(rant)No wonder ADV and other companies have folded...

[Neco]

I sure can pick'em I tell you what.

First I buy Macross II: Do you Remember Love?  on DVD a few years ago and get pissed off because the last half has this stupid blue tint to the whole picture (that's easy enough to fix but damn what else might be wrong?)

Then I find out Gall Force  Destruction & Stardust War  are some of the shittiest transfers of all time with their screwed up telecine patterns, panning, and field blends.

Now I start working on Dirty Pair: Flash, thinking I'm gonna have an easy project to do as it deinterlaced and IVTC'd just fine for the most part,  and what do I get?   garbage on the edge...  No problem I'll crop!   NO.  corruption extends up from the garbage well into 20% of the picture on a lot of these bad frames so I have to manually replace them with dupe copies or dupe the end of the last scene early so I don't screw up my frame rate..   Except this crap happens on practically EVERY scene change and on  episode 1 of OVA 1, I am 3 minutes into the video with an astounding 33 frame replacements so far.

I'm almost afraid to look at Loddoss War and other older stuff I have on DVD, hell even afraid to look at my newer stuff!
What gives?   It's no wonder people  seek out sites like this one, when they get charged unfair prices for a disc with 5 measly episodes (or sometimes less) and then to top it off, the transfer to DVD is some screwed up bullshit  with no attempt to repair or cleanup the mess from whatever source they used.

Ugh.. I just want to find something I can encode that we don't have, so I can give back to the community,  and I get nothing but trouble each time I try a set of DVD's... 

[Monkemon]

That sucks I would love to see Dirty Pair Flash up on the site.

[Neco]

I know there are rips out there, likely of dubious quality..  An old one I saw floating around was DivX.   I didn't bother to check it out though.

I haven't intended to drop the project as of yet.   Basically I've solved the hurdle of easy deinterlacing and IVTC.  Got some good filtering done to clean up the picture as well.

It's just that this process of  replacing bad frames on the scene changes (I mean really how do you fuck up every scene change in a project? There is clearly damage from splicing and miss-aligning too.) is very manual and time intensive.   I basically have to use  Avisynths  Freezeframe  function,  one entry per line,  to swap out bad frames for good or approximate copies.   But stepping through the file one frame at a time, is the hardest and most boring part.

The GOOD news is, that I usually only ever replace between 1 - 2 frames  so far.  Which means even if the match isn't pixel perfect,  you really wouldn't notice it while watching at full speed,  unless you specifically looked for it, and probably have to look hard.

It's just going to take me a long time to get through it..  My  Avisynth script will be reading like the proverbial  timecodes.txt  when I am through with the first episode.   And then I get to do it all over again, 20 more times!     I hope to hell calling that many  FreezeFrame()  functions  isn't going to impact performance upon saving.

[Drew]

There's been a lot of improvement recently, though.

Like companies packaging a full series for $40 to $50. I think that's a fair price, especially considering that I remember paying upwards of $20 for two to four episodes in the past.

[Neco]

You are quite right.  The prices do get better in some respects.

But still,  until the price for e.g  Gundam SeeD  / Destiny sets are gonna drop to $25 per part (seriously, wtf package the whole damn thing in one box THEN I'll consider paying $60+)  I likely won't ever pick them up.

Much less the shorter series' out there that they want $30 - $50 for anyway.  I guess it all depends on where and when you shop too.  Hopefully I'll have some spare cash around christmas time or something and things will have good sales...

Kind of always been wanting to get rid of these AHQ Gundam encodes..    Ah needz moar kwalities!

Oh I misspoke earlier.  It's actually 16 episodes,  I'm not sure where I got 21 from.

I have half a mind to e-mail whatever is left of  ADV and chide them for this pathetic quality though,  unless sunrise delivered them production copies in this condition, then I'll have to yell at them too.

[indifference]

There's been a lot of improvement recently, though.

Like companies packaging a full series for $40 to $50.

I have to agree with this. I paid at least $19.99 and up to $25.99 per volume of Elfin Lied and The Platinum Edition of Eva. Fucking stupid. I know I would be way more inclined to support a decent product with a decent price.

[Zalis116]

Wait for another Bandai sale at rightstuf.com, get a GotAnime yearly membership for $12 then the Gundam Seed/Destiny Anime Legends sets will drop to $27. Although even 2*50 ($100) MSRP is far better than the singles prices of 30*12 ($360).

[kureshii]

I missed that Bandai sale they just had! Guh, when I saw the sale it was about to end in 10 minutes... couldn't get an order fixed up in time >_>

[indifference]

....Guh, when I saw the sale it was about to end in 10 minutes... couldn't get an order fixed up in time >_>

That's how it was with the freeleach here.

*Laughs*

[fohfoh]

I remember paying $90 CAD for the whole series of Evangelion on VCD nonetheless and that was CHEAP. The DVD version was going at about 160 CAD, we're also not counting the 3 different ending VCDs which were going at a price of about $15 CAD each. But here's to say though... my copies were actually pretty decent. Not super high quality since I opted down for the VCDs I got, but still decent. However, mine was a Cantonese dub version and not an English dub/sub version directed towards the American market.

[Scudworth]

this is why I just torrent.

[Neco]

Its why a lot of people torrent..  But frankly,  I'd prefer they get there act together and  clean up stuff they transfer to DVD, especially concerning the older stuff.   Clean it up,  and make the price feel worth it.

I torrent just like everyone, but at the same time,  its not always the best quality.   BluRay rips are changing that of course for the newer Anime,  but for the old stuff and stuff I want to buy..  It just doesn't feel worth it if they have all these crap problems they -shouldn't-.

But its a catch22..  The more people torrent, the less incentive they have to put out a quality product..   Scapegoating pirates is always going to happen whether it truly affects their bottom line or not,  but it seems a lot of these companies truly only bring stuff over here on an  "as we can afford the license" basis..   Which piracy is more apt to hurt versus something like  Video games which get bukoo sales regardless.

So yeah on the one hand, people send a message they are not satisfied with the price and/or quality of whats being offered.   On the other hand their only response is to cheapen it even more and cut costs wherever they can to maintain their sales.

OZC has an interesting take,  which I kind of agree with as well.  Supporting the whole BluRay thing.    It would be nice to see lots of titles shift over to BluRay, transfered from original masters and cleaned up.  But that is also very expensive and it sucks.   But products like  Dirty Pair:Flash are just inexcusable no matter what the medium.   So far 100% of the scene changes I've come across in Episode 1 are horrible junk with the corruption.  If episode 1 is any indication, the entire series is also littered with  glaringly obvious dot crawl too

I still haven't figured out how I want to get rid of that and where in the filter chain to do it.

I would totally support and feel better about spending money on good quality BluRay  releases though.   I just wish the industry would catch on (or at least the torrent community) and stop encoding every single  OP/ED /Commercial Break  sequence  with each episode..  Just annoying lol..

[Monkemon]

Yeah prices are much better these days, except maybe in the hentai genre (Have not checked current prices in a few years) where a single disc can cost as much as an anime boxset. Just be glad we are not shelling out as much money as those in the 80's for vhs tapes,  those went higher than $30 for as little as 30 minutes of animation.

[Animade]

Yeah prices are much better these days, except maybe in the hentai genre (Have not checked current prices in a few years) where a single disc can cost as much as an anime boxset. Just be glad we are not shelling out as much money as those in the 80's for vhs tapes,  those went higher than $30 for as little as 30 minutes of animation.

lol you've got that right. I was one of those that shelled out $30 an episode on VHS back in the 80's. I still remember my utter shock when ADV started to sell DVD boxsets for 60 bucks at the end of the 1990's. Picked up a ton for no other reason than, just because. Sure the transfer wasn't the best but lol entire seasons for less than a hundred was wonderful to me.

You know what is actually the worst thing about shelling out any amount of money for a 1 episode VHS tape? Yeah the actual tape. Those damn things took up a shit load of real estate. So I loved the price, quality, amount of content, or slim-ness of packaging that DVD's offered. Hey I grew up in the slim pickings and high price days. To say nothing about the smorgasbord of anime that's at the tip of my mouse today.

[Neco]

I too know the pain of VHS  Anime prices.   Oh man.. I remember when I saw a New Dominion Tank Police set of 3 tapes for $15 each and I was jizzing in the store.

One reason I never saw Lodoss War until I picked up the DVD set for some $30 or so, is because I remember looking for VHS sets and they were over $100 - good god.

Making some very good progress with DP:Flash though!
Assuming it all goes smoothly for each episode,  I've got the dot-crawl all but removed, some good noise cleanup and got it all squeezed into a 2-pass VFR decimation routine.  So I'll only have some 38,000-ish frames to deal with, instead of the 47,000-ish I was looking at before.

But either way it will be a very nice release and way superior to the DVD's.  Hopefully won't take more than 2  - 4 weeks of work, ideally I'll be able to clean an episode per day though.  Knowing my luck something else is bound to go wrong, like the audio ending up out of sync or something though   

[Monkemon]

Thats good news, hope the rest goes smoothly. I had forgotten how much anime cost in the 90's and early part of 2000
I remember paying a little over $150 for the Chronicles of the heroic knight boxset at HMV in 2001 and over $100 for the first 4 discs of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Though a few factors played into the price hike, what with dvds just starting to take over the market and the fact the Canadian dollar at the time was pretty much worth half as much as Americas.
Best bet at that time ,the 90's anyways, were used video game stores where you could get anime tapes for about $15-$20, there was also a little Chinese market downtown where I bought fansubbed bootlegs of Dragonball Z at $20 for 2-4 episodes. I paid $35 each for three of the movies Fusion reborn, Broly returns and Exploding Dragonfist.  Glad we have torrents now, it is a lot easier to watch a series and decide if it is worth the purchase as well as being able to see series that would never hit our shores.

[Neco]

Heh I'm still not done with episode one..

I wonder if it will take me more than a month, I can only stand working on this shit an hour or two at a time..  I'm on frame 29187 of 38862 (or maybe its 61, editors always seem to throw an extra frame onto the count for no reason)..

So far I have manually swapped 670 bad frames by hand

I am sooo close to just cropping as much as humanly possible and then doing quick swaps on stuff that gets past that shit..   Soo many things wrong with this video, ugh..   But I want to make a release for something we don't have, and Dirty Pair: Flash seems like a rare title these days.