Thread by @TheIvanhobe

Good day, computer boys and girls.

We need to talk.

About #UltramanTiga.

Specifically about the Millcreek DVD box set that released last year.

Because I finally took a deep dive into it and boy oh boy, did I find some interesting stuff.

/Extreme Video talk thread

First some context, because as all things Tiga this story is complicated.

A few years ago Milcreek obtained the license to release all things Ultraman from Tsuburaya.

This resulted in some high quality BD box sets of the original series.

Fans were super happy.

But, when it came to the release of the Tiga/Dyna/Gaia trilogy, the iconic 90's trilogy of Ultraman, fans were less happy.

While every Ultra series release up until that point had been as high quality blu-ray releases, the TDG trilogy would release as DVD box sets.

In 2021.

This was upsetting to many, especially since the TDG trilogy had BD releases in Japan just a few years earlier.

So releasing these shows in DVD outside of Japan seemed like a cheap, business related decision.

But the story isn't nowhere near that simple.

I've already talked about this in detail before, but it bears repeating because it is important:

The reason why the Ultraman Showa BD sets look so damn good is because Tsuburaya productions in the 60's, 70's and 80's were mostly shot, edited and mastered using 16 mm. Film stock.

Film stock is an analog medium of recording, and because of that it can "capture" a lot of detail; you're essentially capturing photons using silver molecules.

As it happens, this turned to be a blessing once humanity became capable of processing images in high resolution.

The thing about film though, is that it is expensive, which is why in the mid-80's a lot of companies, including Tsuburaya starting using magnetic video tape to record their shows.

It was cheaper, more convenient and, at the time, it gave you a better looking image.

This is because magnetic tape doesn't record images, but rather it captures an electronic TV signal, which can the be reproduced into any CRT display with great fidelity.

At the time, it was the better option.

So, what does this have to do with Tiga?

Well, because video tape became the primary means of mastering TV shows during it's time, pretty much every Tsuburaya show produced between 1990 and 2007 was mastered on video tape.

This, turned out to be a bad thing.

See, video tape is convenient, but because of the way tv signals worked back then, it had a limit in resolution of 480p at best

And this is were DVD comes into the picture.

See, DVD was technically a digital medium, but it was still designed to work with the prevalent (at the time) CRT monitors.

Which, at best, had a top resolution of 480i.

So, any show mastered on tape still looked pretty good on DVD.

And then LCD monitors came along.

Once humanity fully moved into HD monitors, DVD and Video tape simply didn't cut it.

Anything with a resolution lesser than 720p looked like absolute crap in modern displays.

Which means that there's two full decades of TV shows that can never, ever be in true HD.

Ultraman Tiga, Dyna, Gaia, Cosmos, Nexus, Max and Mebius are shows that were produced during this era.

Which is why all video sources are stuck on video tape, which is why we can never have any of those shows on any resolution above 480p.

Compare that with the Showa Ultra series, which were recorded on 16 mm film, that could easily be mastered into 720p.

That is why it made sense to release those in BD, but the Heisei Ultra series are stuck on DVD.

But wait, wasn't there a Tiga BD set Japan released in Japan?

Now this is where our story gets interesting.

Back in 2014 Tsuburaya commissioned a remaster of Tiga.

Though it would me more accurately to call it an HD rescan since you simply cannot remaster a show shot in tape.

To give you an idea, here's a screen shot of the DVD Japanese release of Tiga from the early 2000's (left), and the same shot from the BD release from 2014 (right).

The image looks certainly cleaner, but the actual resolution is the same, just upscaled from 480p to 720p.

That said, there's something extremely interesting about this "HD" rescan.

You'd think that this 2014 version of the show would be exactly the same as the original DVD version, just with a better image.

But it isn't.

The newer "remaster" actually has extended scenes.

You read that right.

This 2014 HD rescan of Tiga has longer scenes in certain episodes that are NOT in the original DVD release.

Mind you, it's nothing major, I am talking about 16 extra seconds of footage in about 9 episodes of the show.

But it is noticeable.

Don't believe me? Okay, here's the proof:

This is a clip of episode 33 from the original DVD9 R2 release of the show:

*FYI, DVD9 R2 refers to the DVD format, DVD9 being double layer DVD's that can hold twice as much video as the standard DVD5's, and R2 is the region code of the DVD, in this case for Japan.

**This will be important later.

No here's the exact same scene but from the Japanese BD release that used the 2014 rescan as a base:

Did you noticed, it's hard to tell so I'll explain.

When Munakata looks down the hand rail, in the BD version the shot begins when he lowers his gun and ends when he runs inside.

The DVD version cuts both of these moments.

It is roughly a second of extra footage, but it is undoubtedly there.

And there's many scenes like that throughout the episode, which again, do add up to around 16 seconds of extra footage.

Here's another, easier example, least you label me a Witch or something:

This is a clip from episode 34, DVD9 R2 version:

And here's the exact same clip but from the BD release, now with some very obvious 2 extra seconds of footage:

By my count, episodes 11, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 33, 34, and 52 have these extended scenes.

They add absolutely nothing the the story, and I have no idea why they were cut of the original DVD release, but they are clearly distinctive.

I am sure you're wondering by now, WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAS TO DO WITH THE MILCREEK RELEASE OF TIGA!?

Well, I am getting there. Right now in fact.

Here's a familiar clip from ep 33 of that release which I obtained using, huh, magic:

And here's another familiar clip from episodes 34, once again, straight from the Milcreek DVD release from last year:

As you can tell, the footage from the Milcreek DVD release matches perfectly with the footage from the Japanese BD release from a few years back.

And this is very important for an extremely simple reason.

See, back when these new DVD boxsets were announced and released, many of us were disappointed because Tiga in particular had already had a DVD release by Funimation in the early 2000's.

So we assumed that this new Tiga release was little more than a re-skin of that release.

But as it turns out, we were wrong.

This new Milcreek didn't re-released the old DVDs, but rather took the newer HD rescans from 2014 and merely converted them to DVD.

These is are whole new DVDs that yes, have (technically) better image quality than previous DVD releases.

But wait, converting HD footage to DVD isn't still a downgrade?

Well, technically not.

Remember, the Tiga master tapes have a maximum resolution of 480p, and DVD has a max output of 480i.

The difference is minimal.

But wait (again), didn't Tiga had that BD 720p release?

Well, yes.

But that was 480p to 720p upscale.

And do you know how bad a 480p video image up scaled to 720p and then sent to 1080p displays looks like?

It's horrible. Sickeningly so.

Of course, this is where things get complicated, for most people.

As I said before, DVD was designed with CRT monitors in mind, and as such DVD image usually looks terrible on modern LCD displays.

So basically, unless you have a DVD player that supports component video connected to a CRT capable of displaying 480i signals, you will never get the best image of your DVDs.

Most people who buy these DVD sets don't have that.

But wait, I can hear some of you saying, what about compression?

This has been a hotly debated topic among the community, by which I mean me and other 2 people, and this is due to the Millcreek DVD sets only having 6 discs.

See, when you put video on a DVD, you often have to compress the image according to the amount of footage.

And video compression means degrading the image.

With the Millcreek DVD's having 9 eps per disc, this has been a major concern for many.

See, even if this DVD uses a higher quality video source, it means nothing if the image ends up being compressed anyways.

So you can imagine my surprise when I popped the Milcreek discs into my external unit and saw this:

For those of you who are not me, let me explain.

Standard DVD's, known as DVD5, have a capacity of 4.5 gb, which translates to roughly 120 minutes of video.

But these DVD's have 7.09 gb of video in them.

In other words, these are not DVD5.

THESE ARE DVD9.

This is very, very important for two reasons:

First, DVD9 releases are rare because, well, DVD9 is expensive, which goes a long way into explaining the price point of the Millcreek DVD sets price point.

Given how cheaply made the Milcreek sets can be, this was a huge surprise.

The other reason is that, well, DVD9 has a capacity of 8.4 gb, roughly 240 minutes of video.

Which is the equivalent of roughly 10 episodes with a length of 24 minutes.

In other words, THESE DVD'S HAVE LITTLE TO NO VIDEO COMPRESSION.

This has been a huge point of contempt for me and many (again, like 2 or 3 people), because Millcreek keeps putting more and more episodes per disc in these DVD releases.

We assumed these discs were DVD5, which would require a 50% compression rate. Hence the outrage.

But now that we know these are DVD9, this puts the recently announced releases, such as Ultraman Mebius, in a whole new light.

There will probably be some compression still, but we're talking about a 5% rate at most.

That makes a huge difference in terms of image quality.

But wait, one last time, I hear you saying.

What about the Ultraman Tiga Gaiden special that was included in the Millcreek release?

That one has a HORRIBLE video quality, wasn't that because of compression?

Okay, this one is a bit complicated since I do lack a lot of the context here, but here's what I can tell you:

Try as I might, the best source I could find for the Tiga Gaiden special was a 360p video from the Japanese DVD9 release.

In other words, the lacking quality of that special wasn't due to video compression, but rather a low quality original source.

And since Tsuburaya is who provides the raw video for these releases... yeah, this is not Millcreeks fault.

I only bring that up because that was another concern for the Mebius release, which will include all Mebius related specials.

As far as I can tell, two of those, the Armored Darkness specials, also have a 360p source.

So yeah, expect those two to look like crap as well.

So to finally wrap this up, what did we learn today?

That while the Millcreek Ultraman Tiga DVD box set seemed like a cheap quality release, it is quite possibly the highest quality video release of Ultramana Tiga that exists.

Provided you have the right equipment to watch it.

This is not surprising since Tsuburaya is who provides Millcreek with all their video sources, and for Tiga in particular the 2014 rescan was the best source they had.

Though releasing it on DVD is still an odd choice when 480p SD BD exists.

Still, from personal experience, I can tell you that this Tiga DVD set looks stunning if you have right equipment.

Which I do, because I am a video nerd like that.

But most people won't, which will remain a sticking point for the next Ultraman releases.

Of course, this is only concerning VIDEO quality.

As for the rest of the series... you'll have to wait until next week because seriously, I've been at this for 2 hours.

See you around, kids. 🧵