The News Thread (for news that does not need a thread)

Funimation had some news to show off lately:

- English dub cast for Free! Eternal Summer will be revealed soon.
- Home video rights confirmed for Ping Pong the Animation; English dub and Blu-ray/DVD also announced in addition to Summer 2015 release date
- Home video rights confirmed for Tokyo Ravens; English dub and Blu-ray/DVD also announced in addition to March 17 2015 release date for Part 1 (Summer 2015 for Part 2)
- Home video rights confirmed for Puchimas! -Petit Idolm@ster-; Japanese language with English subtitles and DVD only in addition to 2015 release date for Season 1 (Season 2 sometime after)
 
NormanicGrav said:
SnowWolf said:
Voice Actor: Dragon Ball Z Kai's Ocean Dub Coming Soon
Dragon Ball Kai Ocean Dub – Richard Ian Cox is Goku

This ought to be interesting. :?
Click to expand...

Indeed, I wonder how Funimation is reacting to this.

----

In other news, A Certain Magical Index the Movie: Miracle of Endymion will be out from Funimation on January 15th as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, Amazon US pre-order reveals.

----

There's something I should probably point out sooner than later (since the news was quite recent). As you all know Sailor Moon is about to get released as a combo pack and standard DVD release from Viz Media over in North America [Region A/1 only based on specs]. The set was released early for Rightstuf buyers and there has been some mixed responses from quite literally everyone in terms of the video quality. The Blu-rays were obviously going to be an in-house upscale because there's no Blu-ray release/master in Japan, but the biggest problem that everyone has pointed out is the DVD quality - it's bad.

Here's a comparison, left picture is the German/Italian/Japanese DVD release and the right picture is from Viz Media:

xiD0s3J.png
H99p9Ys.png

Fandom Post User said:
The Viz DVDs on the other hand, on top of all the ghosting and noise reduction, have forgot to remove the black bars from their 16x9 master and added an anamorphic flag.

So instead of using 720x480 resolution like the previous DVDs, they instead only use 540x480. Anyone watching on an HDTV may not notice since the anamorphic flag will stretch the image to the proper proportions, but anyone using a CRT (and if they're only buying the DVD set, they may very well be), will have these black bars on the left and right of the image, and the anamorphic flag will introduce black bars top and bottom as well.
Click to expand...

Another comparison on the DVD quality.

The authoring was handled by Subatomic Digital - the same group who handled Gargantia and Inuyasha (the one with the 'awful interlaced quality').

ANN will be hosting a podcast with the producer to address these issues next week:
Tweet 1
Supposed to get Sailor Moon set in today or tomorrow. Arranging podcast next week with producer. Will solicit questions next week.
Tweet 2
I told Viz that the questions from both me and the audience will largely be about video issues. They asked for links to the screenshots.
Click to expand...

Fandom Post user Library-chan has a list of the specs used for the Blu-ray release.
Click to expand...



That's the DVD. Surely the Bluray is not that bad?

If the Bluray is just as bad, that's another release I can take off my to buy list.
 
cyborg 002 said:
That's the DVD. Surely the Bluray is not that bad?

If the Bluray is just as bad, that's another release I can take off my to buy list.
Click to expand...
The DVD is just Viz's BD Master downscaled. Going by the thread on TFP the BD isn't entirely awful, but it's far from good.
Someone described it as "a subpar upscale filled with DNR & EE from hell"
 
Viz Media made a blog post about the Sailor Moon release via Neon Alley. There's screenshot comparisons on the blog.

To create the Sailor Moon Blu-rays, we used the masters used to create the 2009 Japanese DVD sets. To make the footage for Blu-ray, a proprietary process was used consisting of clean format conversion, inverse telecine to return the source to its native framerate, correction of inherent alieasing issues and the sharpest SD to HD conversion possible. After this, Pillarboxing was added to maintain the 4:3 original aspect ratio of the footage and then it was processed to a high bitrate mezzainine encode for Blu-ray production. After these correct combinations were worked out, the final product was processed.

These are completely different masters than what was used for the 2003 North American DVD releases that many fans have in their collection. Let’s take a look at the change using episode 2 as an example. These shots compare the 2009 master to the North American Blu-ray releases coming out tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Quite different, right? Of course, due to the materials and the fact that each episode is different, there’s still some minor imperfections and every episode will have some small variations. In handling the series as carefully as possible, no additional processing was done. For those of you getting the DVD only releases, you’ll also notice the difference in the picture compared to previous DVDs available in North America. However, we will be omitting pillarboxing on the Sailor Moon DVD sets going forward. The Blu-rays will still have them, though.
Click to expand...
 
That's ether arrogence or upper management talking (Including Toei because let's face it, if Japan doesn't have it's snozz shoved into proceedings then, suddenly it's funked up market will disaper in a cloud of baka gaijin dvds being bought instead of their glorious (overpriced) tat).

There's no way, given the VOD Version of the same files are perfectly fine, that they think that this is acceptable.

And, given that Sailor Moon has no BR Master to speak of (outside the film and I'm sure Toei would rather go bankrupt than hand that over) the inclsion of a BR format is just dumb.
 
ConanThe3rd said:
That's ether arrogence or upper management talking (Including Toei because let's face it, if Japan doesn't have it's snozz shoved into proceedings then, suddenly it's funked up market will disaper in a cloud of baka gaijin dvds being bought instead of their glorious (overpriced) tat).

There's no way, given the VOD Version of the same files are perfectly fine, that they think that this is acceptable.

And, given that Sailor Moon has no BR Master to speak of (outside the film and I'm sure Toei would rather go bankrupt than hand that over) the inclsion of a BR format is just dumb.
Click to expand...

I remember reading somewhere that Italian Sailor Moon DVDs had better picture quality than the US DVD (and potentially Blu-rays) and English Speaking Areas could not receive those assets due to 'some sort of licensing agreement/disbute' with TOEI.

Unfortunately I've lost the exact link =(
 
NormanicGrav said:
Manga said on Facebook that they have Seasons 1-7 of Yu-Gi-Oh!

The reason I bring this up is that New Video Group (the US distributor for Yu-Gi-Oh!) released them as five different seasons. Perhaps there's more to this than we know? I know NVG are releasing 5D's, GX and Zexal on DVD.
Click to expand...

Could be a typo OR they are releasing it differently to the US release (i.e. spread out the episodes across more disc which results in more seasons).

OR MangaUK have the rights to the side-quest series (Capsule Monsters) ?!
 
My guess is that Manga UK might be planning for their release of Yu-Gi-Oh! to give each of the series' major story arcs its own volume, which would mean something like:

Volume 1: Duelist Kingdom (1-49)
Volume 2: Battle City Part 1 (50-97)
Volume 3: Virtual World (98-121)
Volume 4: Battle City Part 2 (122-144)
Volume 5: Waking the Dragons (145-184)
Volume 6: Grand Championship (185-198)
Volume 7: Dawn of the Duel (199-224)

If so, then the largest volume would be volume 1 (49 episodes), while the shortest would be volume 6 (13 episodes).
 
Joshawott said:
My guess is that Manga UK might be planning for their release of Yu-Gi-Oh! to give each of the series' major story arcs its own volume, which would mean something like:

Volume 1: Duelist Kingdom (1-49)
Volume 2: Battle City Part 1 (50-97)
Volume 3: Virtual World (98-121)
Volume 4: Battle City Part 2 (122-144)
Volume 5: Waking the Dragons (145-184)
Volume 6: Grand Championship (185-198)
Volume 7: Dawn of the Duel (199-224)

If so, then the largest volume would be volume 1 (49 episodes), while the shortest would be volume 6 (13 episodes).
Click to expand...

I'll double check with Manga HQ about this and get back to you guys accordingly. If memory serves I'm remember being told that it will be over 5 "sets" (for want of a better word).
 
Back
Top