AUS DvD's

Rosencrantz

Rosencrantz

Dragon Knight
I've been hoping that Karin would be re-released in the US but as Funi said not by us and no-one else has said they are releasing i'm now looking at the fairly recent region 4 Australian release.

What i'm wondering is how do their DvD stack up versus region 1?

I keep finding all my region 1 DvD's suffer from poor encoding with varying amounts of noise/jagged lines when watching compared to the near perfect R2 stuff I have.

I assume this is down to PAL vs NTSC?

Anyone have any R4 stuff that can tell me what I can expect?
 
Practically every anime DVD (except Kaze) released here in the UK is sourced from an Australian master. If you've watched anything from MVM or Manga, then you've most likely watched an Australian disc with a UK company logo on the front end.

That said, it's a case by case thing. Three years ago, all Australian DVDs were NTSC-PAL standards conversions, where they tried to get 24 frames per second into 25 frames per second by extrapolating and averaging out an extra frame, and this resulted in softer images with ghosting and some judder to varying degrees, and these would look worse than R1 NTSC discs.

Then Siren Visual entered the market. Their first release to come to the UK was Manga's Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, and this was a native PAL release, at 25 smooth frames per second, no extrapolation, but running 4% faster than NTSC because of it. Resolution is a lot better and it looks excellent. But there is a consequent pitch alteration to the audio because of the speedup, and if you are used to fansubs or NTSC discs then you might notice that.

But Madman Entertainment got onto the native PAL bandwagon as well, and their final volume of Soul Eater, and the second release of Full Metal Alhchemist Brotherhood were PAL discs, as released here by Manga Entertainment.

Since then practically every release in the UK sourced from Madman and Siren is native PAL, and will look as good as the UK releases from Manga and MVM that you'll have seen in recent years. There is the odd exception, with shows like Nabari no Ou, and the most recent Naruto Shippuden releases as NTSC-PAL standards conversions, and Madman have started experimenting with NTSC releases for niche titles (.hack//Quantum was one that was released here in the UK).

I have some AU imports, and some older titles are NTSC PAL and look rough, but more recent shows that I have bought have included Durarara and Usagi Drop, and they look great.
 
Thanks for the quick reply, I already knew about them sharing authoring costs, I guess I should of thought 1 step further to make the assumption they are therefore identical :)
 
To make a change, and get their discs out ahead of the Madman release, Manga authored the Panty and Stocking discs themselves for a change...

In fact the big difference between Manga in-house discs and AU sourced discs is that Manga never include a signs only track for the English dub. There will only be a single subtitle stream on their discs. If there are two subtitle streams, Full subtitles and signs only, then it's a good bet that it's an AU disc.
 
Just Passing Through said:
To make a change, and get their discs out ahead of the Madman release, Manga authored the Panty and Stocking discs themselves for a change...

In fact the big difference between Manga in-house discs and AU sourced discs is that Manga never include a signs only track for the English dub. There will only be a single subtitle stream on their discs. If there are two subtitle streams, Full subtitles and signs only, then it's a good bet that it's an AU disc.
Click to expand...

Quite the fiassco with the defective discs, though I didn't realise they skimped on the signs only track.

I think i'm going to adopt a US BR and UK/Aus DvD only policy, the 4% speed up has never bothered me but the flicker I see with NTSC does.
 
Japan is NTSC so, while nearly everything is HD these days, they're still working with NTSC in mind. PAL releases by definition have been messed with more (although PAL has greater vertical resolution than NTSC which is more likely to be of actual benefit these days when working down from HD masters than up from DVD masters).
If you are seeing problems with all R1 discs then it is probably down to how you are watching them rather than in inherent problem with the format - Japanese discs are NTSC and, while America has been given inferior masters in the past, we'd get the same ones in that case.
 
Shiroi Hane said:
Japan is NTSC so, while nearly everything is HD these days, they're still working with NTSC in mind. PAL releases by definition have been messed with more (although PAL has greater vertical resolution than NTSC which is more likely to be of actual benefit these days when working down from HD masters than up from DVD masters).
If you are seeing problems with all R1 discs then it is probably down to how you are watching them rather than in inherent problem with the format - Japanese discs are NTSC and, while America has been given inferior masters in the past, we'd get the same ones in that case.
Click to expand...

I was probaby a little too broad with the 'All', it's more like a lot of the more recent titles.
 
Shiroi Hane said:
Out of interest, here's a comparison I did of the video quality of the R2 NTSC, R1 NTSC and R2 PAL DVDs for Haruhi:
http://anime.thenexxus.org/haruhi/stuff/comparisons/
Click to expand...

I've seen that pic before and it's just occured to me that the R2 UK picture hasn't been taken at the same point as the other two. It's at a transition point between frames, how can we compare quality when the picture is messed up by the player?
 
Rosencrantz said:
Shiroi Hane said:
Out of interest, here's a comparison I did of the video quality of the R2 NTSC, R1 NTSC and R2 PAL DVDs for Haruhi:
http://anime.thenexxus.org/haruhi/stuff/comparisons/
Click to expand...

I've seen that pic before and it's just occured to me that the R2 UK picture hasn't been taken at the same point as the other two. It's at a transition point between frames, how can we compare quality when the picture is messed up by the player?
Click to expand...

Ah, the wonders of NTSC-PAL standards conversions. I'm so glad I went with R1 for that title.

IMO credit sequences are the worst option for screen comparisons, (although I can understand that for Haruhi, as that's where the most obvious compression artefacts occur). For credit sequences, the US company usually goes through a process of getting raw video, rotoscoping the original credits, and basically just overlaying a clean credit sequence with the English language credits, all different levels of complexity depending on what they got from Japan. In the early days, that meant that English language credit sequences were recorded at lower bitrates and resolutions than the Japanese source material. The credits on some shows, especially early Funimation discs, are loaded with jaggies.

Not so much a recent problem though. I love what Funimation did with the credits for Baka and Test, they got the feel of the original Japanese credits completely with their translation.
 
Shiroi Hane said:
That IS the same point. That's what it looks like.
I purposefully chose the busiest and least busiest points in the OP.
Click to expand...

TBH it feels like you are cheating in some way, i've advanced frame by frame on things before and you see that kind of doubling up but running normally it's not noticible, sometimes you can't even get it to repeat the doubling up when using the frame advance.
 
Rosencrantz said:
Shiroi Hane said:
That IS the same point. That's what it looks like.
I purposefully chose the busiest and least busiest points in the OP.
Click to expand...

TBH it feels like you are cheating in some way, i've advanced frame by frame on things before and you see that kind of doubling up but running normally it's not noticible, sometimes you can't even get it to repeat the doubling up when using the frame advance.
Click to expand...

NTSC-PAL conversions...

NTSC plays at 60 Hz is 30 frames per second but through some technical wizardry boils down to 24 frames per second or thereabouts. Look up 2:3 pulldown on Wiki for an overly technical explanation.

PAL, where we and Australia are plays at 50 Hz, aka 25 frames per second.

Since anime is made at 24 fps, it has to be converted to 25 fps. What is happening most now is that they are just speeding up the animation, so it runs 4% faster, with smooth frames and none of that doubling as in that Haruhi grab.

But this is a new thing, only for the last three years. Before that, we had NTSC to PAL conversions, where they tried to keep the same runtime, but by stretching out 24 frames into 25. On discs like Redline and FReedom OVA on DVD, they did this the easy way by simply repeating the 24th frame. This introduced judder.

To keep the animation smooth, the other way, which most anime used, was to extrapolate frames that were part way between two complete frames, which is why on those old anime discs, if you pause and frame advance, you get partial frames like that seen on the Haruhi grab. Some NTSC-PAL conversions are really good, and you don't notice the lower resolution and ghosting (which is what those partial frames are called), and they playback perfectly smoothly.

The bad NTSC-PAL conversions show much lower resolution, obvious ghosting, and they judder anyway. For example, see Kaze's Vampire Knight and the latest Bleach discs.

Anyway, in terms of time code and position in playback, that partial grab from the UKR2 disc does correspond exactly to the same point as the NTSC discs. It's just a matter of luck that that timecode on the PAL converted disc coincides with a partial frame
 
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