Grain Removal

De-grained by Q-Tec. The de-graining itself is kind of impressive. It leaves a significant amount of cel dust, film dirt, and doesn’t really destroy lines. In a way, it’s less destructive than many “faithful” restorations.

However, Q-Tec failed to de-grain every frame. For almost every shot, the first and last frames have intact grain. Shots begin with grain, but then melt into smeariness. It’s as if it constantly goes in and out of focus. Going from grain to no-grain also looks a lot like interpolation.

As a result of the de-graining, lines also shimmer. (No examples)

Freezing

The technicians also removed all visible cement splices. For shots that begin static, they duplicated frames; nearly every shot freezes. Sometimes, duplicated frames have additional spot removal. (Frame numbers in yellow.)

Hallucination

This shot begins with a shaky-cam effect. It coincides with a cement splice, so the technician removed the splice by extending the top of the artwork…

…without referencing the art itself a few frames later:

Screen Tearing and Retouching

They used screen tearing to cover splices. Notice also that their retouching has smeary borders.

Frozen cloning, tearing, and de-graining errors all at once:

But…

Commercials for the Japanese DVD and BD sets show beautiful transfers full of grain, and even show a cement splice.

JP DVD commercial:

JP BD commercial:

I’d like to think that the JP BDs are the way to go, but since Japanese companies love hiring Q-Tec, I suspect that the commercials are false advertising and that their BDs are the same smeary version. Leave a comment if you know they’re better. As of now, the JP DVDs are probably the best version.

A note on the English dub: It’s a wonderful dub. I’ve been a fan of it ever since it aired on Cartoon Network. However, I wish they would produce a version of it that uses the original music and effects.

I gave up watching the BDs. I could have lived with the de-graining (while complaining throughout), but the constant freezing and flashes of grain were impossible to overlook. It’s that inconsistency that made it unwatchable for me. A truly terrible release.