It's funny, I've been around the 16mm reels provided to Funimation for a long time. The first time they transferred to SD DigiBeta tapes I was an assistant editor at the post house doing the transfers. Those transfers were used to make the NTSC broadcast masters. Eventually, they started making DVDs. By that time, I was at a different company that was hired to program the DVDs before eventually working directly at Funi. While I was there, they decided to go back to the film prints for a new transfer, but some very questionable decisions were made during that transfer. When the box set was released, the fans hated it. They went back to those prints a third time for a new transfer with a more sane approach. The colorist found reference film for the stock the prints were on, and had the closest color the creator had seen. After some years later, I was working directly with that colorist. We talked a bit about that film. He was flabbergasted about the fans. Someone on the internet looked him up and reached out to him with less than favorable things to say. That's when he learned about anime fans. While I was at Funi, we had arguments with fans that didn't believe we had the film to do these transfers. They were adamant that we took the original DigiBeta tapes, yet not questioning the origin of those tapes. Posting replies with people holding the film reels did nothing to dissuade them. Funi went so far to include an extras on the Blu-ray release of the process of the film transfers, the frame-by-frame restoration process, and other steps. Fans were still online saying they could do better. I wish them luck.
For context, there's been a massive project to produce as close to perfect of a color-corrected version of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. It can be found online in traditional anime torrenting sites. It's really an outstanding labor of passion and a true testament to the global community's love for this series.
I'm not writing this to disregard the PDF author—it's just a personal retrospective.
I'm a 50-year-old Japanese person who watched the original Dragon Ball broadcast on TV around 40 years ago. Back then, there were no LCDs or OLEDs—only CRT ("brown tube") TVs, and the signal was analog. With that kind of analog rendering, it was practically impossible to tell what the "true" colors were. Plus, CRT displays degraded over time, shifting colors toward brown.
The pre-processed raw images in the article actually look like what I remember as the real Dragon Ball colors.
From a photographer's perspective, using cel scans as a reference could be a fool's errand because they are biased by the white color of the scanner light and scanning software. There's a lot of room for opinionated scans there.
OTOH, the result looks great, so good on the passionate fans who spent their time and effort doing this.
fantastic post , I recently just stated on HN that DragonBall really was part of Spanish culture in the early nineties.
I still remember as a child wandering into a bar on an afternoon, in a lost rural village in the middle of nowhere near the mountainous region in southern spain, now nearly 40 years ago. 2 old farmers were having a beer, the whole bar was totally silent, everyone watching the Dragon Ball episode on the tv. It was intense, the saiyans had just arrived.
It really surprised me ( as I did not realise adults watched it) and also because I thought on this trip to the countryside I would miss the episodes ( never to be able to be seen again). No internet back in the day.
Honestly, farmers watching Dragon Ball 40 years ago en el campo.
There was a similar (in spirit) project to upscale and resample Avatar the Last Airbender [1] because the original DVD release was so awful. Shortly after, Nickolodeon released a blu-ray boxed set that was quite a bit better than the DVDs, but it still had some issues. Doesn't seem anyone has decided to upscale it again [2].
I followed this for a while leading up to the release. It’s really impressive work. The only downside in my view is that the official releases are extremely high bitrate encodes. I’m sure that was chosen for archival purposes, but I’d like to have a well-made encode more amenable to regular home viewers.
I did it on my own with Handbrake once got the full release. Not perfect but good for personal storage. Episodes were 3-3.5 GB and with my encoding they are 550-650 MB.
I posted the PDF with the title "Dragon Ball Color Correction Process" because it's more descriptive for the HN audience than "Seed of Might Color Correction Process", Seed of Might being a release group so pretty much meaningless for almost everyone
When there's no budget and people are willing to work infinitely on something as a passion project that will probably almost always be the case. The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from. I've seen the "original" 16mm prints that were made available to Funimation. Let's just say they were not given pristine masters. When those prints were made, they had no way of knowing their use 20 years later.
>The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from
They basically merged the Region 2 (Japan) Dragon Box DVD release with the Region 1 (NTSC USA) one.
>This merge of the two Dragon Boxes aims to get more detail at the boundary ranges of
luma in order to obtain a higher dynamic range in a natural manner, without artificially
distorting the luma through sigmoid-like functions. This is made possible due to the brightness
difference between the North American NTSC and the Japanese NTSC-J standards and how
the DVD compression codec (MPEG-2) handles this difference. Basically, MPEG-2 gives more
3
bitrate to brighter areas. Darker areas get less bitrate and so the image details there are blurrier
and often destroyed. Fortunately for us, the North American NTSC standard has brighter blacks
compared to NTSC-J, which means that MPEG-2 was able to allocate more bitrate to the dark
areas on the R1 Dragon Box compared to the R2J, even though the latter has a higher overall
bitrate. In addition to better dark details, the R1 Dragon Box also has more dark details. This
is because DVDs have a limited luma range, and the brighter blacks on the R1 allowed more
dark details to pass through that limited range. These same extra details missed the cut on R2J
and were clipped away instead. So what does all this mean? It means that the R1 Dragon Box
has better preserved dark details while the R2J Dragon Box has better preserved mid-and-bright
details.
If they are using anything from the Orange Box set, then I really feel bad for them. If anything, they should have used the Blu-ray release. The R2 Dragon Box was a really clean copy that we were left jealous of the source they used. I do remember seeing that and being impressed. It was at that point that they decided to go back and transfer the prints they had again. The original transfer was protected for NTSC broadcast, so a lot of limiting would have been done. Blacks at 7.5IRE and video levels set to 100IRE. They may have pushed the chroma to 110IRE, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time since I've seen them on a scope. They also edited them without protecting the film cadence which made a progressive DVD difficult. The quality of the Blu-ray release was about as good as it was going to get with the 16mm prints provided as source.
It's funny, I've been around the 16mm reels provided to Funimation for a long time. The first time they transferred to SD DigiBeta tapes I was an assistant editor at the post house doing the transfers. Those transfers were used to make the NTSC broadcast masters. Eventually, they started making DVDs. By that time, I was at a different company that was hired to program the DVDs before eventually working directly at Funi. While I was there, they decided to go back to the film prints for a new transfer, but some very questionable decisions were made during that transfer. When the box set was released, the fans hated it. They went back to those prints a third time for a new transfer with a more sane approach. The colorist found reference film for the stock the prints were on, and had the closest color the creator had seen. After some years later, I was working directly with that colorist. We talked a bit about that film. He was flabbergasted about the fans. Someone on the internet looked him up and reached out to him with less than favorable things to say. That's when he learned about anime fans. While I was at Funi, we had arguments with fans that didn't believe we had the film to do these transfers. They were adamant that we took the original DigiBeta tapes, yet not questioning the origin of those tapes. Posting replies with people holding the film reels did nothing to dissuade them. Funi went so far to include an extras on the Blu-ray release of the process of the film transfers, the frame-by-frame restoration process, and other steps. Fans were still online saying they could do better. I wish them luck.
For context, there's been a massive project to produce as close to perfect of a color-corrected version of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. It can be found online in traditional anime torrenting sites. It's really an outstanding labor of passion and a true testament to the global community's love for this series.
I'm not writing this to disregard the PDF author—it's just a personal retrospective.
I'm a 50-year-old Japanese person who watched the original Dragon Ball broadcast on TV around 40 years ago. Back then, there were no LCDs or OLEDs—only CRT ("brown tube") TVs, and the signal was analog. With that kind of analog rendering, it was practically impossible to tell what the "true" colors were. Plus, CRT displays degraded over time, shifting colors toward brown.
The pre-processed raw images in the article actually look like what I remember as the real Dragon Ball colors.
From a photographer's perspective, using cel scans as a reference could be a fool's errand because they are biased by the white color of the scanner light and scanning software. There's a lot of room for opinionated scans there.
OTOH, the result looks great, so good on the passionate fans who spent their time and effort doing this.
> CRT ("brown tube")
ブラウン管 means Braun tube, named for its inventor.
Thanks for the correction — I had no idea it was named after a person. Interesting that in katakana, both "brown" and "Braun" are the same: ブラウン.
fantastic post , I recently just stated on HN that DragonBall really was part of Spanish culture in the early nineties.
I still remember as a child wandering into a bar on an afternoon, in a lost rural village in the middle of nowhere near the mountainous region in southern spain, now nearly 40 years ago. 2 old farmers were having a beer, the whole bar was totally silent, everyone watching the Dragon Ball episode on the tv. It was intense, the saiyans had just arrived.
It really surprised me ( as I did not realise adults watched it) and also because I thought on this trip to the countryside I would miss the episodes ( never to be able to be seen again). No internet back in the day.
Honestly, farmers watching Dragon Ball 40 years ago en el campo.
There was a similar (in spirit) project to upscale and resample Avatar the Last Airbender [1] because the original DVD release was so awful. Shortly after, Nickolodeon released a blu-ray boxed set that was quite a bit better than the DVDs, but it still had some issues. Doesn't seem anyone has decided to upscale it again [2].
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/5hv4en/no...
2: https://github.com/brucethemoose/AvatarUpscale
I followed this for a while leading up to the release. It’s really impressive work. The only downside in my view is that the official releases are extremely high bitrate encodes. I’m sure that was chosen for archival purposes, but I’d like to have a well-made encode more amenable to regular home viewers.
I did it on my own with Handbrake once got the full release. Not perfect but good for personal storage. Episodes were 3-3.5 GB and with my encoding they are 550-650 MB.
I posted the PDF with the title "Dragon Ball Color Correction Process" because it's more descriptive for the HN audience than "Seed of Might Color Correction Process", Seed of Might being a release group so pretty much meaningless for almost everyone
Further proves that pirated content is almost always superior to official releases
When there's no budget and people are willing to work infinitely on something as a passion project that will probably almost always be the case. The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from. I've seen the "original" 16mm prints that were made available to Funimation. Let's just say they were not given pristine masters. When those prints were made, they had no way of knowing their use 20 years later.
>The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from
They basically merged the Region 2 (Japan) Dragon Box DVD release with the Region 1 (NTSC USA) one.
>This merge of the two Dragon Boxes aims to get more detail at the boundary ranges of luma in order to obtain a higher dynamic range in a natural manner, without artificially distorting the luma through sigmoid-like functions. This is made possible due to the brightness difference between the North American NTSC and the Japanese NTSC-J standards and how the DVD compression codec (MPEG-2) handles this difference. Basically, MPEG-2 gives more 3 bitrate to brighter areas. Darker areas get less bitrate and so the image details there are blurrier and often destroyed. Fortunately for us, the North American NTSC standard has brighter blacks compared to NTSC-J, which means that MPEG-2 was able to allocate more bitrate to the dark areas on the R1 Dragon Box compared to the R2J, even though the latter has a higher overall bitrate. In addition to better dark details, the R1 Dragon Box also has more dark details. This is because DVDs have a limited luma range, and the brighter blacks on the R1 allowed more dark details to pass through that limited range. These same extra details missed the cut on R2J and were clipped away instead. So what does all this mean? It means that the R1 Dragon Box has better preserved dark details while the R2J Dragon Box has better preserved mid-and-bright details.
https://jysze.github.io/SoM-DBZ-Merge/mergeproject/R1R2.pdf
And then this merged release were used for the color correction
If they are using anything from the Orange Box set, then I really feel bad for them. If anything, they should have used the Blu-ray release. The R2 Dragon Box was a really clean copy that we were left jealous of the source they used. I do remember seeing that and being impressed. It was at that point that they decided to go back and transfer the prints they had again. The original transfer was protected for NTSC broadcast, so a lot of limiting would have been done. Blacks at 7.5IRE and video levels set to 100IRE. They may have pushed the chroma to 110IRE, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time since I've seen them on a scope. They also edited them without protecting the film cadence which made a progressive DVD difficult. The quality of the Blu-ray release was about as good as it was going to get with the 16mm prints provided as source.
This is so incredibly cool! Thank you for sharing!