DYRL BD Remaster - the Good.......and the BAD.

[Einherjar]

Just a thought - if Shoji Kawamori and the rest were the Japanese equivalent of George Lucas, shouldn't there be a ton more unnecessary releases of DYRL and the like with superficial changes as the staff does little to no new work beyond that?

[Johnomaton]

So you're the puppet master, are you?

Sans sexy nineties cyborg shell...

Edited August 2, 2012 by Johnomaton

[xrentonx]

Sans sexy nineties cyborg shell...

Hahah, man, that's the best kind too!

[Jonias]

Sat down to watch my Limited Edition set the other night. Was only going to skip to my favorite parts but ended up watching the whole movie. Previous posters are correct: Some scenes are so crystal clear they are an absolute joy to watch, but there are frequent scenes where parts are out of focus or strangely grainy - not unlike the process they used in the Zeta Gundam New Translation movies. The transfer/re-master process really is somewhat disappointing in that regard. Overall, it's almost as if the last HD Remaster DVD has a more even quality...

And as for the blurring out of the decapitation scene, it really is something of a jarring cut, felt strangely out of place.

The opening text scroll in the new edition is also pointless. Instead of the minute long silence before Bretai starts talking, there is a short text scroll to bring the viewer up to speed on what happened before the movie started - and it basically said the Earth has already been decimated when the Macross made the fold to escape. So much for the surprise of finding the Prometheus.

As for the film strip, I STILL can't tell what scene it's from after looking at it many times : ( You would think I have the whole movie committed to memory by now (First watched this in its original theater run in 84!).

Lots of posts from the last few months on people's experiences on pre-ordering this. When I tried to pre-order the Limited Edition was sold out everywhere (CDJapan, Ami-ami, etc) and the only place that has them was Amazon.jp, and they wouldn't ship this overseas. I ended up trying Tenso.com which is a service that can act as your Japan address for orders and then they forward it to you. Arrived in the US around 3 days after Amazon shipped it in Japan, pretty painless experience.

[Strumvogel]

It might be too little, too late but there seems to be a concerted effort on the part of a number of small retail associations - and, which is more critical a couple of major players, such as Animate and Yodobashi Camera - addressing the complaints they have received to their Bandai reps.

It might not have any effect this time, but the ostrich has had its head pulled from the sand and slapped by a not inconsiderable number of, normally quiescent fans...

One chap, who posted to the retail forum to which the Missus subscribes commented on the seemingly random, and subjective nature of the edits as well. He found the, now infamous head-stomp few less shocking than Milia melting the face off one Zenty (not editted) or fabulous swan-song of Roy (gunpod to the spine, blood to the visor)... He further commented on the disturbing nature of even this minor revisionism (and yes, he did cite Lucas) as an unnecessary meddling with an already established cultural product - though his comparing it to book-burning went into hyperbole...

I just hope that the momentum (personal and industry) keeps up here, because Josey Wale's famous saying applies all over the World and at all times:

"Don't p*** down my back, then tell me it's raining!"

Thanks for keeping us in touch on that side of thing nautilus. At the every least we know that Bandai-Namco and Kawamori is getting a clear message that what they did is very stupid, causing some loss of sales as well as unhappy fans and retailers.

-snip-

Translation: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Heh. That actually works for me, though it's not something I'd actually send. It's just one of those things you'd write just to vent your frustration and immediately delete.

That and for a laugh.

[eugimon]

just got my copy and watched the opening sequence...

video 2/5. Holy crap it's inconsistent. From blurry to razor sharp every other scene. It's jarring and frequent. Some shots look like it was done on purpose as one thing will be in focus and other stuff won't be but it's doesn't make any sort of sense as to what is and what's not. If it were done on purpose you would expect the main subject to be in focus, like... hikaru's face. But there will be a scene and hikaru's face will be blurry while his hand will be in focus. Then it will switch to whatever and switch back and now the entire scene is razor sharp. There's lots of screen jitter as well from the minute inconsistencies of where the original plates were in relation to the fixed camera.

Unfortunately, a lot of these soft scenes are iconic moments, like when max pulls the zentradi pilot out and shoots him in the face .

audio 3/5

The remixed track is pretty good. The LFE track is robust but honestly, there's a lot of sounds that were just recorded poorly originally and there's not much to be done about it. Most of the audio is still front and center and they really didn't utilize the surrounds effectively. A decent job but not great.

Overall... it's better than before but it pales compare to the sort of restoration and update jobs that Disney gives the Studio Ghibli movies. I wouldn't say I'm happy with it and certainly not for what I paid for it... like I said, compared to the restorations that other movies have received, this one is sadly lacking and the jarring frequencies of the inconsistent IQ makes it really hard for me get lost in the movie.

Would I recommend it? Do you LOVE DYRL? If yes, then yeah... go for it. It's better than ever. But if you're just a casual fan or if poor IQ really gets to you... I have a really hard time recommending this.

[Johnomaton]

Thanks for the frank assessment eugimon. I never trust "all praise" reviews of products; nothing is perfect, but if we're lucky the flaws aren't deal-breakers.

[takatoys]

Sad to hear about the blurry scenes in almost all the movie. I was expecting the best quality being a blu-ray disc.

[Johnomaton]

Sad to hear about the blurry scenes in almost all the movie. I was expecting the best quality being a blu-ray disc.

Just keep in mind this is nothing new; people have observed these discrepancies in every release of DYRL prior to the BD. The deal with the BD is that because some scenes were poorly shot compared

to others, the difference is all the more noticable with the higher resolution. It's just as much a part of DYRL as Itano's schlocky fatalities, and there's nothing to be done beyond reanimating the film.

[xrentonx]

^^^

e:f,b what he said

Sad to hear about the blurry scenes in almost all the movie. I was expecting the best quality being a blu-ray disc.

I think that's just the way the movie was "shot" though because quality wise blu-ray is still better than what we had before (unless you own a projector and own the actual film reels). It's just that the flaws do show up a little better now due to the "clearer" resolution.

Edited August 3, 2012 by xrentonx

[eugimon]

Just keep in mind this is nothing new; people have observed these discrepancies in every release of DYRL prior to the BD. The deal with the BD is that because some scenes were poorly shot compared

to others, the difference is all the more noticable with the higher resolution. It's just as much a part of DYRL as Itano's schlocky fatalities, and there's nothing to be done beyond reanimating the film.

thanks that's good to know. So unless they can find the original plates and reshoot 3/4 of the movie, DYRL will never have a proper HD transfer. That's pretty sad.

[xrentonx]

thanks that's good to know. So unless they can find the original plates and reshoot 3/4 of the movie, DYRL will never have a proper HD transfer. That's pretty sad.

It's a pretty proper HD transfer already (in 1080p anyway). It's just that we can't go back in time and have them reshoot with what we know now. Believe me, years from now when we have video screens that can display in 4K resolution or something crazy, we'll be saying the exact same things.

[nautilus]

"Them young Whipper-snappers", we'll say. "They don't know they have it so good. When I were a lad, all we had was one camera-copied BETAMAX of 'Do You Remember, Love?' to share between an entire club. At least, I think it was Macross. There was so much snow on the screen that it could have been an episode of Emerdal Farm and no-one would have been any the wiser..."

And anyway, you know that in another few years, Bandai are going to hire Michael bay to do to our beloved what he did to Transformers...

Edit: ....... I'll get me coat!

Edited August 3, 2012 by nautilus

[sharky]

there's nothing to be done beyond reanimating the film.

There's an idea. Why the heck not? Don't they record the voice acting first anyway and sync the animation to the voices? So, they wouldn't need to re-record the voices, right?

[russ869]

Lots of posts from the last few months on people's experiences on pre-ordering this. When I tried to pre-order the Limited Edition was sold out everywhere (CDJapan, Ami-ami, etc) and the only place that has them was Amazon.jp, and they wouldn't ship this overseas. I ended up trying Tenso.com which is a service that can act as your Japan address for orders and then they forward it to you. Arrived in the US around 3 days after Amazon shipped it in Japan, pretty painless experience.

I did this as well. Had to go get it from the post office, but it worked great!

And about the inconsitent video quality from scene to scene, it totally doesn't bother me. If you'd bought a lot of Honneamise releases of 80s and 90s movies on BD like me than you'd be used to that already. (Heck just look at the Ghost in the Shell or Spriggan BDs if you want to see shifting levels of quality). It's definitely miles better than any DVD. If you watch the HD theatrical trailers on the Flashback 2012 BD you can see that the same scenes that are blurry in the movie are blurry in the trailers which indicates to me that that's just how they were photographed. (It does seem like the photography for this movie was produced a little sloppily but no amount of remastering is going to be able to fix it now). Overall I'm incredibly happy with this release (except for the edits).

Edited August 3, 2012 by russ869

[Johnomaton]

There's an idea. Why the heck not? Don't they record the voice acting first anyway and sync the animation to the voices? So, they wouldn't need to re-record the voices, right?

I'm really not all that bothered by the inherent production flaws; I view trying to actually alter the materials as rather unnecessarily invasive. it's this sort of mentality that Kawamori probably shouldered in making his alterations, and it's really plastic surgery gone too far. Serial Experiments Lain is possibly the only instance I can think of where something so drastic is quite welcome and commendable; I still pause at the thought of losing the original, but it is so sophisticated and clearly guided by the central creative forces of the original that it's not that troublesome. DYRL isn't like Lain. Considerably more time has passed and would pass before a hypothetical reproduction, and the original creative forces were fairly diverse; not only are we minus the late Ishiguro, but who's to say that Itano and Kawamori would or could work together? It's also no secret that the floodgates on Kawamori's shall we say, ideology, have really opened since; I'm sure Itano has changed too. Further, the original DYRL material is not SO bad. Despite a considerable amount of out of focus material, there is good stuff in there too.

Even if only the problematic scenes are tackled by artists trying to make a carbon copy with archaic production methods, they still might not be able to make something that looks authentic to the source. Moreover, if they were to muster the forces necessary to do so much work, they might as well remake the thing or just create something new altogether. "Fixing" something is necessarily a delicate procedure, and I'm not sure the potential benefits would justify the costs,especially if something new could be had instead.

Edited August 3, 2012 by Johnomaton

[treatment]

Yeah.

The BD quality is disappointingly uneven.

About 80% good and 20% crap due to the seemingly every-other-scene-softness/off-focusness and the damn stupidly unnecessary "director's-cut" blur-edits. Thought the BGM-edit wouldn't bother me as much, but it sure damn well did.

:sigh:

DYRL-BD could've been alot more awesome and alot better than this recent effort.

Just hoping that BandaiVisual do a much better job on the inevitable Macross Plus Blu-Ray editions.

add:

you know, it would be really interesting to find out the stats on how many in Japan canceled their pre-orders and/or return the BD for refunds.

Edited August 4, 2012 by treatment

[nghia59]

Well guys I just got my BD and watched it front to back. The edits are annoying as I liked them the way they were because those small snippets of gore are a sign of the 80's sensibility. It was kind of prevalent in the Megazone 23 and BGC series and was just part of the styling back then. It was a shame to lose them even if its just a case of losing a bit of history. The rest of DYRL though bugs the hell out of me for technical reasons. Man, you'd think that if you're gonna' remaster something like Macross: DYRL that it would have at least looked more professional. The disparaging differences in image quality from shot to shot it just awful. There are some shots that are as clear as day and you might mistake looking at them as the actual cells, but most other shots were grainy as hell and still others looked like a bootleg VHS frame from the 80's. The game sucks too. But all the other stuff was cool.

Just my personal take.

- Nghia

Edited August 6, 2012 by nghia59

[TMBounty_Hunter]

Man, you'd think that if you're gonna' remaster something like Macross: DYRL that it would have at least looked more professional.

They remastered it the best they could. Those flaws are in the original film. To fix that you need a restoration instead of a remaster.

[nghia59]

They remastered it the best they could. Those flaws are in the original film. To fix that you need a restoration instead of a remaster.

They have software that can fix all that stuff these days. And I do believe that remastering means restoring.

- Nghia

[nautilus]

It is true that DYRL was only 'remastered', and not restored.

Bandai paid to put the best original print they could find through a frame-by-frame cleaning process to create a new digital master print. Not cheap, to be sure, but still not as expensive as a full restoration. The downside is that whatever flaws remained in the print would be in the new master.

Restoring, like the name implies would have involved going back to the original negatives, making corrections at that stage and doing some serious work on the bad sectors. I believe that it is technically possible, but I do not think that Bandai are willing to dig that deeply into the pockets.

The easiest way to sell old stuff is to re badge it 'remastered' and hope we all confuse it with 'restored'.

[Keith]

There is no actual official distinction between "remastering" and "restoring."

[Vifam7]

It is true that DYRL was only 'remastered', and not restored.

Bandai paid to put the best original print they could find through a frame-by-frame cleaning process to create a new digital master print. Not cheap, to be sure, but still not as expensive as a full restoration. The downside is that whatever flaws remained in the print would be in the new master.

Restoring, like the name implies would have involved going back to the original negatives, making corrections at that stage and doing some serious work on the bad sectors. I believe that it is technically possible, but I do not think that Bandai are willing to dig that deeply into the pockets.

Probably would've been money and time better spent than hiring Kawamori, making those dumb edits, and producing a lame ass game.

IMHO

Edited August 7, 2012 by Vifam7

[Johnomaton]

I say we get about twelve-odd Macross fans that are also convicts in the slammer for life, and we give them a second chance. The mission: detonate Harmony Gold, infiltrate Criterion, and release DYRL proper.

[VF5SS]

they still fixed the coloring mistakes

[Zinjo]

There is no actual official distinction between "remastering" and "restoring."

Where would this "Office" be anyway?

I suspect it is in the definition of the term.

Restore: Return to it's original state, flawed as that may have been. DYRL - DVD release

Re-Master: Rebuild to a pristine improved state. The implication is to correct flaws, fix color saturation, enhance picture clarity, change images, etc... DYRL BD release

Perhaps we were expecting a "Restored-Master" and were given a "Re-Master" instead.

[Einherjar]

I say we get about twelve-odd Macross fans that are also convicts in the slammer for life, and we give them a second chance. The mission: detonate Harmony Gold, infiltrate Criterion, and release DYRL proper.

No need to go that far. Just point an laugh at their overhyped offering for 2012 as an alternative to this stuff - a banner.

[nautilus]

There is no actual official distinction between "remastering" and "restoring."

Tell that to the BFI, AFI, Kodak, 3M, ILM, SONY Pictures, etc. etc. etc.

There is some difference from company to company, but remastering involves only improvements (made initially though mechanical means, and now through software processes) to standard stock. Restoration is defined as a return, as far as possible, to the individual elemental negatives.

The confusion lies in the media of today. The terms were coined and defined at a time when film stock was the only source. Remastering in those days meant simply digging out the transfer prints and making up a new master from which to make copies. Restoring actually meant taking those negatives and cleaning them up before making new transfer prints.

Its all a little complex, but if you take a film to any company specializing in this sort of this, such as ours, you'll get more or less the same answer. Ask for a Remaster and we'll ask for your transfer prints and some time. Ask for a Restoration and we'll ask for your negatives, a good deal of time and a great deal of money.

[Renato]

Tell that to the BFI, AFI, Kodak, 3M, ILM, SONY Pictures, etc. etc. etc.

There is some difference from company to company, but remastering involves only improvements (made initially though mechanical means, and now through software processes) to standard stock. Restoration is defined as a return, as far as possible, to the individual elemental negatives.

The confusion lies in the media of today. The terms were coined and defined at a time when film stock was the only source. Remastering in those days meant simply digging out the transfer prints and making up a new master from which to make copies. Restoring actually meant taking those negatives and cleaning them up before making new transfer prints.

Its all a little complex, but if you take a film to any company specializing in this sort of this, such as ours, you'll get more or less the same answer. Ask for a Remaster and we'll ask for your transfer prints and some time. Ask for a Restoration and we'll ask for your negatives, a good deal of time and a great deal of money.

By that definition this could be considered a restoration job because I heard they did in fact go back to the negatives... Although I have no idea how they actually manipulated them. I guess I could try to find out..

However, my stance on the blurry shots -- other than the digital-blur censorship shots, of course -- is that that is the way they were photographed, so there is precious little you can do about that now, even going back to the negatives.

[TMBounty_Hunter]

By that definition this could be considered a restoration job because I heard they did in fact go back to the negatives... Although I have no idea how they actually manipulated them. I guess I could try to find out..

I don't think they went as far back as they could have. This looks like just a fresh scan of the final master film so not really a restoration.

However, my stance on the blurry shots -- other than the digital-blur censorship shots, of course -- is that that is the way they were photographed, so there is precious little you can do about that now, even going back to the negatives.

I do still suspect the zentradi subtitle scenes were shot like they would shoot credits: shoot the animation to film -> reshoot animation film plus text layer creating the final master film but losing quality due to the extra step.

If that is indeed the case they could potentially rescan the raw animation film which should be significantly better and then add the subtitles digitally.

That would be a proper restoration, going back to the earliest and best elements possible.

Edited August 8, 2012 by TMBounty_Hunter

[HannouHeiki]

Any thoughts on the FB2012 blue ray? I know most of us weren't going to expect much considering source limitations. The main thing I'm looking to find out is if it is actually 1080p video and I'd the experience is any different from letting my PS3 upscale the previous DVD release.

[treatment]

Any thoughts on the FB2012 blue ray? I know most of us weren't going to expect much considering source limitations. The main thing I'm looking to find out is if it is actually 1080p video and I'd the experience is any different from letting my PS3 upscale the previous DVD release.

The video quality of FB2012-BD is utterly crap.

BV didn't even try.

[HannouHeiki]

The video quality of FB2012-BD is utterly crap.

BV didn't even try.

Do you know if it is in 480p or 1080p?

[Jasonc]

Sad to hear about the blurry scenes in almost all the movie. I was expecting the best quality being a blu-ray disc.

I'm wondering if maybe it's the televisions people are using? I'm using an LED HDTV, and for the most part, the picture is extremely clean. Yes, there are spots that it's not a refined, but most IMO, seem to be when the Zentraedi are talking with the subs on.

[jvmacross]

The thing that really impressed me about the DYRL BD (coming from someone who has just had bootlegs of this film since forever) were the space battle scenes....I was like, "My God, it's full of stars!".......