

We should probably come up with a list of what needs to be done and what our priorities are.

I'm mostly interested in getting each episode as close to its original Japanese broadcast as possible.

What's wrong with the "Blue Brick"s again? I can remember:

  1. No Japanese title cards

  2. No next episode previews

  3. First opening and second closing animation only

  4. Poor quality Japanese mono audio

If we're OK with the PQ of the "Blue Brick"s, then fixing #1-3 is as easy as taking the missing bits from the R2 Dragon Ball Dragon Box release and color-correcting them to be consistent with the colors on the "Blue Brick"s.

Fixing #4 is more difficult, since we'd need to get our hands on the broadcast audio.

Rainbowing.  Overzooming.  They're sharper than the R2s but that can somewhat be remedied on the R2s with LimitedSharpenFaster and/or FastLineDarken, I think.  But the R2s have the ugly teal shift.

ETA:

Puto, a friend of mine who helps me with my sub projects, says the R1 source has a terrible problem with color bleeding on account of the source material.  This affects all Funi-based releases except for, for some reason as I mentioned, the R4s of 1-13 which come from a different source and have minimal filtering.

Molly said:

Rainbowing.  Overzooming.

How bad?

Molly said:

But the R2s have the ugly teal shift.

Can you post some full size sample frames?

here is a good example of the cropping from the opening.  Personally, it's really only noticeable because I've been told there's something missing; otherwise, the framing is tight but acceptable.

The real problem is the inconsistency of their masters.  Some parts of the series look great, and others have terrible oversaturation problems with reds out of control.  Even the saga sets had this problem.  Really, the only reason I consider the dragonbox better than these sets is the lack of zooming and having everything (as in, the multiple endings etc.)

I noticed last night that the Dragon Ball stream on Hulu has Japanese title cards *and* English subtitles (burned-in, unfortunately). o_O

bkev said:

here is a good example of the cropping from the opening.  Personally, it's really only noticeable because I've been told there's something missing; otherwise, the framing is tight but acceptable.

Are the R4 DVDs taken from the same master? The colors looks really close in that sample; identical, perhaps.

Madman's R4 sets are taken from the same master as the original saga sets that came out in R1.  And the "banana brick" is from Manga Entertainment's R2 release of the DB season sets, which just started.  I would have pulled from R1 but this was the first comparison pic I could find, and really, they are essentially identical

I do have some original broadcast audio for Z, as well as improved audio (R3TW and Tokyo MX) for some of GT.

Also I have some old Animax rips of GT.  When a 96 kbps stereo mp3 is better than the 448 kbps dual-mono AC3 on the official DVD...

I now have access to extremely robust professional color matching software. Can someone please post some {Blue Brick, Dragon Box} frame pairs in PNG?

I'll see what I can find, but my stash of dvdisos isn't exactly easy to seek through :/.

Anyway, here's one of the ones that stood out as particularly bad (keeping in mind, for some reason I'm unable to get the image insert dialog to show up):

R1: https://i.imgur.com/gvDgF6h.png
R2: https://i.imgur.com/XeyNCc9.png

This is actually the exact same frame, the first shot of the final episode after the OP.

Molly said:

and 35-39 on xbox live

I've been trying to track these down. Have they been deDRM'd yet?

FWIW, I'm only really interested in episode 35.

I've got a rip on my other computer, but the computer has a dead cpu fan that needs to be replaced first.  It went through the analog hole in component.