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ANNCast - It's A Little Bit Funi, This Feeling Inside

yes but they are also not that big of a problem. and therefore should not be triggering this level of nerd rage.

I have little doubt they could have done better had they re-organized their resources where it matters most (ie: the discs). Charge me another ten dollars and use a pair of dual-layer discs, please.

Kakugo wrote:

I have little doubt they could have done better had they re-organized their resources where it matters most (ie: the discs). Charge me another ten dollars and use a pair of dual-layer discs, please.

Those are not AVC compression artifacts. More disc space would not have helped (and 75 GB is more than enough for that many episodes - average would've been > 25 Mbps and most of that show barely even moves). Something happened in the production pipeline somewhere.

I'm surprised that no one asked if the dubs of Future Diary or Guilty Crown are currently in production.

I AM THE VAST UNIVERSE wrote:

I'm surprised that no one asked if the dubs of Future Diary or Guilty Crown are currently in production.

Manga have licensed Guilty Crown for the UK which means they are confident it will be getting dubbed, especially since they are (or were) hoping to do it on BD. Kaze have licensed Future Diary and the same probably applies.

Huh, so more bitrate wouldn't have helped with the banding problem even a little? I guess the problem is bad enough that more bitrate wouldn't have helped.

EDIT: Regarding the whole Lain re-release controversy, let me just say that I find it funny that so many people are ready to throw FUNimation under a bus so quickly regarding this particular issue with the video, and yet when Aniplex of America releases Durarara!! out on bluray WITHOUT a separate subtitles track for on-screen text (despite the fact that the DVD release had one), hardly anyone complains or says anything more than "Aww, that's too bad," despite it costing three times what the Lain set costs.

I have all the Geneon singles for Lain. Wasn't going to double dip, but now I think I will after hearing about the art book and packaging. An art book is my very favorite form of extra-premium-swag.

I've never actually seen Serial Experiments lain. I know how big a series it is and I would love to see it...but this Blu-ray problem may prevent me from doing so. Regardless of what Zac says, I've seen the screenshot comparisons and the problem is evident. Really though, as the Blu-ray.com review for this show points out, the real problem is the brightness setting. It's so much brighter overall than the Japanese release that the banding, which was already prevalent in the Japanese release, becomes so much more obvious in the US release.

This was my first Funimation purchase since August of last year, and I thought that they were turning a corner and showing that they can make a quality, collectable release. I guess not.

I feel bad for Funimation, but if the outpouring of emotion improves video quality going forward then I'm glad all of the technically-minded fans are suddenly piping up and offering advice on how to prevent nasty video for future anime BDs. A lot of the criticism has been extremely constructive in tone.

God help them if someone else on staff prints some of that crap up and makes them address it in a meeting or something.

Ingraman wrote:

This was my first Funimation purchase since August of last year, and I thought that they were turning a corner and showing that they can make a quality, collectable release. I guess not.

That's more than a bit hyperbolic. The vast, vast majority of Funi releases are problem-free, and a handful are better than the JP imports. You just don't hear about the problem-free ones.

And remember, if the source material is already screwed, any compression you add to it can only make it look the same or worse. So no, more bandwidth wouldn't have helped even slightly.

But that's the anime business for you. Screw up something technical on a high-profile release, and there will be a never-ending parade of nerds immediately rushing to rub your nose in it. Makes working in this industry very unpleasant sometimes.

Black levels are also nowhere near as set in stone as fans seem to think they are -- Japanese NTSC spec puts it at 10 IRE higher than North American equipment, but in HD some masters follow that spec and some don't.

Tone, perhaps, but it's pretty clear to me that very few of them can do anything other than point and shout, "BANDING!! NO BUY!!" The number of fans offering "advice" who clearly have no clue what they're talking about is giving me a headache.

I can only imagine what it's doing to Funi's production staff.

Maybe they should, with the lead-off question "Should we have told paying customers about this issue on the box?"

Here's the thing: You're knowledgeable because it's what you do. For average consumer, we're in the dark about these products. FUNimation's been under fire for its upscaled products as well, in rare cases seemingly doing more damage than had they just let bluray players handle the upscale.

While I wouldn't avoid a purchase knowing this, it has been established not all products are the same. Some 480 just looks bad because it is 480, not necessarily the result of upscale loss.

One more question: any reason this information isn't stored in the Encyclopedia? I would think it would be very useful to people to look this stuff up, which isn't easy to do other than reading "BANDING! NO BUY!" blogs.

Perhaps two categories: source resolution (if applicable, since film has no resolution) and bluray resolution. A field for audio/visual issues would also be helpful.

Also, this particular issue can be nearly impossible to spot on some types of TVs -- plasmas and rear projection displays can be very forgiving.

But that department is already insanely busy (did you see how many discs they're releasing this month?? I can't IMAGINE doing that many at once!!)

I would like to write some video nerd stuff for ANN, but as I've mentioned on ANNCast, it's really hard to tell how many people would read it, and boiling down these topics enough to be understandable by total novices would be really challenging. I need to investigate the demand a lot more before I would attempt something so time consuming.