Thread by @ashuraou

Sounds like the Galaxy Express 999 movies are out! These films were a very ambitious project for @worldofcrap and me. The masters were HD, but the grain was wiped away, so the prospect of regraining them with artificial grain took a while to figure out.

I believe we did 2 or 3 different passes on the movie until we were satisfied that it wasn't "too much" and what style of grain to use. It's thanks to Justin's expertise (and willing to sync a week into encode time) that were able to pull this off and make it look so seamless.

We were also able to find the original masters for the dub audio, though unfortunately they were on analogue tapes and had no video reference which made syncing hard.

I bought 2 or 3 copies of the VHS to try to use it as a sync reference, and capturing the VHS through time base correction yielded the fact that the original masters for the dubs were not at a constant rate. (Here's a shot of the 70gb capture I still have of the VHS!)

The recaptured audio from the master tapes was so much better than the old DVD master, however, we /had/ to fix it. The old DVD sounded underwater and was very muffled.

So to conform it to the HD masters, we had to sync it up to the old scratch track by deleting/adding milliseconds of audio by hand to make sure it all synced. Then we manually fixed all the dropouts and re-eqed. Thanks to @theusotsuki for helping me tackle this huge thing.

.@Ulsairi also did a retranslation of the subtitles and resident Leiji-expert @ZackDavisson kindly did proof pass over them as well to make sure they were ship-shape. We tried to match the names of the characters/items up to the current manga translations for some brand harmony.

We spent a lot of time going through and translating a lot of the signs which were missing. Things like Leiji Matsumoto's signature "Pretty Boy" Sake. Subtle stuff, but it helps give more flavor to the world.

We also found out that the Japanese 5.1 audio relaid all of the voices, so the sync of the dialogue is completely different compared to the original Japanese 1.0 mono, which meant we had to retime and prepare two separate subtitle tracks for both audio tracks.

Big thanks to @DaEvaBeato and @Faintly_Macabre for helping me fix a lot of the timing problems in the subtitles and @Cosineofzeta for helping proof them as well. Thanks to @Kitsuneelaine for editing the menu loop, too.

We were also able to include some nice extras. Trailers, an isolated score track for both features, as well as an all-new essay from @TimJEldred discussing the history of the Galaxy Express films and their legacy. (Thank you again for contributing, Tim.)

Also big thanks to both @MichaelToole and @Mendinso for production support behind the scenes. Couldn't have done it without you guys!

Also, fixing the tag for @Kitsunelaine! Darn twitter! She edited the menu loop for us!!

Also as J mentioned, these releases were over a year in the making. A lot of very careful and tiring work went into this project from everyone who worked on it. So thank you very much to everyone who helped. 🙏

A small addendum: It was noted to me the old DVDs we released did not have the 1.0 Mono track from the original theatrical release. We included that. Also, the new release includes a bunch more vintage trailers, not just a single one this time around.