It's funny, I've been around the 16mm reels provided to Funimation for a long time. The first time they transferred to SD DigiBeta tapes I was an assistant editor at the post house doing the transfers. Those transfers were used to make the NTSC broadcast masters. Eventually, they started making DVDs. By that time, I was at a different company that was hired to program the DVDs before eventually working directly at Funi. While I was there, they decided to go back to the film prints for a new transfer, but some very questionable decisions were made during that transfer. When the box set was released, the fans hated it. They went back to those prints a third time for a new transfer with a more sane approach. The colorist found reference film for the stock the prints were on, and had the closest color the creator had seen. After some years later, I was working directly with that colorist. We talked a bit about that film. He was flabbergasted about the fans. Someone on the internet looked him up and reached out to him with less than favorable things to say. That's when he learned about anime fans. While I was at Funi, we had arguments with fans that didn't believe we had the film to do these transfers. They were adamant that we took the original DigiBeta tapes, yet not questioning the origin of those tapes. Posting replies with people holding the film reels did nothing to dissuade them. Funi went so far to include an extras on the Blu-ray release of the process of the film transfers, the frame-by-frame restoration process, and other steps. Fans were still online saying they could do better. I wish them luck.

I'm not writing this to disregard the PDF author—it's just a personal retrospective.

I'm a 50-year-old Japanese person who watched the original Dragon Ball broadcast on TV around 40 years ago. Back then, there were no LCDs or OLEDs—only CRT ("brown tube") TVs, and the signal was analog. With that kind of analog rendering, it was practically impossible to tell what the "true" colors were. Plus, CRT displays degraded over time, shifting colors toward brown.

The pre-processed raw images in the article actually look like what I remember as the real Dragon Ball colors.

For context, there's been a massive project to produce as close to perfect of a color-corrected version of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. It can be found online in traditional anime torrenting sites. It's really an outstanding labor of passion and a true testament to the global community's love for this series.

fantastic post , I recently just stated on HN that DragonBall really was part of Spanish culture in the early nineties.

I still remember as a child wandering into a bar on an afternoon, in a lost rural village in the middle of nowhere near the mountainous region in southern spain, now nearly 40 years ago. 2 old farmers were having a beer, the whole bar was totally silent, everyone watching the Dragon Ball episode on the tv. It was intense, the saiyans had just arrived.

It really surprised me ( as I did not realise adults watched it) and also because I thought on this trip to the countryside I would miss the episodes ( never to be able to be seen again). No internet back in the day.

Honestly, farmers watching Dragon Ball 40 years ago en el campo.

There was a similar (in spirit) project to upscale and resample Avatar the Last Airbender [1] because the original DVD release was so awful. Shortly after, Nickolodeon released a blu-ray boxed set that was quite a bit better than the DVDs, but it still had some issues. Doesn't seem anyone has decided to upscale it again [2].

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/5hv4en/no...

2: https://github.com/brucethemoose/AvatarUpscale

Super Mario 64 is a video game that’s had a lot of rereleases, both official and unofficial. I sometimes wonder if the most people who have experienced it did in a way that wasn’t like the original Nintendo 64. The Switch version sold almost as many copies. As a kid, I beat it with arrow keys on an emulator in 2001.

When I read the responses to this document, I wonder if Dragon Ball is the same, where the collective nostalgia is actually quite diverse.

I posted the PDF with the title "Dragon Ball Color Correction Process" because it's more descriptive for the HN audience than "Seed of Might Color Correction Process", Seed of Might being a release group so pretty much meaningless for almost everyone

I followed this for a while leading up to the release. It’s really impressive work. The only downside in my view is that the official releases are extremely high bitrate encodes. I’m sure that was chosen for archival purposes, but I’d like to have a well-made encode more amenable to regular home viewers.

Further proves that pirated content is almost always superior to official releases

This is so incredibly cool! Thank you for sharing!

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