I don’t think those things took up that much space. I thought that dragonrider_cody was saying that the old ADV dvds, the ones that had all that extra content, looked better than the modern dvds that lack all them.
Though I would like to return to those golden days of on-disc extras. ADV was the king, hopefully the Clannad and Towanoquon commentaries are them slowly getting back into those. I’ve tracked down tons of old ADV dvds just for the extras. In Funimation’s rerelease of BGC:2040, we get to hear Spike do an excellent job as his wimpy-boy typecast. Only in the extras on the ADV release of bgc:2040 do we get to hear him complain about his typecast and have his character be a hilarious narcissist, in his best Eric Cartman impersonation, during the extra commentary. Or Hilary Haag bash the other actors/staff as she’s the “only one with a real job”
So worth it. It just hasn’t been the same without it. The J-commentary is nice, but unless they’re drinking during it like they were in Planetes (or Stephen Foster in D’Eon) then it just doesn’t measure up. I thinks yous knows this.
The video quality is just one reason I really miss singles. There were generally more extras and artwork as well. Plus, the art boxes were generally much, much better than what passes for ones now. Of course, you did have the occasional cheapo one like Azumanga Daioh and DN Angel. However, my brand new Okami-San art box is starting to peel along the top, and I’ve talked to a few others that have had similar issues.
Also, extra features can take up quite a bit it space, especially when you factor it that removing them allows you to add another episode or two. For instance, Funi’s older singles had terrible quality, and I was primarily due to the fact that thu had alternate angles for the opening and closing credits taking up a lot of space. Once they removed those, their video quality generally improved, until they moved to boxsets where it took a nosedive again. Improving video quality was the reason they gave for removing them, though I’m sure there were other reasons as well.
I know I’ve said it before, but the DNAngel singles had almost as much extra content as they did actual show content. Twas awesome.
Even though they were low Res and not as solid as I would have liked, my favorite art boxes are by far the metal boxes that Sentai did for shows like bgc 2040.
The art box seems dead today. I agree that on the days of singles we had quality boxes and extras, while today we get few extras and, from Sentai, we sometimes get the bluray boxes with the infuriating recycle symbol carved out of the plastic where we once had greatness.
Of course, we now get whole shows for the price of one or 2 singles. I guess, maybe, that’s almost worth it?
Still not true 1080 by far, the biggest difference between the 2 is the brightness. The brightness difference is so great that it impairs other comparison. In case it makes any difference, when I was referring to the streams I meant the Netflix ones.
Upscaling gets DVDs to a more eye-friendly status but it’s still clearly different from a DVD for me when I see it. No DVD on any device I’ve seen has been so well up scaled as to be mistaken by me as native HD content. Even 720 content is noticeably lower quality on 1080, which makes sense as it is less than half the amount pixels natively.
On this, I wish that the older shows could have been all done in HD natively. I do feel that the bulk of the current HD content today doesn’t take advantage of the format. Moe blobs don’t need higher resolutions, but they have the option while better animated and more detailed anime series do not. Though I should stop myself here before I start railing at the moe blobs in earnest; I could do that all day
Just to be clear, is this pic from the original adv singles? I see that it is marked as such, but I’m just trying to make sure. You wouldn’t happen to have the time for this scene still, would you?
Also, the pic is marked as being 1080 yet Orphen is a 4:3 title. How’d that work out? Did you go to 1440 and retain the aspect ratio (and pillars) or did you stretch it to full 1920?
The player most likely upscaled it, my PS3 does that will all my stuff. And hell, YYH got a remaster to blu-ray, they could’ve done the same with Orphen…but that didn’t happen.
Well, I only mentioned your name once, so I didn’t “keep” adding anything. The autocorrect on my phone kept changing it, and along the way it picked up an s that I didn’t catch. Sorry about that.
Also, Sentai hasn’t upscaled or remastered any blurays themselves. They have only used whatever masters have been provided. Considering how bad some other bluray remasters have turned out, that may be for the best…lol
It didn’t have to be blu-ray. Media Blasters did a remaster of Rayearth and it looks much better than the original release, and I think Japan used their master when they finished it.
If you take a screen of a 4:3 show in fullscreen, it has black bars on the side.
If you cut them out, and move the pics side by side (one on top of the other)
Bottom one flush with the right side, top one showing the same amount of image on the left, it looks like that.
It cuts off part of the left side of each pic, but gives you a more centered image on the original 1920 image layer size you started with on each pic.
SD-BD is great if the company knows how to properly encode older animation . Unfortunately so far Maiden and Sentai’s offerings . Well not been good . They are working on it so hopefully they fix it with the August stuff . Hopefully the July titles ,but the sources for them might make it hard to tell .
