Akazukin Chacha - 29 - Welcome to the Home of the Phoenix (H.264 Bluray 1080p)
Disks 3 onward of the Akazukin Chacha bluray set (episodes 21 - 74 + OVAs) fix some of the major issues seen in the first two disks, so I'm uploading one from the 3rd disk to better demonstrate what later episodes will look like. This is an upscale with various issues, but less serious than seen in disks 1 and 2.
Comments welcome. It's encoded to be as close to the source as possible.
Source: Akazukin Chacha 30th Anniversary Blu-ray box (original disks)
- Akazukin Chacha - 29 - Welcome to the Home of the Phoenix.mkv (1.2 GiB)
vaseline 😂
https://animetosho.net/view/695429
1 - DVD | BD 2 - DVD | BD 3 - DVD | BD
the colours and brightness are better now, although dark got too dark i can't believe people saw this and said "alright now let's burn them onto discs" such a shame that this is what we can get in modern times cos 100% they lost the original film of the series much like sailor moon's
This is how I feel after spending hundreds of dollars on the set (plus another 150 on a drive that could read disks so that I could rip them)
@zetsu_shoren Sailor Moon's original film reels are 100% NOT lost. They're in Toei's vault, one of the safest places in all of Japan for a film reel to be. The issue with Toei shows being upscaled on BDs in the past was that they remastered their entire film catalogue on an SD format in the mid 2000s and then didn't want to go through and redo that unless for actual movies. This has changed in recent years (almost all of their BDs in the last few years have been real HD remasters, iirc Harlock was the last upscale) but of course the Sailor Moon BDs are over a decade old, when they were still dead-set on using their SD masters, no matter how pink.
As for Akazukin Chacha, I'm not exactly sure but if I had to guess they did some editing during production on videotape so that their main master is on tape, and reconstructing it from film scans would be too much work to justify it given the potential sales of this show (tape editing shenanigans are the reason for most upscales of mid to late 90s shows). Which does not excuse this atrocity of a BD in the slightest, putting the existing master out on SD-BD (like e.g. Kodocha did) would have been a much better move. Though, this being from 1994, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not even tape issues, and it is just the publisher of this BD cheaping out. They clearly didn't care about video quality in the slightest here.
okay sorry i forgot if it was sailor moon or slayers, i remember reading a comment long ago mentioning that the BDs of either show are complete crap cos the studio lost the original film, of course the internet being what it is, i have no way no way to confirm it, i don't work at toei or eg film either, but he spoke about it with confidence which meant he must've known something i didn't since i'm just here to get some good quality shit 🤷♂️
Yeah ok E&G Film is a whole other kettle of fish. Complete crapshoot of a studio, long defunct, probably had tape shit all over their masters and may well have misplaced the reels (mislabeled reels in the wrong part of an archive is a classic way to "lose" a master, see Project A-ko, which was found by complete chance when Discotek was looking for something else, or Ariel, which only got a remaster when Tokyo Lab closed down and informed the original author that they still had the reels, which the producers had lost track of) or actually disposed of them.
Now whether they're actually lost, there's really no way to know, is there (the people making the BD certainly won't tell you "yeah we have all the film but we're cheap", and I doubt there's interviews with staff confirming the state of the masters). Most stories of masters or film reels being lost are made up in absence of any positive evidence, just based on the fact that no real remaster has been released. Sometimes that's because it's actually lost (Shining Heresy in the Votoms BD Box is based on tape because they were unable to locate the reels), sometimes it's because the companies are being cheap (Toei of yesteryear, that "4K AI remaster" of Dororo that's just the DVD badly upscaled), sometimes it's a rights issue that nobody has untangled, or even just some blockheaded rights holders (Golden Boy falls into this category iirc). Now, not a single show E&G has worked on has had a real remaster, so it's probably doomed regardless, but it's not 100% IMO. But in the meantime, better get to capping those LDs...
Eh... I'm deleting these. Download 'em by tomorrow if you want 'em. And returning the disks, too, if they'll let me.
at least now you have a drive you can use for actual good BDs in the future as a general rule, BD releases of old series are going to be shit
Yeah, but like everything except obscure old shows already have good releases here :p
maybe one day japan will learn how bluray works and those will have good releases too
@len absolutely not a general rule, unless you mean late 90s and 2000s shows exclusively. Tape editing and mixed analog-digital production ruin 90s stuff, low-res digipaint takes care of the 2000s. Meanwhile actual film rescans look stunning. This Akazukin Chacha BD is absolutely an anomaly in how fucked it is too.
a good 90% of the pre-2000s BDs i see uploaded to U2 or here look horrendous. you're going off the basis that japan does proper film rescans as a general rule, and unfortunately they don't. maybe one day japan will learn how bluray works
Still looks rather terrible, unfortunately. Drenched in vaseline and artifacts. The best source for this is probably the LDs, but nobody's going out and getting those, much less get them properly capped and encoded.