Good day publius,

I hope you do'nt mind me asking:
how many individual Anime LD's do you have in your collection, and also do you purchase regular movies on the Laserdisc format aswell.

Sincere Regards

If you go by catalog numbers, about 500 not counting duplicates. Some of those are up to 24-disc sets, though, so the actual number of platters is larger. My "Collection Statistics" page counts 1077 non-dead sides, not including discs for which side count is not yet defined (still updates I need to do!), with 686.3 hours of play time. And I'm always hunting more!

Really anime is my focus. I rarely buy anything else, except as a gift for someone ; mainly test discs & classical music.

Hi Publius,
I'm interested to know, having a look at the great photos you put up of your Anime collection, I see most of them are Japanese imports and thus most don't have English subtitles or dub. So do you speak Japanese? Or enough Japanese to understand whats going on in the Anime? Or no Japanese at all? I speak a reasonable amount of Japanese, but no where near enough to sit down and watch the amount of titles you have with out the need for subtitles.

I'm not really fluent in Japanese, but I can usually do well enough to follow most of the dialogue in something aimed at the 12-to-14 set, such as Nadia or Kimagure Orange Road. (My level of proficiency varies with how much anime I watch, since it's my major exposure to the spoken language.) When that's not good enough, or for showings, I have a "genlock", which I can use with a computer to superimpose subtitles on the live video, if I have a timed sub script. This is exactly the process used for making tape fansubs, aeons ago. There are many such scripts available in the dark corners of the World Wide Net, & I have at least half of my library covered.

Yeah, I was wondering, how exactly are computers used to superimpose subtitles on the fly like that? Would it be practical in a home setting?

I don't know about "practical", but I do it. The classic approach uses three pieces of equipment : a computer, a LaserDisc player, & a genlocking overlay generator. The computer is running a programme such as SubStation Alpha, which basically runs in full-screen mode & generates a black screen with text in colours which may be selected by the user or included in the script. The LaserDisc player supplies the playback video. The "genlock" (a rather different use of the term from that encountered in the professional video world) downconverts the computer video to NTSC, in sync with the LD video, & mixes the two together, typically using a luma key function. The overall result is video with subtitles punched into it.

If you had a computer with an NTSC output (which is not uncommon these days), & a video special-effects generator, mixer, or switcher with a frame-sync function (which is pretty usual — you could use one that didn't with an external frame-sync), you could avoid the need for the "genlock", which is a rather obscure piece of equipment, & difficult to find although not terribly expensive. I've got one that failed, & I eventually repaired, but in the meantime bought a replacement for. I might be prevailed upon to sell it.

I figured I'd post this here, as you guys all seem to be the experts on anime discs. A guy a little distance from me is selling his anime collection off, and while I do have a passing interest in some of the movies and shows, I really don't know much about most titles. Normally, I'd leave this all for someone else to scoop up, but he is selling a CLD-D704 for a decent price, and if I'm driving all that far to get it, I'd like to pick up something else to make my drive worth it. He seems intent on selling everything as a lot, so would picking all of these up for just under $200 be fair? I mean, if I don't like them I'd be happy to sell/trade them at fair prices to folks on here. Here's the list:

Dominion Tank Police -2 disc set

Project a-ko 1, 2, 3

Bubblegum Criss OVA Vols 1-4

Bubblegum Crash OVA Vols 1-3

Riding Bean/Madox 01

Orange Road TV box sets 1-2 -12 discs (Limited to 1000 pressing, DVD's long out of print)

Urusei Yatsura Movies 1-2,4,6

Oh my Goddess OVA Vol 1-2

AD Police OVA Vols 1-2

Vampire Princess Miyu Vols 1-2

Crusher Joe Movie sealed

Crusher Joe OVA's sealed

Rupan The Legend of the Gold of Babylon (never released on DVD)

Rupan Fuma Conspiracy

Baoh (long out of print on dvd)

RG Veda Vols 1-2

Battle Royal High School OVA

Area 88 OVA's Vols 1-3

Toward the Terra

Fist of the North Star Movie (very limited pressing)

Battle Angel

Gun Smith Cats

Giant Robo OVA vols 1-4

So like I said, I would like to have the D704 as a backup/spare parts unit as he said it needs calibrating, but I dunno if I wanna drive to 100 kms to pick only it up knowing it has issues.

-philburque46
For those discs, I'd say that's a great price. If you do end up buying them, I'd be very interested in the Riding Bean/Madox 01 and Dominion Tank Police discs

EDIT: oh, and also the Kimagure sets

The Orange Road sets will generally find a buyer in the $50-$100 range. Battle Angel is, unfortunately, a notorious rotter — a clean copy is rather valuable, because the title is hard to obtain due to James Cameron's (I believe) having acquired the rights a decade ago from ADV, so that the DVD went out of print. There are a few in there that I don't have & would offer you my usual "US$5 per disc plus shipping" for.

Yeah, I'm considering going for it. I did enjoy most of my copy of Robot Carnival, and I have a copy of Lensman I have in my to watch pile that I hear is cool, also 3x3 Eyes. I'll let you guys know if I go for it and what ends up for sale.

Wow, $200 for all those? I think I paid that much for the Orange Road box sets alone (Worth every penny, btw). Do keep us informed. There are some titles in there that piqued my interest.

I am interested as well

luck is on your side with the price for everything:)

Good day Publius,

Thank you for your reply,
That is very specialised indeed.

I must admit that when I purchase an anime movie on Blu-Ray I will nearly always try to purchase the Japanese or South Korean ect versions first and then compare these against the US/UK.

Titles such as ''WONDERFUL DAYS'' is a prime example of how different the content can be. I do prefer purchasing from the Country of which they originate from, and do not have a problem with subtitles.

Publius Thank you again.

Regards

not derail the thread but do you have the LE DVD version of Wonderful Days? I was wondering how it compares in quality to the new releases. I'm still going to keep it but if the newer ones are nice then I might buy those as well. This is a fantastic movie that everyone should see. I wish the subs were accurate in the English translation of it.

Interesting. Speaking of the Ghost in the Shell Premium Box, do you (or anyone else) know if the extras feature English subs and/or dub? I've got the opportunity of buying this for around $25 US.

I didn't want to steer you wrong, so I pulled my copies.

On the Japanese Premium Box, some of the trailers on Side 3 are in English, apparently from the theatrical release, & the "International Ending" with English credits is also included. There are also English on-screen captions for some of the promo materials. There is no closed captioning after the last line of the film, & the documentary on Side 5 is neither captioned/subtitled nor dubbed.
The substantially different documentary on Side 4 of the Manga Entertainment US CAV release has the narration dubbed in English on the digital audio tracks, & left in the original Japanese on the analog audio ; subtitles are provided for the interview segments, which are not dubbed, but the narration is not captioned.

I have to say, considering how flat the English soundtrack for this film is compared to the Japanese version, it could just as well have been presented in mono. In other words, this was a huge missed opportunity for an AC-3 release. I mention this because the credits refer to "Dolby Stereo Digital" — in other words, it was available to theatres in AC-3.

Not to forget the opening sequence is available in AC3 on Dolby Digital Experience (1997) [PILW-7006] and sounds awesome compared to the non AC3 versions (of course some would say), BUT DIG THIS... I also own this on japanese Blu-ray, and guess what... there is no AC3 there either, it is "Linear PCM Dolby Surround 2.0", and you have to manually set your amp to surround... sounds just as flat as the LD version. Very disappointing.

Well, a few weeks ago the binder of my AnimEigo Urusei Yatsua set, one of the worst choices in LD packaging history, finally bit the dust. The front cover simply came away. So, clever lad that I am, I managed to remove the paper inserts from the front, back, & spine, & come up with a plan for replacement packaging. Today I finished the first step, putting the discs into individual jackets, purchased plain from a local record store. Each one has a pattern of orange-&-black stripes on the spine giving the volume number in binary, which I made using address labels. My plan is to add another label to each jacket detailing the contents (episode numbers, story numbers, & titles).

My collection, I really like Anime, however if you have to be lucky to find these nice Japanese editions (if you do not buy from EBAY)
I personally never buy american editions.
Put the last 3 separately, you most probably know why

blue seed 2 volume1 KILA172
blue seed 2 volume2 KILA173
blue seed 2 volume3 KILA358
evangelion theatre box death (TRUE)² / rebirth / the end of evangelion KILA-9401~4
ghost in the shell Premium Box BEAL-921
macross plus movie edition BELL-887
memories BEAL-926
mononoke hime (princess mononoke) TKLA-50300
shin kujyaku oh volume 1 PILA-1254
shin kujyaku oh volume 2 PILA-1255

beast city volume 2 SHLA1014
beast city volume 3 SHLA1030
twin angels volume 1 & 2 DLZ-0184