Celebrating Makoto Shinkai with New Video Transfer?
I’m sure you’ve seen enough headlines about this, and the critical acclaims Shinkai gets with his works.
But I’m just pacing through CrunchyRoll’s Byousoku 5 Centimeters feed now, and funnily enough the speech-like pacing of Oukashou made streaming that 480p video casually easy. It gives you a lot of places to hit that pause button so your buffer can catch up. And take a lot of screen shots. Maybe I should post them tomorrow…[maybe I will even update this post.]
Reading the Anime News Network thread, some CR guy reported that they have a new transfer of the movie. That was enough to get me interested. Let alone the new Bang Zoom dub…I don’t even remember what ADV’s dub sounded like. I guess I can always try to sneak that in tomorrow. Sufficed to say the new dub isn’t bad; I watched it all dubbed. But I probably won’t again ever, chance to choose willing.
Of course, 5cm is as beautiful in every inch and every second as I remember it to be. I don’t get to stand up and walk up to my TV like I can with the Blu-Ray version of 5cm or Beyond the Clouds, but I’ll live. This is a great deal for free (as in beer) and free (as in speechregion).
Oh, I guess I still need to watch Beyond the Clouds on CR sometime within the next 18 hours. Yea, time’s running out. This particular version of 5cm will go away. 5PM PST was it?
Looks familiar? (Gosh, I think that old cap was from a DVD rip. I don’t remember. And don’t let this prettier image fool you, I think it just has fewer jpeg compression artifacts from being recompressed.)
I am definitely impressed by the supposedly new mastered video and audio(?) for 5cm. Enough to do this post. Granted, it’s still a streaming video so the bitrate can’t compare, but this is hands down the best quality video on CR that I’ve laid eyes on.
If you care about the supposed fesitivities, visit the Shinkai Day HQ, or check this guy on Twitter. They party it up on IRC and Ventrilo and what not. Nuts.
You can’t retransfer something like 5cm - it’s clearly the most digital movie you could ever make. Maybe they mean they resized it from an HD or 2k version instead of ADV’s SD master?
Actually, how did CR afford to redub anything?
You are right that when transfer they probably meant “from HD source.” I went to sleep after making the post and woke up thinking, “hmm, what the hell does ‘new transfer’ mean anyways?” For one, I don’t know if there’s an “old transfer” to make this a meaningful statement. And second, it is as you say.
CR didn’t redub anything. Comix Wave did.
I find the idea that Comix Wave was unhappy with the original dub to be significantly less plausible than an issue with the rights transfer (i.e. ADV might not have been compelled to turn over the rights to the dub, and CW found it cheaper to re-dub it than to pry the old dub loose).
Well that would seem to be the case. But it makes you wonder why they don’t have the rights to the dub. Seems to me the reason why is actually related to their desire to stream a dub?
Did 5cm ever get a blu-ray release in English? I still haven’t watched it, because I’ve always felt that Shinkai made the film in HD so watching it in SD would be watering down his artistic vision for the film.
No English-language blu-ray release.
I don’t know about “watering down” for SD. 480, for the most part, captures the visuals well enough IMO. But who knows.