Forum - View topicPromo Boxes
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10425 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Bandai recently sent out some screeners to reviewers in retail promo boxes. While not news, I thought some people might be interested in seing what the boxes look like...
Those eyeballs by the way are gum balls. Pretty tasty in fact. In addition to the gumballs the promo box includes a holographic card, a standard promo sheet and the DVD itself. 
This Box includes the regular Edition DVD, along with the Ultimate Edition Box, which includes the Feature DVD, the "extras" disc and the CD soundtrack, as well as of course the very nice Art Box. 
Last edited by Tempest on Wed Jun 19, 2002 5:02 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Jlbkwrm
Old Regular
Posts: 94 |
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Those're gorgeous.
And shiny. One question, though: Why include both versions of the Escaflowne movie? Since the standard version is apparently the first disc of the LE, it seems kind of bizarre. Are there actual differences, package artwork aside? |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4471 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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What flavour are the gumballs? Are they the white mint-ish flavour that you can get from mall gumball machines, or are they Strawberry Snowballs like Rain-Blo used to sell back in the 1980s?
Also, seeing the Escaflowne DVDs made me remember, did you notice at Metro Video there's a 3-disk box set with all 26 episodes of Escaflowne on DVD for just $50 Canadian? Before anyone cries "bootleg", I assure you these are fully licensed. The only catch... it's only the French-language dub (sans Japanese audio). Still, I gotta wonder how exactly they are able to cram 8 or 9 episodes on each disk. |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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Double layered DVDs. |
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Tenchi
Posts: 4471 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I was thinking about it a bit more last night, and that possibility occurred to me... or they could be "flippers" with 4 or 5 episodes on each side, or they might cut off the openings and endings for each episode, which, considering that the most episodes on a single Region 1 anime disk I've ever seen is 7, would make room for two additional episodes. |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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Well I already own the Escaflowne DVDs released by Bandai so it doesn't matter too much to me.
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10425 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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These promo boxes go to retailers who are trying to sell both versions of the DVD. Considering how cheap a DVD is, it's best for the manufacturer to include all the different versions, even if the only diff is the packaging. |
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Gai Super Napalm
 Posts: 148 Location: Hoboken, NJ |
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Low bit rate on a DVD-9, no doubt. Before I get into a completely sidetracked conversation about unlicensed dvd's from the Orient (i was/am very into video encoding techniques and standards), I'll take the time to say that those Escaflowne DVDs could either look virtually indistinguishable (or even mathematically indistinguishable) from the bandai ones, or they could look terrible. If they filled up a DVD-9 to capacity, then 8 - 9 eps per disc isn't really that bad.. but if its like the CCS HK dvds... *Note* I don't even own any "bootleg", "unlicensed", or what have you DVDs.. I have lots of experience with HK dvd "techniques" from 1. A vast collection of HK action and martial arts movies that a relative has and 2. A few friends who have hk anime dvds.. so please no crying about ethics or morals ^_^ Ok lets get it on. The unlicensed CCS HK disks are like, 9 eps per disk (i think the whole series comes out to like, 8 disks or something ludicrous), with only 5.7 gigs per disk. Thats about 600 megs per episode, give or take; where domestic anime companies usually encode at about 1 gig per ep. This produces quality somewhere between SVCD and DVD (if you've ever seen an SVCD for comparrison), which certainly doesn't look bad (since mpeg2 isn't too shabby a compression scheme, increasing the standard bitrate of an SVCD mpeg2 stream by 150% would increase quality quite a bit to the trained eye)... it isn't really worth spending money on in my humble opinion. *Note* There are a few things they could have done besides change the bit rate per say of the video stream to get it smaller. There are like, 10 different resolutions allowed in the DVD spec.. they could have lowered the coded frame size, or have only encoded the op/ed once per disc. I did the math back when I was checking out my friends box and decided to stick with the pioneer dvd's out for both quality and principle's sake. One thing that bothered me about those dvds though, was the size... 5.7 gigs per disc. The dvd standard sizes are 4.7, 8.54, and like, 18 on dual/dual. Why put 5.7 gigs on a disc? The fact that you're over 5 means you need to use a more expensive DVD-9 disc which most regular companies don't even justify the cost for.. But as a company who doesn't care to pay license fees, why take the time to either re-encode the japanese dvds at a lower bitrate (I'd assume they don't have any masters to .. well, master off of themselves) when you can add an extra disc to your set and then just basically copy the episodes straight from their discs to yours. Even still, re-encoding them at only slightly lower bitrate would allow you to keep the episode count but only lose some of the quality (probably un-noticeable even to strange people such as myself.. .5 gigs over 9 episodes).. I'm not sure how proud they are in their product but a law that proves true whether you pay for a license or not is the better your product, the more money you make. (well, its mostly true). It would have been easier and perhaps cheaper to just copy their dvds, and it would have been virtually un-noticeable to lower the bitrate only a little and keep the episode count, while not changing the overall cost of manufacture. So anyway, I think I answered your question somewhere in there. |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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Wow. This got really off topic.
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10425 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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There are two answers to this, one of which Cgoten partially touched upon. You can increase the capacity of a DVD by using double sided discs, dual layer discs or double sided dual layer discs (DVD10, DVD9 and DVD18). Theoretically each gig (4-5 gigs per layer) can hold 1 hour of video. But each layer is generally considered to be able to hold about 2 - 2.5 hours (2 gigs / hour) of good quality video. So a DVD 18 could hold over 8 hours of Video. Companies can also chose to cram even more onto the DVD by using more compression (DVDs use good old MPEG 2 compression technology). 8 episodes of Escaflowne, at 22 minutes is only 170 minutes of video, or just under 3 hours. A company could in fact chose to cram all that onto a single DVD5 (and sacrifice quality), but more than likely they used DVD9s; exactly as Cgoten said. |
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10425 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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This screen scrolling to read messages really sucks. I'm gonna shrink the 2 wider images.
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I already preordered the Escaflowne Ultimate Edition movie but is Betterman good?
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Tempest
I Run this place. ANN Publisher Posts: 10425 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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My Opinion of Betterman is here: animenewsnetwork.com/reviews/display.php?id=282
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Ataru
 Posts: 2306 Location: Missouri (Strikeman) |
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It's a good thing I preordered it.
Hopely Bandai still be the Working Design of Anime DVDs.
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Gai Super Napalm
Posts: 148 Location: Hoboken, NJ |
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I always thought of Animeigo as the working designs of anime dvds... |
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