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The Mike Toole Show - Getting It Wrong


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ultimatemegax



Joined: 26 Jan 2010
Posts: 412
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 3:25 pm Reply with quote
One note about the Bandai K-On! release: it wasn't that the JP version had a 5.1 mix and the NA release was stereo, it's the authoring of the audio and replacement of a song in episode 1 that pissed people off.

Pony Canyon's release of K-On! in Japan had LCM stereo audio on both BD/DVD format. For this release, Bandai had Bang Zoom Entertainment author their BD/DVDs. For the DVD audio, Bang Zoom used the Dolby Digital codec to reduce the audio size while minimizing any changes in quality on DVD. This has been the standard for anime authoring on DVD. The problem is that they used the exact same audio codec for the BDs. BDs have a lot more space and can use lossless codecs like DTS Master Audio (Sentai/Funi) or Dolby True HD (other Bandai BDs). Instead, they used a lossy codec, giving the people who wanted a BD, due to the advantages it offered visually/audibly, an inferior product than the standard. It is not clear whether TBS (the international rights holder) gave Bandai lossy audio or whether Bang Zoom screwed up authoring the BDs.

The other issue people had with the K-On! release was the replacement of an instrumental song in both the Japanese and English audio. The song was Tsubasa wo Kudasai, a well-known track and likely had licensing issues in the US which Bandai didn't want to pay for.
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walw6pK4Alo



Joined: 12 Mar 2008
Posts: 9322
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 3:43 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
It just recently came out that the new Japanese blu-ray of the great Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie has some of the original's most violent scenes blurred or clipped. This bums me out, because everyone was cool with the movie's sometimes outrageous violence in 1984; what's so different 28 years later? I just pray that someday, somehow, this gem in the crown of the anime business gets the release it deserves.


It's also an ass-ugly BD. Better than the DVD, sure, but nowhere near the standards that one would expect of an HD transfer in 2012. The whole thing needs to be completely redone, at least get on the level of Bubblegum Crisis. The censorship change is either due to Kawamori becoming Lucas, or it has to do with the video game tie-in.
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IkariGendo



Joined: 05 May 2009
Posts: 102
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 3:45 pm Reply with quote
If I recall correctly the early Righstuf DVD releases had TV masters, Boogiepop had violent scenes switched to black and white and there was KareKano, missing a scene and a rather nice recap ep since it was the TV version.


For Fumoffu I have an old comparison handy:


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The Mad Manga Massacre



Joined: 15 Jul 2009
Posts: 1166
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 3:48 pm Reply with quote
With the NIS America titles I have I've noticed some technical difficulties with both of them. With the Katnagatari blu-ray I recall having difficulties though I can't recall what they were right now I think I remember someone saying the same difficulties were prevalent in the Arakawa blu-ray which was released at the same time. The only other one I can think of was with the NIS release of House of Five Leaves apparently there were some audio issues with the DVDs which came with the set but the set also came with replacements attached. I was considering getting the Interstella 5555 blu-ray but decided not to because of what I heard about it's quality.
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IkariGendo



Joined: 05 May 2009
Posts: 102
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 3:53 pm Reply with quote
NISA is really good with replacements and will ship internationally got my House of Five Leaves DVDs in the mail without a hassle.

There were complaints about Pandora since their release was I believe brighter than the R2J one? And some minor quirk on the Wagnaria, but that's really nitpicking. They did fudge ToraDora and Persona but they replaced those promptly.

Oh, wasn't Media Blasters jokingly called Mono Blasters? I remember there being an issue with Berserk DVDs.
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varmintx



Joined: 31 Jul 2006
Posts: 1200
Location: Covington, KY
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 4:06 pm Reply with quote
ultimatemegax wrote:
One note about the Bandai K-On! release: it wasn't that the JP version had a 5.1 mix and the NA release was stereo, it's the authoring of the audio and replacement of a song in episode 1 that pissed people off.

Pony Canyon's release of K-On! in Japan had LCM stereo audio on both BD/DVD format. For this release, Bandai had Bang Zoom Entertainment author their BD/DVDs. For the DVD audio, Bang Zoom used the Dolby Digital codec to reduce the audio size while minimizing any changes in quality on DVD. This has been the standard for anime authoring on DVD. The problem is that they used the exact same audio codec for the BDs. BDs have a lot more space and can use lossless codecs like DTS Master Audio (Sentai/Funi) or Dolby True HD (other Bandai BDs). Instead, they used a lossy codec, giving the people who wanted a BD, due to the advantages it offered visually/audibly, an inferior product than the standard. It is not clear whether TBS (the international rights holder) gave Bandai lossy audio or whether Bang Zoom screwed up authoring the BDs.

The other issue people had with the K-On! release was the replacement of an instrumental song in both the Japanese and English audio. The song was Tsubasa wo Kudasai, a well-known track and likely had licensing issues in the US which Bandai didn't want to pay for.
Your correction of the article is correct, but now I feel the need to correct you on a slight nitpick. Funimation uses TrueHD; Media Blasters is the other one that also uses DTS-MA.
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dtm42



Joined: 05 Feb 2008
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Location: currently stalking my waifu
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 4:44 pm Reply with quote
Anyone remember the crap-storm around Loups=Garous? It's hilarious in hindsight that a company could screw up that badly, but I don't think I was laughing at the time.
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tangytangerine



Joined: 28 Feb 2010
Posts: 439
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 4:44 pm Reply with quote
IkariGendo wrote:

For Fumoffu I have an old comparison handy:


I take it the first one is ADV's old release, is the second one Funimation's version? Oddly, like mentioned in the story, I didn't notice the problem with FMP due to watching it with SDTV until this was pointed out.

As for songs getting removed, Speed Grapher's opening theme song is another that should be pointed out. Funimation didn't want to pay for Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" and somewhat ruined the OP with the music they replaced it with.


Last edited by tangytangerine on Sun Aug 12, 2012 4:51 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Sakura Shinguji



Joined: 09 Feb 2005
Posts: 190
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 4:50 pm Reply with quote
The Miller's Report dub audio glitch was indeed fixed, Mike, and replacements were made available. I don't really want to take much credit for it, but I seemed to be the first one to notice it, and spent a bit of time one night with Jerry Chu on AIM (I don't know why that seems so quaint, but it does) discussing the problem. Oddly enough, I also apparently submitted a note to ANN about it at the time (there's another example of how quaint things used to be; look at how sparsely breaking news items were formatted!). animenewsnetwork.com/news/2002-03-21/miller%27s-report-dvd-glitche

A few other things:

The Spring and Chaos replacement program only involved sending in a copy of one's original purchase receipt; ergo, fans who purchased the early copies and opted to get them replaced should still have those early copies, bad video and all. If you really want some screencaps, I think I know where I socked away that old disc.

Manga's Wings of Honneamise DVD ended up looking awful because, among other things, they had attempted to take the letterboxed masters they already had and create an anamorphic widescreen master from them (which didn't go well), and because they also did attempt some sort of inverse telecine process (which also did not go well).

Fumoffu was the only installment of Full Metal Panic that suffered from the dot-crawl problem, but other releases are too numerous to mention. Part of the phenomenon, though, is directly attributable to a single Japanese company that we all know and love, Kadokawa; for several years, the masters they were sending to U.S. companies were all questionable composite masters, in another attempt to prevent reverse importation by ensuring that U.S. versions were inadequate in the video quality department. Examples include Fumoffu, Scrapped Princess, The Melody of Oblivion, and others from around that 2004-2006 time period. It was one major reason why Kadokawa's direct forays into the U.S. market were welcomed by some fans; the result was that that somehow made Kadokawa feel fine enough to not send wonky video materials over any more. Though now, of course, Kadokawa has discovered how to create new problems (i.e. longer mandated Blu-ray version delays).

And, as IkariGendo has already brought up, if you're going to talk audio errors, you definitely have to include the numerous mono audio discs that Media Blasters released about ten years ago. They're not the only ones to have done so, and it still sadly happens from time to time, but theirs was the most widespread and poorly addressed. Someone else probably has a complete list handy, but off the top of my head random volumes were affected from such series as Samurai Deeper Kyo, The Twelve Kingdoms, Mirage of Blaze, and, perhaps most egregiously (as a function of popularity), four of Berserk's six original DVD volumes. John Sirabella, in a somewhat misguided attempt at addressing the issue, would spend several years making random comments about how Media Blasters planned to replace the discs while possibly never having any realistic intention of doing so, thus generating quite a bit of ill will from fans who felt they were just being yanked around. The only official replacement to ever have been offered was for the first volume of The Twelve Kingdoms... and was discovered one summer by a con-goer at Media Blasters' vendor booth as some sort of stealth maneuver, though all subsequent online requests were honored.
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The King of Harts



Joined: 05 May 2009
Posts: 6712
Location: Mount Crawford, Virginia
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:04 pm Reply with quote
There's a pretty weird goof on the Maze OVA DVD from Central Park Media. It starts out with a narration by Maze and in the dub there's suddenly about 3 minutes of a pure silence before the show actually starts. After about a minute I'm thinking "WTF happened" because it's dead silent, but clearly the narration is still going on according to the animation. So I hit the audio button on my remote to see if it was silent in Japanese, and, yup, there was still narration going on, just not in the dub. It makes me real curious to what happened there. Was that part not dubbed? Did it get lost somewhere? Did the DVD encoder mess up?

On Star Driver BDs from Bandai there's incredibly annoying subtitle flickering whenever background text was translated. I think someone said something about how that's an inherent flaw of BD subtitling. I'm not sure how true that is since I've never noticed in any other BDs, but whatever, it doesn't make it any less annoying considering how much background test there is in the show and that all of it is translated. I guess we'll find out soon enough if it really is an inherent flaw when Aniplex releases Bakemonogatari since they've already confirmed they're translating the background text. Although, deep down, I hope they do an alternate angle or something and just cover up the background Japanese with English like the fansub group did. I mean, there will be so much unreadable text on that screen if they simply put notes at the top of the screen when there's already so much Japanese in the background. Then again, I don't watch anime because it's Japanese, nor do I really care about it being Japanese, so obviously I wouldn't have any problem with super imposing English replicas over those scenes since they're just text, though I'm 100% sure everyone else would erupt with so much rage at the same that the Earth would be slightly repositioned in orbit.

dtm42 wrote:
Anyone remember the crap-storm around Loups=Garous? It's hilarious in hindsight that a company could screw up that badly, but I don't think I was laughing at the time.

Lets not forget Tears to Tiara where they did the same thing by turning Rathy into a little boy even though she's a little girl. You know, maybe, possibly, in some alternate universe I could find it understandable to get a characters gender wrong since, like Mike said, they're human, but to do it a second time is unforgivable. I mean, honestly, if you don't know, ask the Japanese creators that you have direct access to instead of guessing. This is anime, it's never safe to guess a character's gender.
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nightjuan



Joined: 22 Jan 2008
Posts: 1473
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:13 pm Reply with quote
My favorite example would be how Manga Entertainment's release of the Macross Plus movie looks significantly worse than their release of the OVA series, since they apparently just took the VHS footage and blindly slapped it on the DVD without giving the matter a second thought. It's a real pity.

There's also a (fortunately) purely cosmetic issue with the OVA release, where one of the discs has been wrongly labelled as the "movie edition" yet actually has all of the correct content. Laughing
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penguintruth



Joined: 08 Dec 2004
Posts: 8461
Location: Penguinopolis
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:35 pm Reply with quote
I don't see the problem with Big O's second season biting the UFO theme song being any worse than biting Queen's Flash Gordon theme song (which is more iconic) for the first season's OP. Either replace both or neither, but don't mix and match.

And if it was a big problem, why didn't they remove that tune from within the show itself? It played a few times in the episodes themselves. I think you might have this wrong, Mike.
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Ggultra2764
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Joined: 21 Jan 2004
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Location: New York state.
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:43 pm Reply with quote
Probably the biggest example I can think of not mentioned would be with Escaflowne. The first seven episodes of the anime included additional scenes that had to be cut for time for their original televised airing in Japan yet were later restored on video release in the country. Here in America though, Bandai Entertainment only claimed rights to the televised version of Escaflowne meaning said additional scenes never made it over here stateside.
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NJ_



Joined: 31 Oct 2009
Posts: 3009
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 5:44 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
However, Toei Animation USA didn't really have that excuse when they entered the DVD race in 2005, foisting DVDs of Air Master, Slam Dunk, and Interlude at us. DVDs with hilariously bad subtitles, rushed, wooden dubs, and bizarrely few chapter stops.


In addition to all of that, they even went as far as to muting some of the Japanese dialogue in order to match the "subtitles". I used to own their DVD of Interlude and i compared the end of episode 2 to a fansub that was posted elsewhere because i knew something was odd when i saw it on the disc.
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trunkschan90



Joined: 08 Aug 2002
Posts: 592
Location: California
PostPosted: Sun Aug 12, 2012 6:05 pm Reply with quote
Another goof is when they had the Cyborg 009: Unedited and Uncut DVD, yet it really wasn't uncut because of a scene where 0010's dialogue was edited. When that particular episode aired on Toonami they left 0010's dialogue uncut "I'm your big brother from hell", but the uncut dvd had the edited dialogue "I'm your big brother gone bad" -_-
Sony really screwed up.
Also the packaging only lists the first 8 episodes but a screencap on the back package shows Artemis, a character that doesn't apper until I think episode 22 or 23.
The front cover also has the character of a cat girl cyborg who doesn't appear until episode 43


Also for the second boxset of Blood+ http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Part-Two-Kari-Wahlgren/dp/B002KPUMZ6/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
There seems to be problems like the last episode of the English dub after the ending credits isn't in english and the Japanese version has dubtitles.


Last edited by trunkschan90 on Sun Aug 12, 2012 7:54 pm; edited 1 time in total
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