Molly

I’m back after years…just had too much going on. (Didn’t help that I’ve moved a few times, upgraded my rig a few times, and had to do some major damage control after response to my release of a version of DBZ with upgraded audio was taken…not very kindly by a few people who had been circulating the audio for years and making bank on it, and now I had killed their golden goose. Blecch.)

This is something I’ve been working on on and off for a while, and now it’s in the beta testing phase, after which I intend to release it on Nyaasi (it’s actually already available, but for obvious reasons I am not going to link to it here). It’s…somewhere in between a preservation and a fan edit, so it’s a bit of a mutant freak. There’s actually a lot going on here.

For the earliest episodes I rolled back some of the “Harding” censorship that was done because of the “Porygon Incident.” (There is an HD remaster of the first episode, and for some reason ONLY the first episode, and this also has some of the Harding edits dialled down. I utilize that as much as I could.) When 4KIDS got the series, these edits had already been done (as evidenced by Japanese VHS rips from the time), but I still decided to roll them back.

I attempted to dial back the “dejapanization” a bit too. While some of the paint edits (particularly those regarding the alteration of place names) have been kept, I restored a lot of incidental Japanese text. A lot of these edits were very poorly done, but it was 1998.

Several seasons were released to home video with the DVDs absolutely crammed. Who puts 12 episodes of a series on a single DVD?! As a result, a large portion of the earlier part of the series has been replaced with HDTV footage from Japan (the station logos have been filtered out; this works remarkably well with the station in question).

A few cut shots were restored. In a couple cases these cuts were exclusive to the United States and could be restored with the Australian home video release (e.g., Ash walking around the city during “Fire and Ice”, or the infamous Prima shot in “The Mandarin Island Miss Match”), but in other cases (e.g., the weird take when the Pokédex reveals the source of Psyduck’s problems in “Hypno’s Naptime”, or the after-credits shot in “MegaEvolution II”) the restoration was made from Japanese.

Often the best source for video was non-English. “Sinnoh League Victors” had its video sourced from a Portuguese WEBDL; this was effectively an official remastering, since Portugal originally got a cropped SD release and this was an uncropped HD release! But the audio was taken from the US DVDs.

Streaming services seem to invariably have the more heavily edited European cut of “Black and White”, so I had to go and hand-edit a lot of things back down (there are very few edits in the US cut beyond title cards, eyecatches and credits).

There were a couple episodes with mastering errors, in particular, “Ariados Amigos” which appears to have had its fields desynched resulting in a weird blur over the whole episode, and “The Brockster Is In” which was mistakenly derived from an SD source instead of an HD source, and had to be re-derived from a Japanese TV rip.

In some places I created new endings based on the Japanese versions, but using the American themes.

The early theatrical shorts which had their endings removed from the US releases had them reinstated, and I am currently in the process of either translating, or procuring translations for, the songs in these segments.

Movie 6 (“Jirachi Wish-Maker”) leaves half the ending theme in Japanese. A friend of mine already translated this song for a different project and I’ve integrated his translation into the release.

I added a bunch of text to the last 3 seasons to bring it more in line with the Japanese version.

I created English textless openings and closings for movies 5 onward. (Can’t do that for earlier; they aren’t available.)

I remastered the “lost” episode “Beauty and the Beach”, which was only aired in English to my knowledge once (some sources claim twice) and never released to video. I de-censored the “What Kind of Pokémon Are You?” segment (when it was finally released on DVD, they changed a couple shots to avoid the phrase “kick your grass”). drfsupercenter acquired a number of discarded digibetas with Pokémon episodes, which I made use of for most of the available episodes and recycled some footage for the rest of their respective seasons; he also provided no-lyric versions of the Karaokémon segments, which I cut together to get rid of station bugs. Several title cards are redrawn, eliminating video/audio inconsistencies, spelling errors, and other problems.

A lot of the changes are very subtle and probably pointless to all but the most hardcore fan.

My extent of knowledge was that I’d heard of Iznogoud in passing, that’s all. 😦

You can cut a file in pieces and apply filters to them separately, then put them back together with a script.

Also, there’s a way to use Virtual Dub filters in Avisynth.

That’s where Avisynth comes in. XD

The credits have obviously been retypeset, though they made at least a decent attempt at matching the old credits.

For the record, most of my DB* knowledge is thirdhand.

Not that I haven’t had a lot of involvement; if the handle “WinxBloom1980” or the tags “Baaro” and “DragonTeam” ring a bell…

That’s because the Funi releases for GT are based on the same masters as the R2s, with incorrect colors.

Anyone happen to have a preview for the episode “Gohan Attacks” (from “Fighting Power… One Million?”) ?

I currently have two TV sources for the episodes in that general area (one from Toonami UK which came from the big tv-rip torrent, one from Cartoon Network US which came from the spleen). Both are missing the preview. Between the two sources, I can find all the recaps and previews in that general area.

Thanks in advance.

The Salkind Superman movies were significantly expanded for TV broadcast, for example.

That’s so Helvetica it hurts. XD Generic font of generic…can’t get any more generic-looking than that.

Depends on how the software is set up to handle the m2v data; whether it is set to telecine or not.

The Dragon Boxes are progressive.

A friend is attempting to fix the Funi 30ANIV BluRays of Z, and he’ll prolly hand them off to me to encode. (Which means I’ll prolly do the same voodoo I did with the Levels.)

Might only be worth 480, he suggested (because the processing he’s using to mitigate the filter damage does include some blurring), though his experiments have been at 720.

Detective Conan has the same issue (upscaled LD masters), but from what I understand that’s not TMS’s fault (since they themselves DO have HD remasters) but the BluRay distributor.

Could be A, could be B.

As far as Sailor Moon goes, Madman is said to have (for at least the first season) gotten Dynit’s masters and synched up the Viz resources to them. Dynit’s release (aka the R2IT) is pretty much the platinum-iridium standard for the series.

TMS has their issues but they’re plenty competent enough with their remasters. (Lupin III, Magic Knight Rayearth)

Would replacing the last 4 lines with ColorMatrix(“Rec.601->Rec.709”) be of any use?

Whether they lost them or conveniently forgot where they were, the matter is the same, as it’s not out there. But supposedly they went back to an earlier master of FotNS, AFTER they made digital HD masters. Film was the main manner of storage for animation in the earlier era, which is why Funi has, well, film of DBZ.

Also, I was the one who released that big DBZ torrent.

Far as I know, SM’s fine on all sources, although there’s issues with the upscaler Viz used (leading Madman to use Dynit masters instead for the first 2 or 3 seasons). The R4AUs are NTSC.

We know that film sources for these series have existed - in addition to the fact that Funi does have DBZ in that format and has done multiple remasters in 1080p, I’m aware that some episodes of various series did manage to leak out. So the idea that at least something might be out there in the hands of a friendly preservationist isn’t completely out in left field.

They use Q-TEC FORS. Q-TEC upscaling is hideous (though FORS isn’t as bad as their old system).

I use nnedi3_rpow2 to upscale - this is necessary when mixing DVD source with HDTV as I occasionally need to do to correct Animax’s Detective Conan airings. But that’s pretty much beside the point - I’m talking about trying to acquire actual 720 or 1080 source, not fake HD made from SD sources.

That’s basically what Toei’s already doing, isn’t it?

So apparently sometime in the past 15 years or so Toei seems to have lost the masters (except for digibetas) for all their classic anime (Saint Seiya/Knights of the Zodiac, Dragon Ball (TOS, Z and GT), Sailor Moon, Fist of the North Star, Galaxy Express 999 etc.) and is upscaling everything.

I really hope film masters of most of these will turn up. Obviously we know Funimation has such masters for DBZ and did a good job with the first 39 episodes before they decided to cheap out on the rest. It looks like it may well be up to the fans to try to get any of this stuff preserved in better than 480i.

I’ve described the Mandela Effect elsewhere.

What it is in most cases (I believe) is people filling their faulty memories with other people’s faulty memories.

What a lot of people are remembering, in the case of Star Wars, is probably the novelization.

I’m aware, I subtitled that episode myself years ago (it’s the source for a running gag in my circles involving the phrase “good arms” - mistranslation of 腕がいい). I used dub titles to avoid confusion or uncertainty.

Apparently even the Aitwo segment exists in CG and non-CG variants (the latter on the “Mewtwo Returns” R1 and PAL DVDs). I only heard THAT recently.

If you extrapolate the original airdates, you can manage to place the episodes known in English as “PRINCESS VS. PRINCESS” and “The Purr-fect Hero” such that they would have aired on March 3 and May 5 of 1998, respectively. I can’t remember exactly how I did this but it involves putting “Holiday Hi-Jynx”, “Snow Way Out” and “Pikachu’s Goodbye” in that exact order (even though the last of these was supposedly created to replace episode 38). The information in the Mewtwo LD should be able to point you in the right direction.

I believe the VHS version actually has a different ED than my TV version. I want to say the one on the tape is “Pocket ni Fantasy” and the one on TV is “Nyarth no uta”.

I can hotlink my MP4 privately, but not here (forum rules).

We captured them from Kids Station years ago and I have access to transport streams. They’ve got logos, of course, but it’s possible to filter them out pretty well, as the MP4s on my server which I encoded way back then have the logo rather cleanly removed.

I don’t know if better than that can be done.