Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

Wicker said:
Its HDR according to Rightstuf's prodcut description.

"The 4K disc in this combo pack is an Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc created for 4K HDR viewing. It will require a special Ultra HD 4K Blu-Ray player (will not play on a standard Blu-Ray player.) For the complete experience you'll need:


  • 4K Ultra HD TV with HDR (High Dynamic Range)"
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Honestly it could also be a copy/paste from Discotek's listing and when it comes to UHD releases we usually expect both 4K resolution and HDR and all region discs to be included, though recent events showed otherwise.

Besides to me it doesn't make sense if the Funi disc has HDR and the Manga disc doesn't because I don't believe Manga have the capacity or funds to author their own 4K disc (if they did a title like Ghost in the Shell would have been sorted by now). This Akira release to my knowledge is a joint project between Manga and Funimation so the sets would be identical, heck the discs themselves are AB each.
 
So. This is more or less an on-going investigation in a sense but I was told about the French Blu-ray for King's Game the Animation being censored and I was asked to check my copy of the show as I have the UK Blu-ray (which is essentially Funimation's US Blu-ray also). Turns out the UK/US discs also share the same censorship.

There are two outcomes for this because I am not 100% confident on the overall cause:
  1. Kadokawa and studio Seven probably left the series as it was from the Japanese Broadcast onto the Japanese Blu-ray.
  2. Funimation ended up using the Japanese Broadcast version instead of the Japanese Blu-ray version.
 
Honestly, this one really stings. All the work they've put into this release, how long it's took and then this happens. Was super looking forward to getting this show and finally watching it too, will wait and see if AL say anything about it and if not I will cancel/return it, I am by no means a videophile but this is so so disappointing.
 
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thedoctor2016 said:
Violet Evergarden as it uses the FR Discs is a choice...
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Worth pointing out that according to Hanners on Discord a while back, Violet Evergarden was done by a UK authoring group. I don't know who but some of us reckon it's probably the same uncredited individual who worked on titles like Amanchu! and Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion I: Initiation.
 
Yeah they weren’t amazing iirc but were okay. But the fact they got Planets and Millenium (and Eva ) from Justin means I’m confused why not for their most hyped release, like this would be one of their biggest id say.

and yeah even as not the biggest Violet fan this is probably one of ALs biggests fails doing everything right new subs, the films, the BD extras and then to fail the main thing and somehow look worse than the streams or that encode everyone pirated when it aired as Mangaranga showed is not good.
 
Buzzkillington said:
Honestly, this one really stings. All the work they've put into this release, how long it's took and then this happens. Was super looking forward to getting this show and finally watching it too, will wait and see if AL say anything about it and if not I will cancel/return it, I am by no means a videophile but this is so so disappointing.
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Yeah, I'll probably follow you there. Normally I find the visual differences from visual comparisons to be fairly negligible to my eyes, but those are some rough-looking screencaps. I'll see what addition examinations reveal when the UK disks are shipped and whether there's confirmed to be a problem.
 
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Yeah, same here. It’s rare that I can tell the difference on most of the defective releases posted on this thread but that is so blatant I wonder how it even made it to release. So disappointed.
 
Yami said:
I'd be hoping for a replacement program if it w
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Buzzkillington said:
Honestly, this one really stings. All the work they've put into this release, how long it's took and then this happens. Was super looking forward to getting this show and finally watching it too, will wait and see if AL say anything about it and if not I will cancel/return it, I am by no means a videophile but this is so so disappointing.
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Allow me to chime in on this one folks (for those who haven't had a mail-out yet as anyone pre-ordering will be getting a message from our shop this morning too)
🙂
!

The video materials we have from source are a lot trickier than normal ones and on evaluation it will be hard to get a better edition from a normal authoring house. As a result of the concerns raised with the current master, we’re pausing the release to work with a specialist authoring house to look at the masters and see if we can improve them. Assuming the answer is yes, we’ll get the disc changed over in the set as soon as we can.

Anime Ltd remains committed to delivering the best possible edition on first release we can, which is why we’re pausing the release full stop and not just shipping then offering a replacement scheme. As soon as we’ve evaluated the video masters vs the Blu-Rays, we’ll update again on timeframes for release based on what can be done.

To be clear and manage expectations, we can only confirm what can be done when the specialist authoring house has had time to evaluate the materials. If we confirm there is a better product to be had with this release then we absolutely will re-author the discs.

Everyone is on their holidays just now for the festive season, so we'll come back to folks at the start of the New Year with a proper update. Appreciate the patience while we do this as it means all shipments including our we ship are now on hold, but we will have the final product in your hands as soon as we can!

Thanks for your understanding folks and on behalf of everyone at Anime Ltd I hope everybody has a good holiday season!

Andrew
 
FYI, my quoted comment was referring to Manga's Akira 4K UHD not your release of Violet Evergarden but I appreciate you striving to make any release better - have a great Christmas!
 
Hmm... based on the discussions I've read online from both the UK & FR side of the community, it could be a case of the materials itself being fine but the person who was authoring it doing it incorrectly (or trying to improve on something that didn't need fixing) which caused the problems we see.
 
anime_andrew said:
The video materials we have from source are a lot trickier than normal ones and on evaluation it will be hard to get a better edition from a normal authoring house. As a result of the concerns raised with the current master, we’re pausing the release to work with a specialist authoring house to look at the masters and see if we can improve them. Assuming the answer is yes, we’ll get the disc changed over in the set as soon as we can.

Anime Ltd remains committed to delivering the best possible edition on first release we can, which is why we’re pausing the release full stop and not just shipping then offering a replacement scheme. As soon as we’ve evaluated the video masters vs the Blu-Rays, we’ll update again on timeframes for release based on what can be done.


Andrew
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Much as I am looking forward to this release, the forum posts this morning gave me a sinking feeling. I'm happy to wait as long as it takes to get the release right. Kudos for putting the brakes on to check. Second best news this Christmas (my dad got his first Covid jab last week).

EDIT: Got the e-mail as I was typing this.
 
Some mini-comparisons to provide a general idea of how the discs ended up being.

Top image is the Japanese Blu-ray, Bottom image is the UK & French Blu-ray. I have cropped it from the original resolution to basically show where the issues are when it comes the screencaps. Hope this helps Andrew with his investigation into the matter.

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In this first example, the colour levels are incorrect which resulted in brightness that is causing loss of detail on parts like Violet's hair.

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In this second example we have pixilation of sorts that have appeared on Violet's hair when they shouldn't be there in the first place.

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In the third example, we have a similar case but towards the backgrounds of the characters. For instance the walls lose their design due to the pixilation.
 
Lucky I came on the forum before Emailing UP to cancel my order

When I saw [Example 2] on twitter I wasn't all that worried

Then I saw [Example 1] what made me wonder how it even got through QC

Is the US release this bad?
 
Shadow Cat said:
Lucky I came on the forum before Emailing UP to cancel my order

When I saw [Example 2] on twitter I wasn't all that worried

Then I saw [Example 1] what made me wonder how it even got through QC

Is the US release this bad?
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The Funimation release takes a very rare approach by just re-using the Madman Blu-ray discs, which is essentially the Broadcast master and Netflix subtitles. So the video presentation on their sets are better but in terms of accurate viewing experience it's not the best.
 
Violette said:
Haven't seen it brought up here yet, got an email from AllTheAnime a couple hours ago wrt Violet Evergarden, blu-ray release is delayed because of the video quality, their looking at the masters to see if the can re-author and replace them prior to release, no estimate of new release date.

Personally, while I was still holding just out a little bit of hope that it might ship before xmas, I'd much rather get the best release possible when it comes to the video quality of all things, so I'm totally okay with the delay and really hope they can do something about it.

A couple of things to note from the email;
1) From the sound of it, they are uncertain of were the problem is, if it's a problem with the encoding not present on the masters then looks like they'll try to re-author them, but if it's an issue with the masters themselves we might be in for a disappointing release in spite of the delay.
2) They did refer to "looking forward to receiving shipping notifications imminently", so presumably they were kind of on track to at least ship the early bird pre-orders from alltheanime.com soon, so the delay may only affect that, and not the given retail release date of 11th January, but I'd imagine it'll only make that date now if they can't do anything about the video quality...
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Well in these sorts of cases it's usually either one of these:
  • The masters provided by Japan
  • The person or group authoring the discs
Some of us reckon it's probably the latter as authoring individuals can mess up a release (it's happened notably with Viz Media and older Sentai releases). Re:ZERO was caused by a sourcing issue while Your Name was caused by someone over at Madman's authoring team.

The issues affecting VE feels more like a Your Name scenario than RZ (the difference this time being a UK author). As long as the distributor does not go to Com'on screen (French authoring company, very infamous for their Blu-ray authors being a mess also) for their re-author, I think the next one will turn out better hopefully.
 
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