Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

WMD said:
I'm glad I don't know what banding is coz I thought Castlevania looked great. 😬 (if someone explains it I'll prob not read it as I don't think I wana know if its gona affect my enjoyment!)
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Don't read it. Once you see banding you can never unsee it. Ignorance in this case is definitely bliss.
 
Most of the time people mention banding it's usually minor enough that a casual viewer won't notice it anyway. Aside from ReZero Part 1, every example I've seen it took me a full minute to notice anything. Sure is nice not being a videophile
 
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You don’t need to be a videophile to notice bad Banding it’s £25 for 4 eps so not cheap at all expecting good quality for that price is not bad at all. And I can say this isn’t anime but a western show so it IS expensive
 
I'm not a videophile, but you'll notice bad banding regardless of who you are. If you don't then your screen is either weirdly configured so your not seeing colours correctly, or your tv is proforming some sort of debanding.
 
Well yes like I said in my previous post I can notice banding for something like ReZero Part 1 and probably Castlevania but most of the time banding is just so minor that I just can't see it so it's never really an issue to me.
 
It just so happens that of the over 100 screenshots of the VIZ release I took, 2 match up decently well to the UK screenshots.

Now, keep in mind, mine are PNG and uploaded to Imgur, while the myReviewer ones are JPEG and uploaded to their own site. It is very possible that because they were converted to JPEG and/or are hosted on their site additional compression is added, so I can't truly say one is better or not without having lossless PNG shots taken with a good media player (mine were Virtual Dub 2.

So here they are:
VIZ (me):
GwNRyHj.png

AL (myReviewer):
0000280273.jpg


VIZ:
ckZj6tq.png

AL:
0000280269.jpg


The difference in colour in the second shot makes me curious if a less than desirable player was used to capture screenshots for the UK BD. However, as is, (and this is NOT an in-depth comparison), both are very bad looking, but I lean towards VIZ, but as there are some discrepancies in colour, I won't give a final judgement, as it would be unfair.
 
Professor Who said:
The difference in colour in the second shot makes me curious if a less than desirable player was used to capture screenshots for the UK BD. However, as is, (and this is NOT an in-depth comparison), both are very bad looking, but I lean towards VIZ, but as there are some discrepancies in colour, I won't give a final judgement, as it would be unfair.
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The myreviewer Akira and Perfect Blue screenshots have the wrong colors, so Castlevania probably too. That said, the VIZ BD probably has the wrong colors because they never get the colorspace conversion right,
 
Some of the colours seem darker for AL, almost looking like deeper contrast, but that would mean the other colours meant to stand out would be brighter, which they aren't
 
Scavenger said:
The myreviewer Akira and Perfect Blue screenshots have the wrong colors, so Castlevania probably too. That said, the VIZ BD probably has the wrong colors because they never get the colorspace conversion right,
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Yeah, after looking, it appears AL's colours are closer to the Netflix stream:
Z6d8B1b.png


However, after looking at those screenshots, the AL one has more banding. Again, this may be JPEG conversion or site introduced compression on top of the perfectly fine screenshot. So, really, I can't tell which one is better encoded until I see lossless PNGs. That said, the AL has more accurate colours, so...
 
Wow. That bitrate! Looks like it's on a BD-50, right? The VIZ BD was on a BD-25 and had this lowly bitrate:
OcvWDh9.png


That said, the AL disc is better, but not a huge improvement. Looks like it's the source both VIZ and AL were given that was really poor- most likely a streaming master, if I had to guess.
 
Professor Who said:
The difference in colour in the second shot makes me curious if a less than desirable player was used to capture screenshots for the UK BD. However, as is, (and this is NOT an in-depth comparison), both are very bad looking, but I lean towards VIZ, but as there are some discrepancies in colour, I won't give a final judgement, as it would be unfair.
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The images on MyReviewer are superficially representative and not a true one to one capture of the disc content. VLC was used to capture the frames in png format, an old version of Graphic Workshop Professional (Windows 3.1) used to batch convert the pngs to jpg at 100% quality (typically a 3MB png becomes a 1.25 MB jpg.) and uploaded to MyReviewer, which performs a further compression to minimise the footprint on the site to a 100k or so. It’s this final compression that doesn’t make me get too nitpicky about the screen caps I take.

Like I said, I’m really reporting what I saw with my eyes. If as said, that’s a dual layer disc compared to Viz’ single, then that banding must be baked into the source, and there’s really nothing to be done about it (except wait for a Dynit release?).
 
Re: VLC,

VLC is not suited for screenshots because it uses the wrong color space in the decoding process. Blu-ray content is encoded in the Rec.709 color space, but VLC decodes Rec.709 with Rec.601 (color space used in DVDs). The result is wrong colors.

For easy screenshots with accurate colors, use MPC-BE/HC with madVR.

I personally prefer VirtualDub2 because the results are slightly more reliable, but it has a steeper learning curve, especially when dealing with 1080i content, which requires some rudimentary knowledge of Avisynth.
 
Scavenger said:
Re: VLC,

VLC is not suited for screenshots because it uses the wrong color space in the decoding process. Blu-ray content is encoded in the Rec.709 color space, but VLC decodes Rec.709 with Rec.601 (color space used in DVDs). The result is wrong colors.

For easy screenshots with accurate colors, use MPC-BE/HC with madVR.

I personally prefer VirtualDub2 because the results are slightly more reliable, but it has a steeper learning curve, especially when dealing with 1080i content, which requires some rudimentary knowledge of Avisynth.
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As I said, with the compression on the site, I’m not compelled to go learning a whole new bit of software just for grabbing a few pics. The pics are never going to be identical to what you’ll see on screen, and since most people are reading on tablet or phone... it’s a review site, not an image comparison site.
 
Mirai UK BD is missing pretty much all of the extras from the US BD:

UK BD

US BD
  • Interview with Director Mamoru Hosoda (1080p, 37:39)
  • Japanese Cast Interviews (1080p, 46:52)
  • Mirai at Cannes Film Festival (1080p, 7:39)
  • The New World of Mamoru Hosoda (1080p, 21:05)
  • Mirai in Japan (1080p, 34:41)
  • Visiting Studio Chizu (1080p, 5:51)
  • Mamoru Hosoda Visits Toyama Prefecture (1080i, 17:58)
  • "My Future" by Hosoda and Voice Cast (1080p, 3:12)
  • Trailers & TV Spots (1080p, 12:32)
 
Based on that information, I'm guessing that the UK release of Mirai was authored locally using the same authoring house as the last few UK authored releases (e.g. Amanchu, Silver Spoon, etc.). If that's the case, this is probably the second release authored by them to have unlocked subtitles (the first being Amanchu).
 
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