Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

anime_andrew said:
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
Click to expand...
Thank you for doing this. I would like Violet Evergarden to get the best Blu-ray release possible, especially visually because I think it's visually stunning. Looking forward to receiving the finished product.
 
Well I'm glad it's being looked at, if I buy it will depend entirely on if it's getting fixed or not as for me those screenshots look completely unacceptable for a BD, something I'd expect to see from a screenshot taken from KissAnime or something. Like as I say I'm not a videophile but even I instantly see what's wrong with those (as did others it seems) so I have no idea how it even passed any sort of QC...

This one really sucks for me as I was super looking forward to VE ;_; hopefully it ends up as good news, I'm willing to wait as long as it takes to get it right.
 
thedoctor2016 said:
It does make me wonder what is the quality of these subtitles if FUNi didn’t use them..,
Click to expand...

I mean, the reason they didn’t use them is they used the same basic master from Madman. If you follow that logic along then their master was finished long before we announced what we were doing. At that point there would have been no point in them checking our version...
AP
 
But those discs have been complained about since the release Australia is also even re releasing it I just don’t understand why that’s what I meant it was more a joke as yes no one has mentioned the subs yet I do believe they will be better we just don’t know yet.
 
I certainly don't mind waiting if it means a chance that the picture quality can be improved. The Netflix stream of the show looked awful in darker scenes, so the main thing I was looking forward to here was the visual upgrade. The artwork in Violet Evergarden is a lot more detailed than the typical anime TV series, so it was always going to be tricky one to fit onto (presumably) fewer discs than the Japanese release.

While I doubt AL would alter the scope of what's included in the set at this late stage, if it was the only way we could get better picture quality than those worrying screenshots, I wouldn't be bothered if they ditched the compilation movies, and spread the TV episodes across more discs instead.
 
Just to chime in some more here considering feedback is more likely to be seen - I have absolutely 100% confidence in saying that the materials received to encode Violet Evergarden from aren't the issue. Why do I think that? Today I received Birthday Wonderland - another set authored by the same individual from what I understand, and it's the exact same story with that disc. I have no idea what's going on with their encoding setup, but their encoder is constantly spitting out frames absolutely full of macroblocking which would also explain why it looks so ugly and noisy in motion too.

What this ultimately results in is a constant flow of decent frame -> crap frames in various different intervals one after another, sometimes with multiples of one before the other. There's seemingly no pattern to it, but it's happening constantly and genuinely looks like something you'd expect from a h264 Youtube stream (Or the Re:Zero/Your Name v1 discs). See these as an example (Or this for a bigger version). In both comparison shots I've started on a good frame and moved forward by one. That's why it looks so bad, though granted from what I've seen Violet seems to have even worse encoding on top of someone taking artistic liberties and messing with the source to try and make it look more "correct".

I should also add that I have no idea if the video levels are correct for Birthday Wonderland, as the International master seems to differ from the Domestic one. The Domestic one has a "nostalgic" yellow tint, whereas the UK/US/FR BDs don't. This comparison gives a good visual example of what that looks like, with the middle image being what the International Master looks like.


EDIT: Just to add, I went back and had a look at Amanchu which I believe was the first disc this individual worked on, just in case I missed something back then, and this issue does not affect that disc (granted it has incorrect gamma instead). Also just to point out seeing as it's never been listed in this thread - Amanchu uses the broadcast masters and not the home video version with redraws and such.
 
Last edited:
Question as I'm not one who's into all this video production thing

How come companies don't spot wrong colors or artifacting?

Quick example would be Violet Evergarden. Wouldn't someone look at the video they've just encoded (or whatever it is), compare it against the source and think "Oh, that doesn't look right" long before disks are being printed?

I get some things getting passed QC unnoticed (Sorry, but I can't see the difference in the first link @Mangaranga posted about one good frame, one bad frame. The image with only 1.7mb has a bit more artifacting on the right hand of the image, but thats about all and barely noticable). While VE colors are WAY off
 
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.
Click to expand...
Why wasn't a professional called in the first place?
I'm sorry but in this case, clearly the fault is on you guys rather than the authorer. If you employ an individual (which is totally fine) but then don't perform the necessary QC step, there's clearly something lacking in your internal process. I can understand if a publisher does not check how the authoring compare to the raw materials (and sometime they can't do that easily due to the format of the raw material) but at least watch ONCE how the BD looks before duplicating the discs??
How come companies don't spot wrong colors or artifacting?
Click to expand...
Numerous reasons, sometime the source material is on HDCAM (or other versatile formats) and you can't watch that again easily to compare so you assume the house which processed the tapes/authored the discs did the job. Typically, a shift in the color or brightness goes unnoticed in those cases as the original tape can hardly be watched unless you have the proper hardware to compare. The distributor may only then notice banding or other artifacts such as macroblocks and aliasing.

It should be noted that for us it's easy to compare as X person on Y forum will provide a BDMV of the japanese version to another which seeks to compare the release in their country. However distributors can't just go and download the latest torrent from some site to get the BDMV. They are under contract and may ONLY use the footage they're provided with so their reference may be on a format they can't easily watch or handle.

In the case of VE, it looks so off in color and picture problems (banding and artifacts) that I have no good explanation except the clear omission of a QC step by the authorer (which is probably just some individual doing it as an extra job in the evening?) and more specifically AL. Beside, if it was handled by a single individual, I don't think they had to deal with any physical tape. Just heavy raw video files ("thick"). So there's quite likely no excuse for either in this very case.
 
Last edited:
Shadow Cat said:
Question as I'm not one who's into all this video production thing

How come companies don't spot wrong colors or artifacting?

Quick example would be Violet Evergarden. Wouldn't someone look at the video they've just encoded (or whatever it is), compare it against the source and think "Oh, that doesn't look right" long before disks are being printed?

I get some things getting passed QC unnoticed (Sorry, but I can't see the difference in the first link @Mangaranga posted about one good frame, one bad frame. The image with only 1.7mb has a bit more artifacting on the right hand of the image, but thats about all and barely noticable). While VE colors are WAY off
Click to expand...
I probably didn't pick the best examples as I literally picked one spot and got the first two examples to hand. It does get worse that what I posted though. I added a second comparison to my post showcasing another example. Seeing as they're my initial caps posted on Discord they are 1440p though and should be fairly obvious.
 
SpaceDandy said:
Numerous reasons, sometime the source material is on HDCAM (or other versatile formats) and you can't watch that again easily to compare so you assume the house which processed the tapes/authored the discs did the job. Typically, a shift in the color or brightness goes unnoticed in those cases as the original tape can hardly be watched unless you have the proper hardware to compare. The distributor may only then notice banding or other artifacts such as macroblocks and aliasing.
Click to expand...
Sorry, I meant the Authoring house. When they're processing the source files, are they not able to compare source to their output files? This is the part I'm confused about, how they don't notice the color difference

Like, when you're working with files for a youtube video can you compare your Raw video file to your encoded video before uploading to youtube
 
Mangaranga said:
What this ultimately results in is a constant flow of decent frame -> crap frames in various different intervals one after another, sometimes with multiples of one before the other. There's seemingly no pattern to it, but it's happening constantly and genuinely looks like something you'd expect from a h264 Youtube stream (Or the Re:Zero/Your Name v1 discs). See these as an example (Or this for a bigger version). In both comparison shots I've started on a good frame and moved forward by one. That's why it looks so bad, though granted from what I've seen Violet seems to have even worse encoding on top of someone taking artistic liberties and messing with the source to try and make it look more "correct".
Click to expand...
That looks like "I-frame pulsing". Issue with how the rate control is set. Bits are not properly allocated over the B- and P-frames, so only I-frames aren't a mess.
 
SpaceDandy said:
Numerous reasons, sometime the source material is on HDCAM (or other versatile formats) and you can't watch that again easily to compare so you assume the house which processed the tapes/authored the discs did the job. Typically, a shift in the color or brightness goes unnoticed in those cases as the original tape can hardly be watched unless you have the proper hardware to compare. The distributor may only then notice banding or other artifacts such as macroblocks and aliasing.
Click to expand...
Just to add to that in response to Shadow Cat's question. Colours being wrong has become more and more common nowadays for some reason. Viz Media encodes everything in the colour space for SD content, everything Funimation encodes has a red tint, and even Crunchyroll gets things wrong sometimes as I recently pointed out that they're encoding most of Osomatsu-san in the wrong colour space. The common thing back in the early to mid 2010s used to be that BD releases were too bright and everything looked washed out as a result.
 
Shadow Cat said:
Sorry, I meant the Authoring house. When they're processing the source files, are they not able to compare source to their output files? This is the part I'm confused about, how they don't notice the color difference

Like, when you're working with files for a youtube video can you compare your Raw video file to your encoded video before uploading to youtube
Click to expand...
What is acceptable for one's eyes may not be for the others. As stupid as it is, one may just seek simplicity and provide something that is cheap in time and effort, as long as they find the result acceptable. The client NEEDS to check if it ticks the requirement upon delivery. That's common sense and is literally what law says for contracts. It's the same as the warranty you have when you buy something from a shop. If it's not as expected, you can return it.
We don't know how much this individual was paid for his work but I bet he was contracted because his service was cheap. And here we are.
 
Last edited:
SpaceDandy said:
We don't know how much this individual was paid for his work but I bet he was contracted because his service was cheap. And here we are.
Click to expand...
I don't know if this is necessarily a fair comment seeing as, assuming this is the same individual, they've done previous BDs which were actually encoded pretty competently, albeit with increased gamma. I literally only own Amanchu from them though, and I've seen part of an episode of Silver Spoon to check - and their previous work does not look like this. Something has gone horribly wrong with their encoding setup somewhere and even that can happen to the best of people.

Justin, for example is put on a pedestal as the person to go to if you want a quality product, but people also seem to forget that there was a period where even his encoding setup was ballsed up and he put out some badly encoded discs in the wrong colour range. It's because he was receptive to feedback that he took to the BDforums and was helped by a fellow Italian aniBD encoder to fix things (yes that one), and yet his work since has been better than it ever was previously. Hell, even earlier this year he re-authored the City Hunter Shinjuku Private eyes disc and offered a replacement scheme after I pointed out that both Japanese audio tracks were screwed up, so **** still happens sometimes. I think this independent author still deserves a chance if they can prove they can take feedback and fix things, just maybe not with my precious Violet Evergarden...
 
Last edited:
Vincentdante said:
They did have a professional in the first instance.
Click to expand...
Then why did anime_andrew made a clear distinction in the PR statement?

I don't know if this is necessarily a fair comment (…)
Click to expand...
"I bet". I'll be very glad to be proven wrong however. Even tho we'll never know the truth. Also some reported that they're also behind some of those really "meh" Kazé UK release.
 
thedoctor2016 said:
I do think a reason why Justin is on that pedestal is yeah due to his openness with the fans like he didn’t have to reveal he’s doing EVA this early and yet he did.
Click to expand...
He's put on a pedestal because outside of those few titles that went wrong, he has built up a reputation of being pretty much the only consistently good US aniBD encoder throughout the years. If you look at the other distributors over the last decade, it's all ups and downs, generally starting way down. You generally know what you're going to get compared to say, a Funimation or Viz release - and even now both of those put out releases that are all over the place e.g. Funi's Kobayashi, Dumbbells and Mob S2 BDs are good, yet the Quints and Shield Hero BDs aren't so hot. All the Jojo sets are good, yet OPM S2 and Inuyasha are bad/really bad. I can just shove in one of his discs and not have to worry about whether it'll look bad.
 
Back
Top