The Toho "HD" thread

For the discussion of Toho DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, streaming services, VHS, and other formats where Toho films and soundtracks can be found.
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Terasawa
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The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Terasawa »

Atragon Toho BD
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War-Gods of the Deep, Kino Lorber BD (MGM scan) [Screenshot from DVD Beaver)
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Last edited by Terasawa on Thu Sep 03, 2020 11:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Maritonic
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Maritonic »

Wow, I had no idea they ripped this shot.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Tamura »

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Terasawa »

Maritonic wrote:Wow, I had no idea they ripped this shot.
Yeah, there's a bit of Atragon stock footage at the end of War-Gods. AIP also snuck Godzilla vs The Thing footage into Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Cooley High (where the characters watch it at a local movie theater), however, both of those movies are flat, so the Godzilla footage is cropped.
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Joseph Goodman
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Joseph Goodman »

Goldfoot is 'scope; however, the Kino Lorber Blu-ray is noticeably vertically stretched.

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by o.supreme »

I always get that film confused with Warlords of Atlantis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlords_of_Atlantis

Despite it coming out over a decade later, and being the only part of the Connor/McClure Tetrology not available on physical media in the U.S....
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Terasawa »

Joseph Goodman wrote:Goldfoot is 'scope; however, the Kino Lorber Blu-ray is noticeably vertically stretched.
Oops, thanks for the correction. Maybe I'm thinking of the sequel, which (according to IMDb) is flat.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by omgitsgodzilla »

The wild thing is that the War Gods screenshot doesn't seem to have that much more actual detail, but you can still tell it's limited by the source material more than the transfer itself.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Tamura »

Part of that could be that they cranked up the sharpness while transferring it. Toho did the opposite :)
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Terasawa »

^ Toho's transfers are as sharp as a pack of Charmin.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Tamura »

But their transfers got an order of magnitude better right after they got through all the major films of the canon! Atragon may be blurry shit but just be glad we have an okay transfer of Secret of the Telegian and a transfer of Daigoro vs. Goliath sharper than most Godzilla films.
Last edited by Tamura on Tue Sep 15, 2020 6:33 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Rody »

^The logic in that process confounds me.

...I mean, it's great for Telegian and Daigoro, but............

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by omgitsgodzilla »

When HD came along they took the quick and cheap route to exploit their banner properties on the new format as fast as they could. I'm guessing by the time they got around to the lesser-known stuff, better options had gotten a lot cheaper.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Tamura »

When Toho commissioned those awful transfers, the lab they sent the job to - Togen - had an Arriscan for a few years already. That's a top of the line scanner still in use today. Toho knew about this scanner - if these transfers were meant to be serious restorations, Toho would have chosen the Arriscan. It's what they used to scan the original and King Kong vs. Godzilla years later.

But because these were just hasty catalog transfers, nothing serious, they picked the Cintel C-Reality telecine... cheaper and real time transfer. Except for more recent models, most scanners work in much slower than real time because the data consists of very heavy image or video files, but with that old Cintel you record in real time directly to tape. Everything about that series of transfers was about saving time and money, and yet 12 years later they've become the forever transfers. What was the rush about? Why haven't they all been replaced? I love that they had the audacity to shoot a documentary about this garbage.

BTW before I see someone spout that garbage take about how "these movies would suffer from sharper transfers where you can see everything," ask yourself, do you think Toho would hire camera people to photograph a movie in sharp focus so that it could be blurred later? Or that they hired craftspeople to construct highly detailed miniatures, costumes, sets, monster suits, etc. so that the exquisite details that we just get vague hints of in existing transfers could be blurred later? Answer: No. Get rid of that take.

The good that you gain from a transfer of an original negative in good shape vastly outweighs the bad. You see nothing that wasn't meant to be seen. Fandoms tend to want everything... why don't more people want to see all the detail exposed on the original camera negative?

I don't hold kaiju films to an absolutist and much lower picture quality standard than other films and nobody else should, either. In an age where we can see Tammy and the T-Rex in Ultra HD, it's phenomenal that the best we can eke out of a classic like Destroy All Monsters is soft crap with no scene-by-scene color timing.
Last edited by Tamura on Wed Sep 16, 2020 8:18 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by The Killer Meteor »

The DAM master also seems to have dammage hidden with a jarring freeze frame at one point - it's on the Criterion and MB BDs, and also the 2006 Madman DVD.

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Tamura »

The Killer Meteor wrote:The DAM master also seems to have dammage hidden with a jarring freeze frame at one point - it's on the Criterion and MB BDs, and also the 2006 Madman DVD.
This is baked into the material they've been transferring since the dawn of video. Same sort of thing happens in Ebirah and SOG.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by The Killer Meteor »

Typical.

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by omgitsgodzilla »

The Killer Meteor wrote:The DAM master also seems to have dammage hidden with a jarring freeze frame at one point - it's on the Criterion and MB BDs, and also the 2006 Madman DVD.
Do you remember which part of the film that was? I know there's one bit where the SY-3 is arriving in the cave on the moon that seems to have something missing and/or frames repeated, but I don't remember a distinct freeze frame.
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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

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Re: The Toho "HD" thread

Post by Terasawa »

omgitsgodzilla wrote:
The Killer Meteor wrote:The DAM master also seems to have dammage hidden with a jarring freeze frame at one point - it's on the Criterion and MB BDs, and also the 2006 Madman DVD.
Do you remember which part of the film that was? I know there's one bit where the SY-3 is arriving in the cave on the moon that seems to have something missing and/or frames repeated, but I don't remember a distinct freeze frame.
I think that's the only shot in DAM with that problem. The one frame is held for about five frames. I wouldn't call that "jarring" myself, but it's noticeable.
Last edited by Terasawa on Mon Sep 21, 2020 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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