Lying Evily By Moonlight: Viz Defends SAILOR MOON Upscale, Lies Through Their Teeth To Do It

Really, Viz? You're going to make me do this, huh? Alright then. I've had a go at Media Blasters, I've called FUNimation on their bullshit, I can't tell you how many times I've had to publicly shame Arrow Video on old shenanigans, so if you want in on the "fun", that's your problem.


To be honest, I wanted to be polite about this. I wanted to post those atrotious SD upscaled screengrabs from Viz'SAILOR MOON Blu-ray once it came out, sigh really loudly and post a facepalm picture, say "Welp, ain't that some shit... wubba-lubba dub-dub!" and be done with it. I'm a busy guy, they've got money to make, the disclaimer would be enough for everyone to be somewhat satisfied, people could judge for themselves... this should have been easy. Frustrating, depressing and ugly, but easy, none the less.

Don't get me wrong, those promo shots and video clips Viz has been been pimping since about Anime Expo were always a bloody mess - a clusterfuck or questionable decisions and limited resources, I know, but fans of this franchise have been so starved for a complete, proper presentation that I don't even blame a single one of them for knowingly buying a shitty release, because I've done it myself many, many times over the years. 'It is what it is', I told myself. No sense dragging Viz through the mud for a release even they, and everyone else already knew, is a shit-show by nature... heck, I'm honestly a little disappointed to admit I was late to this particular party, not realizing how bad things were going to be until a couple weeks after everyone else had seen the proof.

I certainly had my reasons for being out of the loop. But we'll get to that later...



I figured that, much like The Great Humongous, I'd stop all the violence and just walk away... and then you had to lie through your teeth to our collective face. Why, Viz? It's not bad enough that you have to put shit on our tongues, but you had to look us in the eye and tell us it's delicious Belgian chocolate, too? No, man. That's where I draw the fucking line. You don't literally feed the consumer half-true information about the quality of your product, and more specifically, misrepresent the quality of competing products and expect me to hold my tongue. You don't lie to the internet and expect anyone to forget, much less forgive. That's an amateur move, and what's worse, y'all fucking knew it when you made it.

I'm not writing this because the new Sailor Moon Blu-ray/DVD release sucks. It does, but that's not the part I'm mad about. I'm mad because they suck, and Viz is willing to throw Toei under the bus to say it's not their fault their own in-house upscale is a miserable pile of ass. Not happening, folks. Not on this blog, at any rate.

The lie I'm talking about specifically is THIS POST on the Neon Alley blog earlier in the week, which includes several comparisons between the Viz Blu-ray, and the Japanese DVD. These DVDs are region locked, feature no English language options, and were until very recently the only legitimate way to purchase the entire series for playback on NTSC systems. Don't get me wrong, I love image comparisons - they're a great way to learn how to identify video anomalies, and help consumers who have an eye for said differences. In short, an honest, accurate A/B comparison is the best way for consumers to make an informed decision.

The problem here is that Viz did not use accurate screenshots. They went out of their way to make the R2 DVD screenshots look worse than the actual discs in an effort to make their absolutely abhorrent HD "Remaster" look better by comparison. They also claim early comparisons were from the "Japanese DVD Release" itself, rather than the "DVD Master" as later samples were called. It's bullshotting at its finest either way, but I want to establish how utterly full of it Viz is being before we get into how they're being dishonest.

If you're a visual kinda' Sailor Soldier, here's pretty much all you need to know about what a filthy, back-stabbing lie Viz is pushing to make their set not look like a steaming pile of poorly upscaled shite:


Worse yet, if this Anime News Network ANNCast Interview with Charlene Ingram and Julie McDonald is any indication, they're digging their heels in for the long haul, with zero plans to fix the discs themselves, or change authoringhouses for future titles. In other words, I hope you like all of Viz' future upscales looking like frame-blended and saturation-boosted butthole, because that's all I'm ever going to expect from them going forward.

 For further examples of just how ridiculous the funky frame-blending issues are...


No, I won't be dissecting the whole discs for a 10-page autopsy: The above examples should be enough to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that these are a train-wreck far beyond my already meager expectations. This wasn't hard, Viz: When you were offered SD materials, you should have done a DVD release, gauged customer interest in a Blu-ray and then double dipped a year or two down the line. Now customers are stuck with artifacts that are worse than the import editions, and for a release claiming to be a High Definition definitive remaster, that's unacceptable. In fact, it's bullshit.

And for the record, the DVD version is a 16:9 frame pillarboxed to 4:3, meaning about 25% of the frame is simply wasted space. Yes, most HDTV monitors at this point are 16:9, but that means resolution is limited more than it has to be. Yes, this is stupid. Yes, this was the wrong decision to make from a production standpoint. But it's so, so far down on the list of "shit wrong with Viz' release of Sailor Moon" that I'm not going to even give it the time of day.

Viz Media is lying to you. That's all there is to it. Straight from McDonald's mouth: "All I can tell you is that what you're seeing in terms of blended frames is not part of the post-production process."This is untrue; it's simply the result of an IVTC algorithm not being tweaked to handle unexpected 3:2 cadence changes, and yes, you bet your ass if I had been handed those gorgeous ProRes captures from Digibeta I could have been able to spit out a proper 23.976fps master without any consistent issues. Animation is one of the most problematic types of material you can work with, and it's become abundantly clear that Subatomic Digital - likely through inexperience more than a lack of sincere effort - have come up dramatically short.

The only possible reason this could be the result of the digital masters present to Viz is if Toei did something horribly wrong to produce them. Unfortunately, for that theory to hold any water, we'd have to assume any other international licensor was given the same shoddy materials to work with, since Toei has no reason to play favorites with anyone else. There have been numerous reports confirming that the progressive PAL DVDs released by Kaze Dynamic of Italy* are not only pulled from the same sources as Viz Media's 1080p abortion here, but that they managed to properly IVTC the source video and pitch it to 25fps without any issue. In other words, Kaze Dynamic did what Subatomic Digital didn't: Treat the footage properly, restore the original 23.976fps framerate without any frame blending, and leave the perfectly normal analogue film grain exactly as they should have.

"We're like, video passion on steroids here! That's how addicted we are to getting the best possible imagery..."she continues on the ANNCast."I don't think there's a lot of ground we can cover by pointing to this or that image and saying, this is the right image, that's the right image... I can tell you without a doubt that myself and ten videophiles sit with me, 20 hours a day, working on this material know, and are providing Charlene and our Neon Alley folks with the images that we have access to."

Allow me to express my feelings in the only medium I find appropriate, under the circumstances:


Now, let me explain why I'm so incredibly pissed off by this answer, and why I was willing to try and ignore this sideshow since, franly, I don't have the time for it: This week, I finalized the M2V and AC3 files for a particular DVD release that'll hit shelves sometime next year after, quite literally, months of work I did over weekends and in the wee hours of the night after finishing my regular 40 hours a week doing what I do to make a living. I won't mention the title - odds are you all know what it is anyway, but I at least have to pretend Kentai is an anonymous parody of a shared autistic videophile sarcasm rather than a real human being with video processing credits well into the thousands now - but suffice to say it's a substantially less iconic piece of animation than Sailor Moon will ever hope to be. Honestly, if this title had been a dump of the not-so-great import DVD with no added work, the small fanbase for the sort of niche title we're talking about would have sighed, shrugged, and ponied up $20 just to show their support on principle. It's that kind of show... the kind that gets a release out of a combination of nostalgia from a small set of hardcore fans, and a morbidly curious subset looking for explosions of insanity they've somehow missed from yester-year who figure it's a fair price to peek their head into the freak tent.

The release took forever, but it's not exactly "pretty". Massively improved, absolutely, but those materials were a goddamn joke: I worked from the only surviving analog masters - certainly not fresh 2002 Digibetas that look like a perfect representation of the 16mm film they were shot on, but crumby analog tapes closer to VHS that DVD. We're talking NTSC masters so old they'd be legally allowed to drink! I spent an entire season fixing that two and a half hours or so worth of footage; color grading literally each and every shot for accurate flesh tones and exposure issues, manually removing scratches using matte plates to prevent eyeballs and drops of blood from distorting or disappearing, fixing major film and video damage that I found unacceptable, repairing analogue opticals with digital replacements when I had no other choice to avoid funky seams popping up as a result, experimenting for two weeks on DVNR algorithms that minimized the issues inherent to those god-awful sources without molesting any of the "real" detail underneath... this DVD is my fucking magnum opus. The sanity I've lost is something I can never get back, and honestly, the only praise I expect to see are one or two forum posts saying something along the lines of "Oh hey, that's finally out? Well, it looks better than my old VHS. Too bad there's no Blu-ray though."

My blood, sweat and tears are infused into that remaster, and yet I doubt it'll sell more than 2,000 copies before the license expires. For fuck's sake, I haven't even discussed payment yet because (and please, don't tell my boss this!) that's not why I do it, or at least that's not my primary motivation for doing it... I did it because it was the right thing to do. Because ultimately popular culture is our culture, in all of its kitschy, grotesque and embarrassing glory. Sailor Moon in particular holds a very special place in the hearts of girls who grew up on it - a show about empowerment that was still feminine, wrapped up in a charming bubblegum aesthetic and with a cast of defined, lovable characters? That's the kind of shit people eat up forever. This is a title that fans have been frustrated to only have abridged, incomplete, and heinous quality options for... and this is how their patience and love has been repaid. A botched pseudo-HD master and a bunch of carefully worded corporate deflections that all boil down to, we tried super hard, you guys! Honest!

"As a videophile yourself", Zac Bertschy asks, "Do you look at this and say: Okay, this is as good as this show can look?"

"You know, my feeling about it is I'm really happy with what we did to it, based on what we had to work with. I'm thrilled with it... these issues don't trouble because I don't think they make the product in any way less - I know the love and care we put into it. So am I happy with it? I am happy with it... I'm completely over the moon with it, if you must know!"

Zac later asks: "So fans who pre-ordered this set and get their copy in the mail. They aren't happy with the video quality. What do you suggest that they do?"

Charlene has an answer on that front: "Of course we take all feedback very seriously, but that's... It's up to everyone to decide what they want to do with what they bought. Given - to echo Julie's point - given what we had to work with, that's how it was able to turn out with everyone working on it, so, we just don't have any news on that at this time."

In other words, if you think this release is a slap in the face... you can eat a dick. In fact, you can eat a whole bag of soggy lukewarm dicks if you're still hungry. They're sticking with their partners, they're not changing the process, and we can expect similar results going forward. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Before I can go any further, I need to quote the following piece from the Neon Alley blog that raises further questions:

The original footage for Sailor Moon, being from way back in 1992, is also older than many fans who adore the series now. In 2009, Japan released the seasons on DVD using the best materials available, Unfortunately, the original film from 1992 just does not exist. In making our Blu-ray releases, we used the same masters used to create the those beautiful releases, but make them work for the modern Blu-ray format.


Waaaaaitasecond... let me re-emphasise the part that caight my eye, just to be clear:

"In 2009, Japan released the seasons on DVD using the best materials available, Unfortunately, the original film from 1992 just does not exist."

First of all, the SD Telecine work was done in 2002 - a minor correction, I know, but the fact that a 12 year old DVD kicked your shoddy upscale's ass is still worth pointing out for a total understanding of how hard this ball was dropped. More importantly though, why the fuck does the original film "not exist" for this series, exactly? Toei had no trouble pulling the camera negatives for Dragon Ball Z out to do their fascinating (if not entirely successful) Dragon Ball Kai experiment a couple years back. In 2009, the entire 152 episode Fist of the North Star TV series had a new HD master created from the original film negatives, creating an even higher quality DVD release that the previous 2004 edition. Toei has pulled 35mm negatives out of cold storage for feature films including the Saint Seiya and Galaxy Express and Sherlock Hound movies... and yet somehow, Sailor Moon - easily Toei Animation's most iconic and internationally beloved magical girl franchise, not to mention one of their top earning franchises of the 1990s - "doesn't exist"? Unless you can point me to some dramatic explanation for this one, I'm calling bullshit.

To put this into perspective, that company I worked with? They had a contract with a major Japanese animation distributor. They asked for an HD master, and were told one didn't exist. They asked if they could get a film print, and were told if they were willing to pay they'd make a new Interpositive. So yes, technically it's possible that whatever actual 16mm elements were scanned in 2002 have gone lost. But to imply that Sailor Moon is the one vintage Toei Animation show that simply DOES NOT HAVE FILM ELEMENTS? No fucking chance do I buy that. I mean, if this were some no-budget obscure OVA produced by a nobody in 198X for the faint hope of breaking even? Sadly, you might have something. But Toei somehow lost all of their film masters for Sailor Moon? Really? Come on, guys - this isn't Genocyber, Dream Hunter Rem, Roots Search or some other obscure mess I'd believe has been lost to the sands of time. Honestly, this would be like saying that Warner Brothers can't find the camera negative for The Shining. Because, reasons, don't worry about it.

I could criticize this stupidity for hours on end, but... honestly, I'd rather not. My office is in the process of moving, I really need to get some sleep at some point, and I'd rather just call this shit and move on with my life. Viz, you fucked up. Hard. You're on the shit list, and don't expect me to assume the best from you while you continue to squat down and let releases like this congeal out of your company's backside.

For those curious how this horrendous level of bullshit was accomplished, here's a list of exactly what's wrong with the Viz comparison: 


The R2 DVD screenshots are presented in their 'native' 1.5:1 aspect ratio. DVD stores MPEG-2 video at a resolution of 720:480 at 29.97fps. That 720:480 file is then given a "flag" which tells the DVD decoder to play the file as either squished to 4:3 (ie: SDTV "square") or stretched to 16:9 (ie: HDTV "wide").

In short, nobody would ever, ever watch a DVD with a fat, distorted 2:1 aspect ratio as is being displayed in Viz' own comparison. Yes, technically the DVDs do store their data that way, but that's now how it actually looks when played back on literally any piece of software designed to play DVDs.

Also note that there's some pretty severe aliasing



The R2 DVD screenshots show interlacing. This is a trickier one to discuss because, yes, most anime DVDs are interlaced - that is, the 24fps film frames were converted to irregular patterns of 29.97fps video that show "combing" during motion. Interlacing is normal on NTSC signals, and isn't technically a 'flaw', just a normal part of the broadcast process.

When you watch an interlaced DVD on an interlaced TV, the set itself is refreshing in half-frame intervals, so everything looks normal. When you watch an interlaced DVD on a progressive monitor (like an HDTV), either the display or the DVD player is deinterlacing the signal first. Sometimes deinterlacing looks like crap and introduces jagged, aliased edges and blended frames; other times the deinterlacer is "smart" enough that it can reconstruct the original film frames and look like a proper, progressive image. It really depends on your hardware, and the content itself: Anime, due to its typically low framerates, is infamously difficult to convert from interlaced frames back to the original film frames due to limited motion wigging the algorithms out.

Is it difficult to remove interlacing on cartoons without leaving interlacing behind, or creating blended frames? Immensely. But it can be done. I know this because I manually tweak Inverse Telecine scripts every fucking week at the office. It's difficult to get the right mix and sometimes occasional frames are bound to get fucked, but as you can see at THIS COMPARISON, it's not impossible to convert the 480i broadcast signal on the DVDs back to 480p film frames... hell, knowing Toei's general lab work, I doubt this was even what I'd consider a "difficult" job.


There's really no proper excuse for this one. The chroma channel has been boosted on their "DVD" screenshots to the point where reds have become oversaturated and detail has gone missing completely - detail that is present on their Blu-ray release. The most obvious offender is the far shot of Usagi's house, in which subtle gradations of red and orange smear into a big neon blob on the "Master" shot, but look fairly natural and less... day-glo, on the Blu-ray sample.

Explain that to me, miss McDonald: How the heck do you show color information in a final encode that does not even exist on the master? Do you understand that this is why old film prints often have a nasty yellow push to them - because the pigment itself has simply ceased to exist? You've worked in the industry for over 25 years, so I'm sure you do. How do you show color information that's been boosted out of existance?

You fucking don't, is the obvious answer. Those screenshots - by malicious editing, or by simple colorspace ignorance - are missing color info that exists on the ProRes and Digibeta masters, because if it didn't, it wouldn't be on the fucking Blu-ray. FUCKING HELL.


...I could go on, but honestly, fuck it. It's 1 AM and I'm packing up HDCAM decks in the morning. Viz has confirmed that future releases will be no different, I'm sure a number of Sailor Moon fans will compromise with this turd of a release, five years later someone else will find some 16mm prints and do a proper HD telecine, double dips will be planned... world keeps spinning. I'd make a Dragon Ball Z comparison, but remembering how fucking good those "Level" sets were - and how we'll never see more of them - is still a wound too fresh to talk much more about without sinking straight into despair.
 
And uh, for the record, I couldn't be any prouder of Zac Bertschy for the way he handled this interview. He was left with the uncomfortable spot of being forced to ask - if not in so many words - why Viz was lying to their customers. He was honest, he was direct, and yet he continued to be polite and corteous while trying to drag the answers out that customers needed to know. Mind you, Justin Sevakis could have called them on this bullshit ten times harder, but... well, I guess that'd be too much like giving ANN a rocket launcher in a knife fight, while Viz had one leg tied to the other.

This is exactly the sort of thing I wish I saw in other circles I could, quite easily, draw numerous current parallels to. Yeah, I don't exactly "get" why Zac still writes about anime for a living when it's become clear he doesn't care for the medium's output 9 times out of 10, but I can't fault him for being absolutely spot-on in speaking for the customer when they've been given a raw deal. I only wish I saw honest, probing questioning from the video games media when they sell us broken, unfinished games brimming with DLC and app-purchase enhancements at full price.

UPDATE 1: Just to establish what an unmitigated shit-show this release is, here's a FAN-MADE COMPARISON between the actual Viz Blu-ray, and a fan-made "HD Upscale" using the already compressed, already chroma-subsampled, and (if I'm not mistaken) already-interlaced R2 DVD.