What are the best and worst anime Blu-Ray transfers?

What are the best and worst anime Blu-Ray transfers?

The recent Viz Sailor Moon sets

were among the worst

>Any old Disney film transfer to DVD or bluray, I'm not sure how the Ghibli films look though.
>Sailor Moon
>Haibane Renmei

>Best
Outlaw Star, Escaflowne
>Worst
FLCL

Oh, god, can we talk about Funimation and DBZ for a minute? They've been consistently fucking it up for over ten years. The only good home release is Kai, with the Dragon Boxes being a close second.

We've had:
>Pioneer single-disc sets
>Funimation single-disc sets
>"Unlimited Uncut Edition" (Saiyan Saga Only)
>Orange Boxes
>Dragon Box sets
>"Level" BDs (Saiyan Saga Only)
>"Remastered" BDs

The Pioneer release was shit because it was cut, the Funi release was actually okay. The UUE wasn't bad, either, but the Orange Boxes were a fucking travesty. The image was cropped to be 16:9 with absolutely no consideration for the image. The blues were pushed to all shit and the contrast was increased, making everything looks washed out as fuck. Then the image was blurred to get rid of grain and individual frames were blended together in an attempt to smooth out animation.

The result was shit. It was all shit all-round. The stills looked like shit, the animation looked like shit, 20% of the vertical image was lost and we only got like 5% of the horizontal image. The company that did the remaster hired a guy that, at the time, had only ever done editing on porn.

The Dragon Box is nearly perfect but lacks the dub OST option. The Level sets are based on the Dragon Box masters and the "Remastered" BDs are based on the orange bricks.

Pic related, it's the orange brick.

But how do DVD transfers compare to Blu?
I'm asking because I've heard that some bluray releases are upscales and look worse than the DVD counterpart.

Anything that's been QTEC'ed and upscaling SD shows from the early 2000's are all pretty terrible

The Aria sets weren't as good as I thought they would be.

I've heard people say Aria wasn't a good bluray release.

Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny. To be fair, the anniversary reairing George Lucas'd it so the DVD releases are the way to go. Mechs designs and music aside, not a good show in general.
Any screenshots?

Eva's were pretty bad.

Either the film scans they were working with were a decade old, or the remaster was purposefully made to have the same flaws as the DVD.
It's a mystery but they look pretty bad. Not terrible, though.

Don't have the screenshot but scene with the sparkling water whilst Kaoru and Yukishiro speak in the Kenshin OVA looks amazing on blu-ray.

Take it from me, somebody who bad every Orange brick set, a day does not go by where I do not regret buying these pieces of shit. I wish I had bought the dragon box sets instead but at the time I didn't have any spare cash. Unfortuneatly those things were limited print and now wer're stuck with the rest of the shit you mentioned.

Kai isn't even fully released in the states yet and it's not the complete DBZ anime - just chopped up to be more similar to the manga.

I fucking hate Funimation. You'd think they'd treat the one anime that saved them as a company with respect.

The blue brick sets of Dragon Ball were decent from what I recall, I only take issue with them taking out some insert songs because they couldn't get the licensing. Also the green GT bricks seemed fine as well.

Here is Sailor Moon and the R1 DVD off my shelf. Yes, they are pillarboxed

...

I hear Higurashi was awfully sharpened.
Aria got remastered?

I think the platinum edition of NGE was ok.

is this really amongst the worst? I've seen way worse. This looks passable.

I'm a faggot for saturated colours and think, if the were done well, I'd be OK with it. As for the widescreen shit, isn't possible to remaster an anime for widescreen with cropping? Hell, isn't it easier with cel anime as opposed to digital? How does live action get away with it?

Schemmel just finished recording for the Buu saga, and I'm pretty sure he said he was the last one, so that should be coming out pretty soon hopefully.

But yeah, seriously. Just look at this shit. Apparently the BDs are marginally better, but you're still losing ~15% of the picture and the picture itself is still mostly shit.

Just a picture for the OP since DBZ remasters are pretty controversial. Think both the Predator remasters for Blu ray and the Silent Hill HD collection, although nothing compares to how fucked Silent Hill was.

It'd be better if the saturated colors didn't also crush blacks or drown out all of the colors with white (inconsistently throughout the sets).

The cropping can and has worked. The TV broadcast and Japanese DVD release of Kai were in 16:9 and were remastered frame-by-frame, meaning that you didn't end up with frames where half of the casts's heads were cut off or face shots where you couldn't see the mouth or eyes.

In the standard practice of inconsistently releasing DBZ, the Japanese BD release of Kai as well as every US version of Kai was in 4:3, as opposed to the Japanese broadcast and DVD 16:9.

I will never understand the hate people have for black bars
do people really hate them that much that they'd buy a version with less picture?

Try watching a pillarboxed 4x3 DVD or Bluray on a 16x9 screen

>In the standard practice of inconsistently releasing DBZ, the Japanese BD release of Kai as well as every US version of Kai was in 4:3, as opposed to the Japanese broadcast and DVD 16:9.

forwhatpurpose.jpg

Similarly, the Japanese broadcast of Buu saga Kai has a weird piss-yellow tint and is a different cut than every other version of Buu saga Kai (which was funded by Nicktoons and Funimation because of Z Kai's high ratings), since they had to rush to re-cut it to have it replace the rest of Toriko's run and have it wrap up in time to be replaced by Dragon Ball Super.

Your best bet for a good restoration is Dragon Ball Kai after 2012 (because the original composure for Kai's music sucks ass)

The restored Dragon Ball Z blu-rays that came out, are essentially the exact same things as the Orange Box's but with more fucking contrast so its dark and bright as shit, the cropping still exists.

The Dragon Box tricked a lot of people, cause it was around the same as the orange box, and people thought "this is more funimation bullshit isnt it" similar to Dragon Ball Kai seasons coming out, and then Level 1.1 1.2 then Dragon Ball Kai season 1 again.

Funimation is fucking retarded.
Dragon Boxes are ultra expensive.
Even torrents suck.
The best 1080p torrent out there has the first 50 episodes in english only with the shit music, then it switches to dual audio with good music.

Everything else is unseeded, or shit tv rips.

Buying the Kai sets is equally as bad, $31 for multi dvd/bluray and theirs plenty to buy but its not even finished in America.

the best bdrips i ever got were some spanish dudes from /t/ but he didn't make it to the cell saga.

then something happened where he didn't like that other groups were releasing it too so he stopped, so i don't have any good BDs starting at the end of namek

I do all the time
it doesn't bother me as much as cropping does, in fact it doesn't bother me at all

>old Disney movie
Tiggered

>special blur-ray edition
that's not a typo

Some shows were mastered at standard definition, so they'll look bad when upscaled

did Funi really release that

Why would they do this.

You can't look at this and say, hey, it looks better now.

Haibane Renmei Complete Edition DVD from Funimation. It's actually pretty good I think.

I think they did this with Sword in the Stone, Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood, and Sleeping Beauty.
The dvds I have of the Rescuers and Down Under are pillarboxed too.

bost coalgirls rip :DDD

This is from the DVDs off my shelf.

Yeeep.

That can't be real. God, not even the old VHS I had looked as bad as this.

Because people will buy it anyway, for their kids, and the kids won't give a flying fuck how it looks.

Disney don't have to care about how it looks, so they don't.

Every time they do one of these "zoom it in a little and remove the grain" jobs, I die a little bit inside. The amount of detail/color lost is depressing. Even more so that people buy it and think it looks great. Cowboy Bebop has one of these too. Pure dog shit.

Any moment with shaking or quick movement (ie: every moment) has this bleed-in effect where the lines just stop existing because technically two frames are being blended together due to the remastering process.

Bukkake Vegeta, faceless SSJ Goku, mouth-foaming Nappa and space panties Bulma are probably the best examples of this.

Its weird because the Hulu uploads of their SM re-release have been good so far.

That's one severe haloing you got there.

The Aria DVDs are solid to my eyes.

>cutting off massive chunks from the top and bottom because 4:3 can't be HD
>passable

And the Bluray sets continue to sell because
>"I want it to fill the whole screen!"

>Cowboy Bebop
I have the dvds from FUNI, they're not bad.

I still have yet to buy any blurays. I don't mind 480p

Video game companies do the same.

i just love grain/cel edges from older series

new BDs for the most part are just adding nipples or not adding nipples like pic related

>Aria
Why would you watch that? It has no plot except the general moe "hurr durr cute things are cute"

shidposting :-DD

yu yu hakusho blu rays are GOAT

You're thinking of K-on. Aria's charm is in the beauty of life and Neo-Venezia. Non Non Biyori is like that too.

but it actually improves for the games...

but that's just swapping out the digitized sprites of the actual artwork for the actual artwork

It's literally an upscale.

Aria or Higurashi?

I wish they did a good 4:3 release once and for all. I want to see it as it was conceived, not a cropped version.

>Disney
Looks pretty good considering its a 1967 film

what the fug

They charge a premium price for their blurays too

Trust and betrayal should be an example of how remasters should be done

The new one is better because it doesn't fill my screen with autism bars. Besides, it feels weird watching things from before you were born. This is much better.

it's just a prank bro. Nobody thinks like this. Calm the fuck down.

>Nobody thinks like this

Unfortunately they do, that's the entire problem.

That's a good one Sup Forums.

who are you quoting

Is there a problem with doing this? I've never noticed anything wrong.

g gundam better be good

wtf is "level set" ?

Both

ashamed to say I hadn't noticed that yet. That does make it a more glaring issue than I hard originally seen it as indeed.

Funi's original series of DBZ blurays. Lasted two volumes before getting canceled in favor of that garbage on the right.

>Lasted two volumes before getting canceled in favor of that garbage on the right.
WHAT WHY???????? are gooks fucking blind?

Funi user. Americans are retarded. Muh non-grain 16:9.

WHAT DO CASUALFAGS HAVE AGAINST GRAIN????? FUCK

>Funi
>gooks
What

"It looks old".

Yes, seriously.

I was assuming the decision was made by gooks and not Funi, since Funi had first decided to do it the right way, and then stopped

It's too distracting for their brain apparently is what I gather.

No, it was all Funi. They cited "cost-effectiveness" and "audience expectancy" as their reasons.

Toei had nothing to do with it, and were putting out Dragonball Kai in 4:3 on Bluray at the same time Funi did this.

I'm a photographer, and I also fucking rage against my "fellow photographers" who go nuts with the noise removal filters, making everything look like shit

Same with people who use all those smudge filters for old emulator games.

>The Dragon Box is nearly perfect but lacks the dub OST option.

Is there a way to make an audio version compatible with dragon box?

There was one release of DBZ I found that had dub OST in it, but it was 16:9 so eventually I deleted it.
Kinda regret that now, wonder if the audio can be synced up.

EoE was pretty grody looking. On an HDTV it's alright, but up close you really see the muddiness and outright damage on the film.
Here's a snap from the blu ray.

Sprites will always looks better

oh nice, ghosting

Here's an approximation of the actual cel used to film that frame. The entire frame is a blurry mess in the finished film, looking very 480p.

Anymore EoE cells? This looks awesome

there is/was a huge cell thread on Sup Forums a while ago with some eva ones

To the archives it is.

here you go

I think I heard once that the reason Funimation keeps releasing DBZ in cropped widescreen is that it just sells more than the 4:3 releases.

Every Miyazaki film I've seen has had a great BD transfer.

...

Bebop's BDs were great remasters, except for the shots with digital effects, which had to be upscaled.

Because people are stupid and I've checked the Funi forums and mindsets like actually exist and dominate those discussions.
It's disgusting.

The grain has its charm.