Another train pulls into the final station as Den-O is now complete! Kind of! What does that mean? Read on and find out!
Big thanks go out to the uploader at ADC who provided the BDs for the series (who I can’t name because ADC is still down and I don’t remember who it was…) and to Earthly for the hard work scrubbing things! Thanks also go out to OrangeLion and TV-N as the scrubs were based on their work.
I was definitely excited to work on Den-O since it’s such a popular entry in the franchise and it finally let me dive into a Phase 1 Heisei series. It was well worth it, and I think despite a slow start with releases for the first quarter of the series, the change to single daily releases helped a lot with getting things done at a solid pace. While I’m well aware that people would certainly prefer a fully new translation from start to finish, myself included, to me, it made more sense to get HD encodes out there and at least attempt to tidy up the existing translation and hope that someone will take up a full re-translation at some point. Should anyone be interested in that, I welcome them to use these BD encodes.
Now, unsurprisingly, when I said Den-O was only kind of done, that’s because there are several other movies set after the series that we’ve also got plans to release. Normally, we would do these in their release order, but since some of these would have to wait until we’re all the way on to Decade, we’re going to skip the usual release order and do the Den-O movies independently of whatever else we’re releasing. So look for the Den-O/Kiva, Farewell Den-O, Den-O/Decade, and Super Den-O Trilogy to come out in the near future.
Additionally, the batch is going to be slightly delayed as there are some revisions that we’d like to make to some earlier episodes based on things we realized we could word better as the series went on. If you’re happy with the translations as they are now, they won’t be anything extreme, but we’ll have a patch pack with the batch to revise the existing releases if you so choose. We’ll probably include the movies with the batch as well, which will help with delaying it a little longer.
Last, as usual when doing one of these wrap up posts, we have to talk about what’s next. People ask about Decade all the time and the only update I can give on that front is that the retranslation project is waiting for translator availability. After discussions with Champstice, we’ve agreed that Decade will get released first with scrubs (unless the translator is available by the time we’re ready to start releasing), once again in conjunction with Earthly, and when the new TL is ready, we’ll simply re-release the encodes with the new TL and offer a patch for anyone that got the scrubs. Additionally, as previously announced on Twitter, we’ll be doing Kabuto once Earthly has an opportunity to give the subs one more pass, and I’ve also been looking at some potential 540p encodes of the early Heisei series that have upscaled BDs (Faiz, Ryuki, etc.), but that particular plan will be discussed when I’m done with series that were produced in native HD. In any case, that’s all still a little farther down the road.
In the meantime, Earthly and I, in conjunction with the RaillerSubs team, will be doing Kiva’s BDs! This isn’t expected to kick off until the start of 2019, namely because I want to make a dent in Kyoryuger first, and we have the rest of Build Box 3, as well as Build Box 4 and LuPat Box 2 in December. This lines up well with Earthly’s availability for the next month or so as there is some additional work that needs to be completed on the subs. My personal goal, using the daily schedule, is to be able to beat the Kiva Figuarts release. Can we do it? We’ll see! So, be ready to “Wake Up!” in 2019 and watch some Kiva!
Thank you so much for all your work!
You’re awesome! When you say the batch will be delayed, how long do you typically think that will take? Im really excited to watch this series!
Hopefully only until mid-December or so. That should give me enough time to sort out the movies and get the revisions for the episodes all squared away.
>I’ve also been looking at some potential 540p encodes of the early Heisei series that have upscaled BDs (Faiz, Ryuki, etc.), but that particular plan will be discussed when I’m done with series that were produced in native HD.
So could you enumerate on this further?
I know that from Wizard forward, they were shot in 1080p and that from Kabuto to Fourze, they were shot in 720p.
Of those that were remaining (Agito, Ryuki, 555, Blade, and Hibiki), I know Ryuki, 555, Blade were upscaled for their BD releases. Also, does Agito even have a Blu Ray release yet? I was wondering about Hibki and Kuuga but I found an old Bunny Hat blog post regarding that: https://bunnyhat.blogspot.com/2013/05/shooting-and-editing-of-early-heisei.html
I’m still not exactly all that what would mean for Kuuga’s Blu Ray releases. And also apparently Hibiki was broadcast in 1080p?
I don’t know enough about the Showa Kamen Rider BD releases, but I guess all of those were upscaled?
So the problem with Kuuga is that while it was shot in HD, they did the effects work in SD. This is the same as what happened with the 80s/90s Star Trek shows. They were shot on film but effects work was mastered on tape, so for the BDs for ST:TNG, they had to redo the effects from scratch. Toei’s intention for Kuuga was to redo the effects when it was cheaper, but it’s not really gotten cheaper.
So for the “middle shows” that were upscaled (Agito-Blade), the shows don’t exist in anything but 480i/p (Because of how it works, you can argue that the shows exist in either interlaced or progressive forms) so as you said, they were upscaled for BD. The BDs have one inherent advantage though, and that is that they (excluding Blade, which got utterly shit on for the BD release) were made using better masters opposed to just upscaling the already-compressed DVD masters, so while Toei added a massive amount of sharpening to try and make them look less like upscales, some of that can be undone by careful filtering and there’s a bit more detail than what we see in the DVD encodes thanks to BD’s superior compression.
So, why do a 540p encode if it’s still upscaled from what really only exists in 480? Because math. If I have a little extra detail to play with, a minor upscale from 480 to 540 should hold up well enough and 540p doubles to 1080p and quadruples to 2160p, aka 4K. This means we can take advantage of smaller file sizes while allowing a viewer’s display to upscale it cleanly if they are watching on a bigger screen. There are certainly valid arguments as to why this is pointless and it should just be encoded at 480, but I’ll be doing some screenshot comparisons once I actually get to a point where I’m seriously considering any of this.
As for Hibiki, it was shot at 1080i, so if and when I get my hands on the BDs, we’d determine if there is enough detail worth doing an actual 1080p encode or if, due to the age and/or encoding Toei does on the discs, if it’d be better off at 720p like the subsequent 720p native series. For the Showa Riders, those were all done to 16mm film, so those are usually worth encoding at 720p as well.