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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 08 Mar 2021, 07:13
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Speaking of digital/analog sound misunderstandings, here's the video I recommend to everyone who insists that "vinyl better because analog". Also just great to watch if you want to learn more about digital sound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
My thoughts on vinyl are basically the same as my thoughts on LD: It's not better, but it's neat and I like it. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 08 Mar 2021, 23:48
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 13 Mar 2021, 19:14
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| Don't forget 16-bit-style games (sprite-based, more tiles than polygons) on 32-bit machines. I'll never get tired of Suikoden II. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 23 Mar 2021, 05:33
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It's fun to scroll past that list cause you'll think you see a bunch that you recognize, but on closer inspection they just have somewhat similar titles.
I'd start with TNT Jackson. That's a quality name for a movie. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 25 Mar 2021, 18:47
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Nail on the head regarding the word "repro." I'm not a puritan about piracy because companies don't care about preserving old games for posterity. If it weren't for piracy, loads of creative works would be lost in the ether. But when you're bootlegging, i.e. selling something that doesn't belong to you, you don't get the benefit of the doubt from me. And if you're a would-be buyer, the only difference between buying a bootleg and burning your own pirated ISO or putting your own pirated ROM on a flashcart is how much money you're spending. You're getting fleeced.
And f*ck anyone who buys something they don't otherwise care about because they think it'll be worth more later. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 05 Apr 2021, 18:16
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Macross: Super Dimension Fortress: 15th Anniversary Memorial Box (1982) [BELL-1036]
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Symphonic Orchestra Live (1997) [KILA 339]
Technically not the last discs I bought, but the latest to arrive after they spent a considerable amount of time on a boat between Japan and here. Big thanks to Julien for packing them up nice and safely!
The Macross box is so damn slick. I've only watched the first disc so far (it's CAV, unlike most of the set), and the picture is about as clean as it can be given the source and the format. Sound's mono (presumably the original TV mix), but that can't diminish the heavenliness of Macross's sound, even in its earliest incarnation. I confess to singing along with the opening theme song most times it plays (and I'm almost to the point where I can pronounce all the lyrics roughly correctly!)
Probably the last addition to my modest LD collection for a while. I've had about three waves of substantial additions since I got my player about a year and a half ago, and my shelf of anime LDs in particular feels nice and fleshed out now. Now I just need an uncrowded weekend for a change to edit and submit those cover pics I've been procrastinating on... |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 08 Apr 2021, 14:45
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Does anyone know where you can get good quality rgb scart cables for the Saturn. One advantage of being an european is that my consumer grade LG CRT is rgb capable. Right now I have my Saturn hooked up using the original Sega RGB scart cable. (I checked up the manual and yes it came with an RGB cable. And my TV confirms that it is indeed RGB)
Still there is some background noise in the quiet sections, due to the cable. So I'd like to know, if you know any better alternatives to the original Sega RGB cable.
I think retrogamingcables.co.uk has good-quality SCART cables for most consoles that support RGB. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 09 Apr 2021, 02:13
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Well there's something I never thought would happen. This is kind of like the anime equivalent of the Good Friday Agreement.
Fingers crossed for Macross Plus and DYRL on blu-ray over here. Definitely looking forward to DYRL subtitles that aren't fansubs. Or dare I say it, a new dub? |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 10 Apr 2021, 17:26
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| I hate to be part of the No Fun Brigade...... but the Moon has way too little atmosphere for that design to make a lick of sense. Bet you the company got some strongly worded letters from a handful of kids about that! |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 17 Apr 2021, 16:56
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DBZ's handling is indeed dogshit, but to me it's never been too surprising. For people my age and a bit older, DBZ is simply mainstream. It's a lot easier to sell cropped DVDs with blown-out colors when the number of anime nerds pales in comparison to that of the average joes who simply don't want "the black bars" on their widescreen TVs.
As for Looney Tunes, I think that has more to do with that there were just so damn many of them. My impression is that while a good number of them are indispensable classics (Baseball Bugs, What's Opera Doc, Duck Amuck, Fast and Furry-ous...), a lot more of them are just "...eh." Not to mention the ones that Warner Bros. doesn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole anymore. We had the first two Golden Collection sets when I was a kid, and that was more than enough for me. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 19 Apr 2021, 04:57
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Some of it's people settling for a substandard product, but I think it mostly comes down to people who can't tell a good product from a kick in the teeth. Most people (as horrifying as it is to think of) don't realize when a TV has frame interpolation turned on, will automatically think that any picture that doesn't completely fill the screen is missing parts, and wouldn't notice if you re-orchestrated a film's soundtrack with a middle-school band. (Okay, that last one's an exaggeration... I think.)
The situation with anime's usually better because it's a niche product; a bad release cuts proportionally deeper into sales. That's why the worst releases are often the ones with the broadest appeal. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 19 Apr 2021, 16:22
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...Good thing I didn't?
"Looney Tunes" is indispensable. "Every last Looney Tunes short" contains plenty that given perfect foresight I would have skipped.
To bring this back to Macross, this is like if I said, "I watched a few episodes of Macross Frontier and decided it wasn't for me," and someone lectured me that Macross (not Frontier, just Macross without any qualifiers) is actually brilliant and I just don't know. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 07 May 2021, 17:56
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| Social media can make anything look like a wider trend. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow there have been, are, and will be chronic clutter-ers, habitual throwers-away, and everyone in between. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 10 May 2021, 07:07
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I think Kiki and Lala's blue bird may not even be correct as you have the の character and also the い but that い is in between
the Kanji so what does that make out???
The い in 青い鳥 is making an adjective out of 青.
青 = "ao", blue
青い = "aoi", blue as an adjective
鳥 = "tori", bird
青い鳥 = "aoi tori", lit. "blue bird," jisho.org more specifically defines it as "bluebird of happiness"
Of course, I noticed there's another laserdisc entitled "Kiki's Delivery Service" in English, so I could be totally wrong.
Different Kiki.
Looking at the picture you sent, it appears the Kiki & Lala parts are separated from the rest of the characters on the cover and the OBI. They're smaller and that makes me think the intent is "Kiki & Lala" are like a brand. Similar to having a Pokemon logo as a brand.
Perhaps the movie/episode is called simply "The Bluebird" or "The Bluebird of Happiness".
You can tell from the の at the end of the first part of the title that the two parts are connected: キキとララの is incomplete by itself. の "no" is a possessive particle here, so "Kiki and Lala's Blue Bird" checks out.
Anyway, when in doubt I just check what names Anime News Network's encyclopedia has for a given title: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=1789 |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 18 May 2021, 00:56
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https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/17/22440090/apple-music-lossless-audio-dolby-atmos-support-audio
Finally Apple does lossless audio on Apple Music (formerly iTunes) and no increase in price on the monthly subscription. Ironically, all their headphones and speakers are Bluetooth connected therefore can’t do lossless. Nevertheless this is a good news. Do you think Apple will do the unthinkable and offer lossless video on Apple TV?
Lossless video? No chance in hell from Apple or any other company. Lossless audio is a drop in the bucket compared to lossless video. Even at SD, lossless digital video (even compressed) takes up a prohibitive amount of space/bandwidth for the consumer market. And honestly, it's not even worth it. HEVC and x265 work great in the right hands. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 29 May 2021, 18:07
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This seems to add confusion. Like the OP, on my AC-3 decks I cannot select analog Right if the disc is AC-3. There is no either/or. I’m pretty sure this true to every machine, at least every Pioneer machine with factory AC-3. I suppose a modded CLD-97 would probably let you listing to the squeal...
I have a CLD-79, and it behaves the way the OP describes: you can choose analog right, but if you do and it's AC3 you get nothing from either the demodulator or the RCA outputs (mute, not squeal). I went to triple-check this just now. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 08 Jun 2021, 04:22
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| I picked the Super Famicom Dragon Quest games (I+II, III, V, VI; went looking for V and found a listing with it and the others for a good price) in part to practice reading Japanese. Still need to look up plenty of words while playing, but I'm getting more of it than I thought I would at first, so that's encouraging. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 20 Jun 2021, 05:57
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| Going to echo rein-o here, just get one of these discs. If you use skin tones as your measuring stick, you'll always be playing catch-up with different movies you watch because transfers vary (to say nothing of actors' skin tones). Video Essentials comes with lots of important test patterns and a detailed manual. I won't pretend it's easy (I thought it was a bit of a headache, at least), but it'll get you where you want to be, which I can't say the same for when it comes to messing with your scalar's color settings without a calibration disc. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 20 Jun 2021, 16:55
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1) Why cant tvs look like an iPad? Its all same screen technology after all? not looking for higher PPI than 4K
2) why cant i use retrotink? I know its for games but why cant it be used for LDs?
3) i thought LCD from 10 years ago were better as they were more like a step stone between the old analogue tech and newer digital tech. Now its completely digital, even DVDs are starting to sound extinct
1) I think part of it may be that larger screens magnify flaws? You've also got different power considerations.
2) The main reason I think is the Retrotink's bob-deinterlacing, the main benefit of which for gaming is latency but is a very poor fit for movies on a flatscreen. It's a no-brainer CRT-mimicking kind of linedoubling that gives you really obnoxious flicker without the natural softening of a CRT display. Also, I ran an LD player through an RT once to judge for myself, and I recall some sync problems.
That said, while I don't have one, but it's possible that the new Retrotink 5x is more suitable for movies as it has more deinterlacing options, and I've heard some claims that it handles VHS well. I don't think the comb filter's supposed to be anything to write home about, though. What I've got my eye on is the upcoming Pixel FX Morph, which is described as a "spiritual successor" to the Framemeister and does mention LD specifically in its project roadmap: https://www.pixelfx.co/content/morph_roadmap.html
3) There's no proper continuity between CRT and LCD. While older LCD TVs are more likely to have analogue video inputs, it's still converted to digital just like today and there's nothing analogue about the displays themselves. They're just worse digital displays. Also, you can indeed still get new TVs with a composite input (like my OLED, not that I ever use the composite input because I get fewer deinterlacing artifacts with a scaler).
Tasuke, please, please, please play those old games at 4:3. Those screenshots are going to give me nightmares. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 21 Jun 2021, 14:38
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Don't touch your TV settings when calibrating for laserdisc if you have a scaler and you use the same TV settings for other sources; just change your scaler's settings. The results are always a function of your player's, scaler's, and TV's settings, but there are multiple solutions to the puzzle. You can get good results without impacting other sources by adjusting only the scaler to fit the other two.
Think of it this way: the numbers in your scaler's menu don't have to be the same (indeed shouldn't be the same) as other people's: they just have to be right for your player and your TV. That's why calibration exists. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 28 Jun 2021, 00:31
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| Don't worry about VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). It only applies to video games; refers to dynamic screen refresh rates so that slow frames in games get delayed instead of dropped. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 28 Jun 2021, 05:00
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So back to Patlabor, I just (finally) filled in one of the more glaring omissions in my experience with anime to this point, namely Patlabor the OVA and movies 1 and 2.
It was all great stuff, and P2 was as brilliant as advertised. Chills you to the bone, more so than any anime I've seen in a long while. The scene of an ordinary Tokyo morning commute peppered with a heavy military presence is the best example, I think. The comparisons to Ghost in the Shell invite themselves, of course, and my first impression is that P2's treatment of heavy militarization in "peacetime" rings more eerily accurate than GitS's treatment of artificial consciousness feels plausible. This is definitely one I want to watch again to make sure I've caught all the subtleties, and to keep more of its striking compositions in my memory.
One area though where I'd compare P2 unfavorably to GitS is in how it relates to its previous material. The problem is Noa, who is a (wonderful!) cartoon character in a movie where she had to be written out of being a cartoon character or it would have been tonally dissonant. It felt more like an exercise in obligation and excuse-making than a stage in a character's arc, which is how I think they tried to frame it. If there were some kind of connecting tissue between where she was in Movie 1 and Movie 2, maybe I'd buy it, but as of first watching I don't. It's not an implausible trajectory, but it feels more convenient than natural. GitS's characters meanwhile (to my understanding) weren't as fun or colorful as Noa to begin with, so they mesh better with Oshii's sober P2/GitS tone. Fortunately, P2 is almost entirely told from Goto's and Nagumo's perspectives, so this is a minor complaint about an excellent movie.
Actually, I think my favorite part of what I've seen of Patlabor was part 1 of "The SV2's Longest Day." I'm an absolute sucker for artfully rendered heavy-winter atmospheres in anime, and while P2 has this in spades, having much of this episode focus on Asuma annoyedly making his way to Hokkaido to spend his vacation with Noa because he has no friends or family he can comfortably stay with in Tokyo hit several of my personal atmospheric and character notes dead on.
One last thing, seeing the scenes in Movie 1 that later served as the model for the Ultracity 6060 "Lip Sync" bit killed me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHNnL9hSEBU |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 08 Jul 2021, 07:02
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Did we want more Star Wars? Yes, but from George Lucas, not from Disney.
I did not know a single person who wanted George Lucas to make more Star Wars movies by 2015. I don't like the sequel trilogy either, but Star Wars fans at large stopped being George Lucas fans well before he sold the company to Disney.
Anyway, I also don't see the point in judging companies by how many good "franchises" they have. I care about movies, not franchises. A great movie that doesn't have a glut of sequels and spinoffs is no less for it. |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 12 Jul 2021, 16:52
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Putting aside any of the relative merits and demerits of various varieties of football, here's the simple explanation of football/soccer naming history:
They have the same name because they used to be the same sport.
And here's the longer one:
You start with a vague primordial form of football/soccer/rugby played at English schools called "football," which at some point becomes divided into two distinct sports: one where you're allowed to pick up the ball, and one where you aren't. When the latter is codified by the Football Association, it takes on the name "association football." The former is prominent at the Rugby school, and takes on the name "Rugby football." Note that from this point on, both association football and Rugby football are both simply called "football" in locales where each is the most common. The nickname "soccer" derives from the word "association," and originates from "Oxford '-er' slang." (It is a common misconception that "soccer" is an Americanism; the term in fact originated in England.)
Rugby traveled to the US and Canada and caught on at colleges, and was widely simply called "football." Gradually in the US and Canada (in parallel evolution) the rules began to change (most importantly with the addition of the system of downs and the forward pass), but these were considered changes to the rules of the sport rather than the creation of a new sport at each stage, so the name never changed.
While there may have been pockets of Americans in the past who called soccer "football," and others who continued to play rugby proper and call it "football" even as most followed the new rule changes, as American football became ubiquitous it would become a practical necessity to call the other varieties of football by more specific names, namely soccer and rugby. (The situation in Canada is a bit more complicated, but it boils down to similar changes to rugby as in America except pushed back a few decades in each case.) |
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| rcarlson |
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Posted: 03 Aug 2021, 21:35
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| Bleah. Had all five volumes of Adachi's Slow Step coming in, all but one arrived with deep cracks in the same spot, basically a chunk of the edge hanging on by a thread. And the other one is rotted or something to the point where the sound is completely garbled and the picture is really noisy. Oh well. At least I can submit the covers for the database when I have time. |
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Thanks list