Streaming services in Japan are republishing classic anime series and movies in record quantities, often in high definition, sometimes remastered. That's good news for fans of old anime, because many of these shows have been unavailable or available only on imperfect sources like VHS tapes, laserdiscs, or hastily mastered DVDs. For example, the streaming source for the original Laughing Salesman looks vastly better than the DVD box set.
However, the streaming raws can also have problems. Sometimes, the high-definition stream is just an upscale of an old laserdisc or DVD, with no attempt at remastering. They result looks grainy and crude, with thick, jagged lines and blotched textures. Sometimes, the streaming service skimps on bandwidth. This introduces blocking and other artifacts. And sometimes, the streaming raw has encoding mistakes - incorrect frame rates (29.97 fps instead of 23.976 fps) or unnecessary black borders.
Orphan has a pile of high-definition raws for shows it has already released, but many of them have issues that introduce problems in the subtitling process:
So I have a question to my readers (all three of you): would you like to see high-definition releases of our past shows, even if the raws have black bars or look terrible? Or should Orphan hold out for properly encoded/cropped raws? Of course, if we had a few more encoders, this would not be an issue...However, the streaming raws can also have problems. Sometimes, the high-definition stream is just an upscale of an old laserdisc or DVD, with no attempt at remastering. They result looks grainy and crude, with thick, jagged lines and blotched textures. Sometimes, the streaming service skimps on bandwidth. This introduces blocking and other artifacts. And sometimes, the streaming raw has encoding mistakes - incorrect frame rates (29.97 fps instead of 23.976 fps) or unnecessary black borders.
Orphan has a pile of high-definition raws for shows it has already released, but many of them have issues that introduce problems in the subtitling process:
- Incorrect frame rate. The high-definition Sangokushi movie streams are at 29.97 fps. This can't be correct: the originals were movies and must have been created at 23.976 fps. The incorrect frame rate not only bloats the encode, it also wrecks all the motion-tracked typesetting. Because the Sangokushi movies required months of typesetting, this is a big deal, at least for me as the typesettter. So far, no one has been willing to re-encode them back to the proper frame rate.
- Lack of cropping. The high-definition raws for the Nine OVAs are at the correct frame rate but are not cropped. The first OVA has been released as though it were a wide-screen movie, with horizontal black bars to achieve the movie aspect ratio of 1.85:1 instead of the HD standard of 1.77:1. The second and third OVAs are square but have been padded with vertical black bars to widen the 1440 x 1080 resolution to 1920 x 1080. In both cases, this wrecks the typesetting from the laserdiscs, which are 4:3.
- Ugly upscaling. The original high-definition releases of all the 60's Toei animation films appear to be simple upscales of DVD sources. They look terrible at 1080p and need to be downscaled to 720p to be tolerable, as was done for Wan Wan Chuushingura. (Toei is now remastering some of its best known titles, like Horus and Hakujaden; we'll see if they keep going.)
