Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

Sword Art Online II Part 1 Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Folks on Blu-ray.com have been discussing Anime Ltd's SAO release:
SAO II has a heap of quality control issues. Missing/faulty subs for episode title screens, new type of nonsense on the back cover (under the box, in this case), spelling errors on the silvery box and one completely missing episode title on the digipak.

Plus the whole video quality thing.
Click to expand...
Source: BD.com

Folks on this forum have also noticed the wrong description for one of the characters in the booklet:
Spotted a very small issue in the booklet. The description of the young Shino in the pages detailing the main characters is actually a duplicate description of Asuna calling her Kiritos wife etc, I found it quite amusing!
Click to expand...
Source: Britguy
 
That's disappointing to hear. I love Anime Limited and they are getting better but small issues still seem to bog down their releases a bit. What is wrong with the video quality exactly? Is there any comparison screenshots between the AoA and the Anime Ltd release?
 
Definitely quality control issues, but hardly deal breakers either. In a way, I find errors like that in the print materials more annoying because you'd think they'd be spotted easily - but equally, at the end of the day they're just minor niggles.
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
That's disappointing to hear. I love Anime Limited and they are getting better but small issues still seem to bog down their releases a bit. What is wrong with the video quality exactly? Is there any comparison screenshots between the AoA and the Anime Ltd release?
Click to expand...

I didn't see anything wrong with the video quality (although the DVD could have been a bit better). There's a bit of banding during some scene fades, but that's about it. That post quoted above seems to be from someone who equates image quality with disc count and bitrates rather than what appears on screen. Or someone who wants to pay Anime Limited prices for Aniplex quality. Pay £500 and you get Aniplex Fate Zero, pay £30 and you get MVM Fate Zero, they're not going to be identical!
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
That's disappointing to hear. I love Anime Limited and they are getting better but small issues still seem to bog down their releases a bit. What is wrong with the video quality exactly? Is there any comparison screenshots between the AoA and the Anime Ltd release?
Click to expand...

The person that mentioned the video quality said this:
SAO II video quality on Anime Ltd.'s release is decent, but no Aniplex. It evens out at 5.4 gigs per ep (with two DTS-HD MA 2.0 tracks), with the usual Anime Ltd. quirks here and there.
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Pretty much most of the time Aniplex sets tend to have the best video quality because they're simply authored in Japan. Mangaranga knows more about this than I do though.
 
Short story, read the second section of this answerman. SAO II suffers from having increased Contrast/Brightness or whatever. I did some image comparisons between Aniplex's release and Madman's encode here. The encode seems okay, but the aforementioned issue causes problems to stand out far more than they do in the source. Quite a few releases from different distributors tend to be affected by this, both in the US and AU/UK. Curiously enough this is the third recent Madman authored title to suffer from this that I know of, with both Fate/Zero and 009 Re:Cyborg being the same too.
 
Japanese masters often incorrectly have their colour space set to 0-255 instead of 16-235. I don't have the software to manually correct the screencaps to see if that's the problem here, but it's possible - check the DVDBeaver Blu-Ray screencaps of Blind Woman's Curse to see the difference between 0-255 colour space (the Region B UK Blu-Ray) and corrected 16-235 colour space (the Region Free US Blu-Ray).
 
NormanicGrav said:
Sword Art Online II Part 1 Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Folks on Blu-ray.com have been discussing Anime Ltd's SAO release:
SAO II has a heap of quality control issues. Missing/faulty subs for episode title screens, new type of nonsense on the back cover (under the box, in this case), spelling errors on the silvery box and one completely missing episode title on the digipak.

Plus the whole video quality thing.
Click to expand...
Source: BD.com

Folks on this forum have also noticed the wrong description for one of the characters in the booklet:
Spotted a very small issue in the booklet. The description of the young Shino in the pages detailing the main characters is actually a duplicate description of Asuna calling her Kiritos wife etc, I found it quite amusing!
Click to expand...
Source: Britguy
Click to expand...

We cover it off in the podcast but like I say - totally my fault for having to be involved in product design down to the final checking phase until the end of Tokyo Ghoul time really. After that we hired Keith to take on more chunky roles in Production so I only manage very specific products or help guide our product team on it :). So you can pretty much rest assured it's a rare outbreak and I'm being put back in my cage again now...

Missing / faulty subs for Episode Title screens & video are news to me though and certainly not in our court as we didn't author this one I'm afraid though but we'll investigate if someone drops us a mail :).

Andrew
 
Yami said:
Japanese masters often incorrectly have their colour space set to 0-255 instead of 16-235. I don't have the software to manually correct the screencaps to see if that's the problem here, but it's possible - check the DVDBeaver Blu-Ray screencaps of Blind Woman's Curse to see the difference between 0-255 colour space (the Region B UK Blu-Ray) and corrected 16-235 colour space (the Region Free US Blu-Ray).
Click to expand...
This shouldn't apply to HD. That Answerman is a callback to an earlier ANNCast where FUNi's Lain release was discussed:
As for what happened here, I can only guess. This could be as simple as a configuration mistake when the master tapes were captured or cloned in Japan. Black levels are also nowhere near as set in stone as fans seem to think they are -- Japanese NTSC spec puts it at 10 IRE higher than North American equipment, but in HD some masters follow that spec and some don't. Sometimes American gear is used by Japanese companies, adding effects that hit American black levels while the rest of the show has Japanese black levels. I can't tell you how much pain and headache that causes US distros.
Click to expand...
 
It's slightly different in the HD era in that rather than the American/Japanese NTSC IRE discrepancy we now have a discrepancy between encoding for the levels of a PC monitor (0-255) and HD video standards (16-235). This isn't even restricted to Japanese films, though it does happen far more frequently in masters obtained from there.

Not to say that that's the case here, but it looks similar.
 
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Complete First Season [DVD]

Confirmed to have English subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

CQdu9abWsAANguj.jpg


Baka Warner Bros.

Alternate Solution: Watch the show on Crunchyroll or pickup the Japanese Blu-ray singles.
 
It makes me so sad that this show is getting treated like this. Thank God the Japanese singles have English Subs. Now I just hope if/when Stardust Crusaders gets a release over here it's a huge improvement over this.
 
NormanicGrav said:
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Complete First Season [DVD]

Baka Warner Bros.

Alternate Solution: Watch the show on Crunchyroll or pickup the Japanese Blu-ray singles.
Click to expand...

Do we know if it's PAL or NTSC? Because PAL is the killer for me on this one. I can add subtitles and deal with standardised menus and English credits, I can't de-PAL it.
 
This is relevant to the UK Scientific Railgun Blu-ray...

http://www.fandompost.com/oldforums/sho ... gun-Disc-1

I just started watching Railgun on BD, and during episode 2 at the 36:02 mark there appears a green rectangular glitch on the screen on the left side of Kuroko's hair. The screen freezes at that point and stays like that until 36:09.
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Not much to panic about, it's a mostly static scene, just a reaction shot.
 
Ugg. I suppose we can hope that it was a speck of dust or something on FUNimation's master stamper so it won't affect our discs if they are being replicated over here...
 
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