More Ghibli titles Incoming! - Page 4

I may have even more good news. Naturally, virtually all fans of Castle In The Sky are disappointed about the sub-dubs. So on one of Blu-rays.com threads about this, we decided to all simply email Disney with our complaint in the hopes of at least being heard. With a bit of luck, maybe we could get a Pinocchio-style replacement program.

Well, I and few others received similar emails this morning after sending in our complaints last night. Here's what it said (My personal info was removed)


I won't have the disc til Friday. And so far no one with a disc has confirmed/denied this. But let's hope it's true.

You can buy the HK version which has proper subtitles and is a port of the JP video track... but has no English dub if you want that.

As a bonus the HK version also has the JP boxart on the slipcover and disc case instead of the abomination on Disney's release

I'm probably going to get some flack, but I have to vent my disgust. Studio Ghibli's incompetence is at another level when it comes to their home video releases and have always been. People should not be buying these problematic releases. It's extremely frustrating considering how dear these films are to me. They are master film makers, but that's all.

Even though Buena Vista Japan are manufacturing the home video releases, Studio Ghibli calls the shots in how they want them presented, and Disney make enough money that they don't have the balls to tell them they're doing a disgraceful job. That doesn't excuse some of Buena Vista's incompetence on this side of the ocean though as apparent with the dubtitles on Laputa.

The biggest offender is all their films are color corrected for 9300K instead of 6500K. Apparently most TVs over there are defacto 9300K. Unfortunately that spits in the face of the SMPTE spec and the 6500K color space presenting the purest white balance, not to mention a standard. It's like no one can see that the image is tinted reddish-orange. The skies are cyan, the whites are pink, and skin tones are unnatural. I feel like I'm the only one that isn't blind sometimes.

Their digital films are slightly cropped from their original 2048x1108 resolution and have artificial gate weave added to give it a "film" look and suffer from horrible noise, color banding, and over compression.

The sad thing is Nausicaa turned out so well at first, minus color correction. They went back to the best film negatives they had and scanned them carefully at 6k. Unfortunately, soon after Japanese consumers complained about the "noise" and thus successive film releases have been DNRed slightly.

I really suggest you let Disney know what you think by contacting them here and here.

The masters created in Japan are used worldwide for all releases, so don't expect any improvements no matter where you live. To give you an idea of all the pros and cons of the Blu-rays released in Japan, you can read below for a list.

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Film) 1984
+ No DNR: Grain and image is crisp with no digital noise added and the bit rate is 40Mbps+
+ 24-bit original Mono mix in 2.0 Lossless Audio
+ Many subtitle and language options with minimal footprint
+ Commentary audio track
+ No edge enhancement
- Red tint and not properly color corrected for 6500K
- No DTS-HD MA encoding to reduce footprint
- Questionable subtitle job, but literal at least
- Lossless audio could have taken potentially less space had it been encoded in mono. Minor nitpick.
- They lost the negative of the title screen without the film code on it. Minor nitpick.


Laputa Castle in the Sky (Film) 1986
+ DTS-HD MA original 2.0 mix encoded Lossless Audio
+ Many subtitle and language options with minimal footprint
+ No edge enhancement
- Red tint and not properly color corrected for 6500K
- Moderate DNR that has softened the image and made the grain blobby
- 16-bit lossless audio only
- English subtitles have been toned down to remove swearing and some violent dialogue


Whisper of the Heart (Film) 1995
+ 24-bit Lossless Japanese Audio in original 2.0 and 5.1 mixes
+ Many subtitle and language options
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Red tint and not properly color corrected for 6500K
- Moderate DNR that has softened the image and made the grain blobby
- No DTS-MA HD 2.0 audio to reduce footprint
- Language options are 24-bit DTS and take up a lot of space for secondary material
- Opening and Ending negative sections are in very poor shape


My Neighbors the Yamadas (Digitally made. Archived on Film) 1999
+ Lossless Japanese Audio in 2.0 and 5.1
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Red tint and not properly color corrected for 6500K
- Moderate DNR that has softened the image and made the grain blobby. (Despite this being Ghibli's first digital film, there is no digital archive, just a film negative, and you'd swear they bought the film stock at a local drug store, the gate weave is so bad.)
- 16-bit lossless audio for both 2.0 and 5.1
- No DTS-MA HD 2.0 audio to reduce footprint

Howl's Moving Castle (Digital) 2004
+ 24-bit Japanese Lossless Audio in 2.0 and 5.1
+ Many subtitle and language options
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Fake gate weave
- Color banding
- Noise and macroblocking
- While reduced, the red tint is still there and not properly
- Original 6.1 soundtrack has been replaced with a 5.1 ES downmix
- Language options are 24-bit DTS and take up a lot of space for being secondary material

Tales from Earthsea (Digital) 2006
+ 24-bit Japanese Lossless Audio in original 2.0 and 6.1 mixes
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Fake gate weave
- Color banding
- Noise and macroblocking
- While reduced, the red tint is still there and not properly
- Language options are 24-bit DTS and take up a lot of space for being secondary material

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Digital) 2008
+ 24-bit Japanese Lossless Audio in original 2.0 and 6.1 mixes
+ Many subtitle and language options
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Fake gate weave
- Color banding
- Noise and macroblocking
- Levels are incorrect and leaves the image even duller than it already is

The Borrower Arrietty (Digital) 2010
+ 24-bit Japanese Lossless Audio in original 2.0 and 5.1 mixes
+ Many subtitle and language options
+ No edge enhancement
+ Correct 1.85:1 ratio and no overscan letterboxing
- Fake gate weave
- Color banding
- Noise and macroblocking
- Language options are 24-bit DTS and take up a lot of space for being secondary material

From Up on Poppy Hill, My Neighbor Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies are coming out soon, and I don't expect to see any change to the pattern of less than stellar mastering.

If Disney wasn't so cheap and greedy, the films would be presented on a BD-50 with maximum image and lossless original language sound quality, along with small Dolby Digital soundtracks of other languages. All extras would be on a second BD-25. You may now flame me.

How do you know they are color corrected for the wrong spec and are not just warmly corrected (which appears to be not to your taste?)

Not to mention your post is... a bit misinformed. Yamadas is definitely NOT a transfer from an optically printed film master. Have you seen what transfers from those look like? Look at Ghost in the Shell or Jin-Roh on BD. And the JP Whisper of the Heart + Castle in the Sky BDs do not show signs of DNR, or if they do then so does Nausicaa. Why do you commend the Castle in the Sky BD for using DTSHD-MA and mark off Whisper in the Heart for using LPCM when Castle in the Sky's DTSHD-MA stereo track actually makes it use more space?

I also do not see the issue with artificial gate weave if it's the artistic intent. Should it be counted off for when discussing the objective quality in a dedicated PQ thread? Absolutely. But not when talking about the films themselves. Also is this noise you speak of the digital grain they intentionally add...? I would also like to see screenshot evidence of the banding, as Ghibli titles seem to be one of the small number of digitally produced anime that don't have highly noticeable banding.

My six year old really enjoyed Ponyo and I enjoyed it the first five times we watched it.
I just received Arrietty and Castle in the Sky and I know nothing about them. How do they compare to Ponyo?

Should compare just fine, although I have not really scene Ponyo yet. Had a badly scratched disc the library that made the movie skip around the chapters out of order.

I enjoyed Arrietty enough to buy it and Castle In The Sky was a forgone conclusion of being bought, now to get Whispers Of The Heart at a reasonable price.

There are different color timings for Naussica, either due to intentional timings or differing color temps.

Best Regards
KvE

I much prefer Ponyo over the other two movies - probably my 2nd favorite Ghibli film after Spirited Away. While visually beautiful (as all Ghibli titles are), I was a bit let down by Arrietty's story as it kind of echoed elements of older Ghibli films like Tortoro.

I'm a little confused by what you mean on Yamadas. I have all the JPN BDs, and I really don't know why I bothered. Yamadas was Ghibli's first 100% digitally produced film. It was painted entirely on computers. It however wasn't backed up as far as I know in a digital format, simply printed off to film. Spirited Away was their first film to be backed up digitally. The telecine wobble is awful on it. I'm not saying they went back to the original negative, a film print was used. It is not a digital transfer.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. A 2 hour LPCM 2.0 24-bit/48KHz track takes about 2GB of space. If it was losslessly compressed, it would be about half that. Laputa isn't even 24-bit. Maybe I'm missing something, but LPCM is not compressed. It's always going to be larger than the same track in DTS-HD MA or TrueHD. As far as I know they don't pay extra licensing fees for having more than one DTS-HD track. I think they just want to have an "open" standard for people that have stereo setups and may not have a DTS-HD capable reciever. The reason I praise Laputa for having a DTS-HD track is because it was the original stereo mix, when they could have easily went with LPCM like they did Nausicaa.

Nausicaa does not have DNR. The grain is fine and sharp and the image benefits immensely from it. Whisper, Laputa, and Yamadas are not only dull, but the grain is large, clumpy, and soft. Nausicaa is pushing 40Mbps+ constantly, while the others are barely pushing 30 at times.

As for the fake telecine wobble, there's several things that bug me. It looks completely fake with the way it moves. It's making compression less effective. It is hypocritical when Ghibli says it's "blasphemous" to make an old film look like new. In this case Miyazaki was referring to Disney restoring their old animated films through Lowry. So to make a pristine rock solid digital film look like film, and not even well, is double standards.

As for the red tint. It isn't about a preference. It's wrong. People don't spend a ton of money on high end audio/video equipment and following strict presentation standards to have a rogue standard introduced upon them. It's a pain in the butt, if you really want I can provide visual examples.


I'm not sure what you mean. The US and JPN versions of Nausicaa are exactly the same minus the US version being more compressed. The UK versions are all DNR scrubbed clean, and even oranger. The JPN and US are questionable, the UK versions are even worse.

Sorry misremembered the JPN vs UK comparisons as including the US. Could have sworn there some from the US disc somewhere.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...8#post19470418

There are difference between the two in color in addition to the DNR on the UK version.

Best Regards
KvE

I just gave the new American BD of Whisper a thorough viewing and there might be a very tiny amount of DNR applied to it. It's not something you would notice unless you are intently looking for it. I would not characterize it as objectionable in any manner unless someone can produce stills showing the art being damaged. Though colors do look a tad dull and the white balance might possibly be off.

No, 2.0 doesn't compress that well. The audio bitrate of the DTS-MA JP track on the US Nausicaa BD is almost the same bitrate as the LPCM on the JP Nausicaa BD:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2804
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2082

It might be bit less if the DTS-MA track used a lower bitrate core, but that kind of makes using DTS-MA pointless since you punish those who can't decode it when you could just use LPCM and let everyone enjoy uncompressed 2.0. TrueHD doesn't fare much better with 2.0 tracks, either. I decompressed the TrueHD 2.0 tracks on the Bubblegum Crisis JP BDs, and the resulting 3-hour wav files were only a few hundred MB more than the TrueHD files. That's probably why Bandai Visual stopped using it for 2.0 tracks in Japan.


I can't remember the specific discs, but I've seen some anime BDs where the DTS-MA 2.0 track on the US release actually had a higher bitrate than the LPCM on the JP release. It wasn't because of 16-bit VS 24-bit, either.

Hey, at least Ghibli stopped windowboxing all of their video transfers. That's some form of progress, at least.

We did Arrietty last night and my six year old thought that "many of the people from Ponyo were also in Arrietty". The dad looked similar, to her, to the dad in Ponyo - but at least he was not wearing ear rings...

She really is an old soul and is enthralled by the understated interactions and dialogue between the characters in Ponyo and Arrietty - compared to the usual fare she might watch.

Err... ESL subtitles? I see the email the other person got referred to them as "English ELS subtitles". Is that actually a thing or is this just one confused rep?

Spirited Away is the one that's most important to me, with Totoro a close second. I hope they arrive next year, at the latest.

Hey ABBN, you say you have visual examples to demonstrate that the colors are wrong... I too have wondered in the past whether their mastering process was not well suited to the 6500K color spec but pretty much got over it and moved on. i also got a new display and had it calibrated which made me question the red/pink/orange tint issue and whether it really affected all/any of these titles because the skin tones in particular look much better with a calibrated display. There's also the issue of what the colors are supposed to look like - which is something the creators of these films can only definitely say. Nausicaa and Laputa, and now Whisper do have color palettes that don't look exactly contemporary - what with today's push for pumped up, contrasty images that pop off the screen. But to me, Ponyo, Howl's and now Arrietty all look pretty fantastic. I saw Arrietty in the theater not long ago and the blu-ray looks pretty spot on similar.

Anyway, i would be interested in seeing your visual examples because I too question the process and whether my tv's 6500K calibration is not well suited for these films.

As I recall, Ghibli's Japanese DVD release of Spirited Away was mastered for 9300k and had reddish "flesh" tones that made the characters look sunburnt. This generated a wave of complaints from people who'd seen the movie theatrically. By the time the movie came to DVD in North America, Disney adjusted the colors to 6500k, and people were pleased with the results on that disc.

Short answer: the rep is incorrect. Literal subs are not included on the set.

Long answer: I and a number of other members from BD.com all emailed our complaints in regards to the lack of literal subs. All our emails explained the situation as clear as possible. From the ever-so-slightly different canned response we all received, whoever was answering the emails was under the impression that both dubsubs & literal subs were supposed to be there.

Virtually everyone responded to that first email we received explaining that the given info was incorrect. Literal subs were not included. The next wave of responses from Disneys reps were now along the lines of "we are aware of these concerns and are currently researching the issues you are describing."

So while we don't have a definitive answer yet from Disney, I do think the fact that we're not getting the same canned response back is a good sign. It never hurts to try, and maybe in the end we'll get a Pinocchio style replacement program.

Surely it should be pretty easy to put these subtitles up as a download? If not, why bother connecting our Blu-ray players to the Internet?

I don't want to have to download them and risk them having been taken down sometime in the future when I've bought a new player; I want them on the disc.

I noticed that when I saw Arriety in a local theater is had a very grainy texture to it (twas' a digitial projector)-when I recently purchased the bluray and watched it I noticed the same graininess to the video-?

Considering that the blu-ray is getting top marks for video quality in the reviews I've read, I'm willing to bet that it's natural film grain.

Yesasia shows Totoro on Blu ray with an expected release date of July 18th 2012! Does this have any connection to reality, or are they just making stuff up? http://www.yesasia.com/global/my-nei...0-en/info.html

They also show a box set with Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies available the same day. Seems too good to be true.

Ghibli switched to digital ink and paint with My Neighbors the Yamadas (though apparently there's about ten minutes of digital ink and paint in Princess Mononoke). Any film grain on a post-Mononoke film could be the result of outputting the digital source to 35mm and then transferring that back to video, but in this case it's probably digitally-added pseudo-grain.


Totoro and Fireflies were both announced in April, so they're as real as it gets until somebody has them in hand.

From Up on Poppy Hill has a U.S. distributor, and it's not Disney. Get ready for more waiting, though:

Not too surprising Disney would pass on this, since it sounds closer in spirit to Only Yesterday (which Disney has been sitting on for years) than anything else. Plus Disney was probably nervous about the mild spoiler (Click to show)
GKIDS (who are also handling the Ghibli theatrical retrospective) doesn't have their own home video arm, so I'm guessing the DVD/BD release will be sublicensed to another company.

If The Secret of Kells is anything to go by, it will probably be handled by New Video Group, who do excellent work.

I didn't know the Ghibli/Disney deal was first-look; I'd been under the impression that Disney was obligated to distribute everything. Not too shocking that this isn't the case, though.