Thread by @seedofmight

After a recent post, we realized we've never really talked about the sources we're using for the #DragonBall and #DBZ movies. Everyone knows we used the Dragon Boxes for the show, but for the movies it's a little more complicated...

In 2018 all classic Dragon Ball films and specials were once again rescanned and cleaned for their re-release in HD. Unlike anything FUNi has done, the scan was done competently and all the movies have far more detail than in any previous release.

The movies were first released on streaming services (Amazon was available). These versions of the films retain grain, however suffer from the standard issues with streaming sources, such as low bitrate, sometimes crushed details, and Amazon's H.264 encoders having built-in DNR.

The movies were all released on Blu-Ray soon after. While the BDs have much higher bitrate and clarity, some films suffer from a liberal application of DNR that makes them lower quality than the WEB-DLs. However, not ALL the movies have this liberal DNR problem.

It was discovered in 2021 that Amazon updated their streaming masters with new H.265 encodes. We noticed that due to the lack of DNR, most of these movies are now better quality than the original streaming H.264 versions. Unfortunately some blocking exists in various scenes.

A bit of a misconception arose around the new H.265 Amazon streaming versions, with some believing they were the best looking versions of these movies.
At this point, we had to determine what the best source truly was.

Our analysis was more detailed than "Should we use the Blu-Rays or the new streaming source for all these movies?"
Instead, we assessed each movie individually and determined the following films look better on BD than the WEB-DLs: DBZ Movies 1-4, 8, and 12.

As for why each source was chosen, we should first acknowledge that "DNR" (Digital Noise Reduction) has become something of a dirty word within the Dragon Ball community due to the infamous Orange Bricks release that use too DNR too heavily.

In that instance, the DNR erased actual detail from the image, and I'm sure most of you have seen the numerous examples of this over the years.

HOWEVER, some releases have such heavy grain that the lower bitrate of their respective medium results in gross digital noise being visible and HURTING the image, rather than providing detail.

For example, the DBZ Level Sets were held in high regard due to "grain" but most of what you saw was digital noise. You could say we applied DNR to the image, and you can see no ACTUAL detail is lost, just less gross noise.

https://x.com/seedofmight/status/1535373242847969289?s=20

To make a long story short, the Amazon web version of some movies, due to encoding settings and a much lower bitrate than the Blu-Rays, result in blocky compression artifacts and digital noise. The Blu-Ray versions are better in these instances.

So let's get back to the movies specifically. Admittedly, this account made an error by showing a "before and after" with the Amazon Web version and the BD version we're working on

https://x.com/seedofmight/status/1747419596297027704?s=20

I actually just forgot the BD version was better for Movie 12, thought the web version was the source we're working on, and had access to the raw web version for this comparison.
Sorry about that!

In that specific post about Movie 12, someone thought the original/web (left) version had better grain and detail, but what they were actually seeing was that bad digital noise and compression issues we talked about.

Keep in mind, these movies were done on 35mm film, rather than the 16mm film (mostly) of DB, DBZ, and DBGT. 35mm grain is finer than 16mm grain so there really should not be super pronounced grain due to the larger film size.

We try our best to make sure our comparisons are fair. We never modify images just for Tweets, we just take screenshots from either the final product, or straight from the work in progress.

One last note is that in any instance of censorship on the Blu-Rays, we can "patch in" footage from the Amazon web video, to ensure the final product looks as good as it can, as intended by the original artists.