[PPP-Raw] Joker - Marginal City

Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Joker - Marginal City 1/25/16

Moar like "Marginal Animation," amirite? Check out that neck action at 04:51!

Back in my pre-digital Lupin Gang Anime days, I was asked if I would subtitle this one. I got a raw VHS and had a gander - I decided it just wasn't for me. But clearly this title has fans.

I can tell you this much - the laserdisc was not mastered very well. It was very dark, very noisy, and somewhat jittery. Also, this title is "semi-letterboxed." If you'll notice, the Cyclone Inc. screen at the very beginning is full-screened, and then there are about 10 pixels of black bars at the top and bottom of the rest of the title. Why they would do such a thing is truly beyond me.

I tweaked the gamma, harder than I would normally care to. As a result, the de-noising led to some "banding" issues. You can only see them on the black screens - so, the title cards and the very first scene. There are also some weird aliasing issues that I just couldn't quite get a grip on (See: The semi-hoizontal crossbeam above Joker's head at around 00:50). I fixed the worst of the jitter, but as a result I had to "remake" the semi-letterboxing - otherwise the black bars would have been bouncing around, which would have been equally distracting. Plus, I didn't want to introduce distortions when I resized to 640x480.

In short - I did the best I could with this one. If somebody out there want to try to do better, I have, as always, included an untouched DVD conversion for archival purposes.