Buena Vista Japan handles distribution of Studio Ghibli's films in Japan and they claim that this color balance was intentional. Various reasons are being cited, including anti-piracy concerns, the need to make the DVD look good on plasma and LCD displays, and the claim that this "look" was approved by Hayao Miyazaki, the film's director.

Huh??? None of the stated reasons for this look make much sense to me. Instead, white balance that far off looks like a major film transfer screwup IMO. It could very well be that Miyazaki approved this look, given his past statements about not caring what his films look like on video. But I've never heard of an anti-piracy technology or strategy that would compromise the look of the legitimate release this much. The same goes for concerns over anticipated display types--that's what D6500 standards are for.

At 5,500,000 units this is one of the biggest DVD and video releases in Japanese history, which might turn into the biggest recall in Japanese history unless BV Japan can convince notoriously picky Japanese consumers that this look was intentional. It will be interesting to see what the US release will look like since BV Japan is supplying the master, rather than using a US mastering house. US release for Spirited Away is scheduled for Sept. 20th in theatres, and sometime later this fall for R1 DVD and video.

Ogenki de,

Paul
SMPTE Hollywood Section
Mercenary video/16/35/70mm/IMAX projectionist
"Otaku wa tsurai yo" <-- Yeah I know, bad pun. Sue me.
It's tough being a fan!

The low contrast orange-cast image makes me suspect they transferred a master positive on a telecine that was set up to transfer prints.

Kodak supplies tools for telecine setup:
http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/products/tools/

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Sounds like BV Japan is digging its heels in. And people think I have an attitude! (I do, I'm just not in a position to impose it ) Regarding their explanations, again I say "huh?"

quote:

---

Sen's original digital master had a screen resolution of 2010x1068.
It needed a 200GB tape streamer--eight tapes for storage.
First step was to trim it to HDTV size (1920x1080). This process took three weeks.
The 1080/24p HD master was recorded from the trimmed data.
Next came color correction.
The original master's color was evaluated by Director of Photography Okui using a Barco reference monitor (color temperature not stated).
The same monitor was used to evaluate the HD master.
The HD master was timed under Okui's supervision.
Due to the large number of colors used in the animation, the HD timing took five days.
Next they downconverted the HD tape to 480i60 to produce the D1 master with anamorphic squeeze and 9300K white. This master was used to produce the video release.
At the MPEG encoding stage for the DVD (done by Sony PCL), inverse telecine was done--the DVD is 24p.
Sony PCL sent the original discrete 6.1 audio data to the US for encoding.
The DTS-ES 6.1 encoding was done by DTS.

---

As a side, I'm not sure about the last line regarding the 6.1 audio. The DVD does not have a Dolby Digital 6.1 track on it--only the theatre print version has this. The DVD has two stereo Dolby Digital tracks (Japanese and French) and one DTS-ES 6.1 (Japanese).

I still don't understand why they would pick 9300K for the D1 video master, especially after the DP had approved the HD timing. Weird.

Does the disc have English subtitles? If it has, there should be no problem because the disc does have a 6.1 DTS-ES track of the original soundtrack that is preferred by almost everyone in region one who might want to buy an imported copy. I do however feel that if the disc is eventually released in region one, it will feature Dolby 6.1 tracks with or without the DTS tracks. I believe "PRINCESS MONONOKE" had both types of tracks

-Claude

Yeah, this disc has English, Japanese, and French subtitles on it. I guess my next upgrade for home DVD playback will be to add DTS capability! As always I'm behind the times...

AFAIK this film marked Ghibli's first use of DTS. Mononoke didn't have DTS on either the print or the R1/R2 NTSC DVDs.

I suspect (and hope) this disc will be re-issued sometime down the road, maybe around the time that the R1 DVD comes out. Now that the big-name English dub is finished, I'll bet there will be another "collectors edition" released with these tracks, just like there was for Mononoke. BV Japan could quietly fix the color issue at the same time, but I kinda doubt they'd do that. The buyers of the first disc would probably make sashimi out of the BV Japan staff if they did!

D5500 Daylight seems a logical choice, since human color vision was created/evolved in natural daylight. AFAIK, the push for higher color temperature specifications for video displays is often driven by a desire for greater luminous efficiency (more lumens).

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