Forum - View topicNEWS: Japan's Animation DVD Ranking, December 7-13
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hissatsu01
 Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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Japanese packaging is far nicer than current US packaging. Chipboard boxes are pretty common (though often limited to being first press extras), while they've pretty much disappeared from US releases. Materials used in the packaging in general are higher quality (paper, printing, design, etc.) You can see pretty decent photos of the first 3 Bakemonogatari volumes' packaging at CDJapan: http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=ANZX-9451 http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=ANZX-9453 http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=ANZX-9455 Almost all releases in Japan are still singles with 2 or 3 episodes per disc. This probably has something to do with better quality audio/video. The Japanese approach to DVD encoding seems to have been just max out the bitrate since there's plenty of room to spare on the disc. This has carried over to Blu-ray where bitrates on most Japanese releases are in the 30s to over 40 mbps. Using constantly high bitrates doesn't guarantee high quality video, but it does make it a lot less likely that you'll screw thing up. In addition, most US DVD releases use interlaced video, while most R2 DVDs use progressive video. Uncompressed PCM audio on R2 DVDs is common while almost non-existent in the US. Even with Blu-ray, Funimation doesn't seem to know that uncompressed/lossless compressed stereo audio exists. There is a catch of course - price. Japanese releases typically cost 3x -5x what US releases do (and no subtitles). And you still have people whining that anime costs too much in the US. I await the first US anime release that consists of loose discs in a ziploc bag with a photocopied label on the bag. Seems to be the direction the market wants things to go.
Yes, I referred to the singles (Identical audio/video to R2 releases is what I've heard), but I didn't even know they did budget boxsets. Those don't sound so good. |
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Annf
Posts: 578 |
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Is that true? I was under the impression the opposite happened, that progressive compresses better and thus you wound up with some U.S. releases de-interlaced in order to fit more eps on the discs (and get problems like what happened to the opening animation in the U.S release of Last Exile). I guess we could survey our U.S. and Japanese disc collections and see how many are progressive or interlaced. 
One video issue I've noticed on U.S. releases is the video quality dropping in openings and endings when English credits are added. For example, on the U.S. release of This Ugly Yet Beautiful World, the video quality on the show is excellent, the video quality on the textless OP is excellent, but the OP-with-English-credits that plays before each episode looks horrible, like it was run through some kind of low-res filter.
There's still much usage of DD stereo even on Japanese DVDs, but I guess it's to save bitrate for video. 100% of the Japanese BDs I've gotten so far are PCM/lossless, though. (2ch BD thread-goers throw a fit and email-bomb companies any time audio specs are announced that aren't perfect. CC Sakura BD box was originally announced as 5.1. PCM & 2ch DD stereo. It was changed to 5.1. PCM & 2ch PCM with an official announcement that they re-investigated the audio and bitrates after receiving customer concerns.)
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hissatsu01
Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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Feel free to check. I'd guess 75-80% of US releases are interlaced. Most (or all) titles authored by Speedvd are progressive, but otherwise it's mostly interlaced.
This happened with a lot of ADV releases. Don't know why. Limitation of the equipment used? Incompetence? Both? |
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