Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Yamato 2520 0-3 (RAW video v2.0) (DVD conversion) Tokio in Yamato 2520 (RAW video v2.0) (DVD conversion) (Damaged source - SEE LAST PARAGRAPH OF ORIGINAL PROJECT NOTES) Space Battleship Yamato - The Mirror of My Eternal Memory (RAW video v2.0) (DVD conversion) 11/10/2013 https://www.otakubell.com/ Plot synopsis: (Largely ripped off from http://ourstarblazers.com/vault/364/) In the decades following Final Yamato, Earth’s greatest challenges came from within. The rise of genetically-enhanced humans lead to the threat of a fascist state. This threat was eliminated when these elites were exiled in a convoy of colony ships, and they made their way to another galaxy where they discovered a new source of tremendous power called Monopole energy. Their leader, Brone, founded the Salene civilization there and declared opposition to the Earth Federation. About a century later, another source of Monopole energy was found on the planet Rinbos, in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Earth forces mobilized to excavate it, and when the Salene arrived to do the same, it sparked a war that raged for 100 years before both sides reached stalemate and a cease-fire was declared. Salene held onto Rinbos (now a an independent frontier world) and Earth set up on the neighboring planet Agua to monitor them. It’s an extremely tense situation; if either side makes a threatening move (like going after the Monopole) the war could boil up again in a flash. In the year 2520, a group of young people find the wreckage of the Yamato, lost in the war over Rinbos, and are prepared to rebuild it to lead Rinbos to freedom... Project notes (Original): Boy have I ever had a rough two years. I'm doing much better now, but I don't know when/if I'll get back to subtitling. We'll see. I was contacted by Live-Evil, who wanted to re-subtitle Yamato 2520 vol 1-2, as well as FINALLY subtitling volume 3 - but the existing LD captures weren't so hot. They were made many years ago, and were not in any consistant format (a combination of h263 and WMV9 - Seriously, who uses WMV? Honestly). They just didn't look that great. Well as it happens, I own all of Yamato 2520 plus all of the promotional material (that I know of). I realized while doing this project that everything I have ever captured before now has been done wrong. No, seriously, I've fucked up and I apologize. Technical explanation: NTSC standard uses a black level of 7.5 IRE for various reasons having to do with the nature of early TV sets. Japanese material deviates from the standard and uses an IRE of 0.0. I had my capture equipment set up to use 7.5 IRE, resulting in crushing blacks. Yamato 2520 has a lot of dark scenes and was looking particularly murky. See http://www.glennchan.info/articles/technical/setup/75IREsetup.html for more details on this subject. So, I captured everything (6 or so hours), then began filtering (around 10 hours per episode), when I realized there was a problem and what the problem was, so I trashed everything and began anew. HURR, hello version 2.0. Now, as to the footage itself - cripes are there ever issues. I don't know if it was a weird mastering thing, but some scenes are crystal clear, only to degenrate into a blurred jerkily-animated mess the next scene. Let's focus on episode 1, the messiest of the lot. There's a basic animation error FIFTY SECOND IN. Go on, watch the moon carefully as it pans off the the right... AND ITS GONE! Okay, these things happen. But you know what's sad about that error? It didn't need to happen at all. Volume 0 came out in late 1994, and look what's at the 0:04:30 mark - why, its the exact same sequence! Watch the moon carefully as it pans off the the right... and its totally fine. So they broke it later when they released episode 1 (in early 1995) by adding in that spaceship, I guess? Volume 1 also has some weird "ghosting" issues - like the picture is smeared off to the right in quite a few scenes. Check out to the right of Nabu's mouth and eyes around 0:25:05 for a clear example of this. I tried some filtering to get rid of this, and was only partially successful at the cost of oblitering other details - not worth it, at least not with my amateur level of expertise. Actually, if you back up to around 0:24:45 you can see a LOT of this show's sins all at once: Nabu's unfocused face as he turns his head on his bike, the noise around the top of the scrap heap that I couldn't fully filter out in the next scene, the jerky animation as we pan up to Marcie's face, back to more lack of detail as Nabu reaches the top (Marcie looks almost simian), on to the smearing of Nabu's mouth... I could go on. Did they not see there were problems here? Was the producer high or something? Oh, he WAS? Oh dear. How awkward. And its so sad, because you can see that a great deal of love and money was lavished on this series. They hired Syd Mead to do the mechanical designs, and they really are exquisite. The soundtrack is amazing - they even got Tokio involved. That could not have been cheap. But the fact that we DO see all of this is a bit of a problem too - there's something clearly very wrong when we have almost as much promotional material as we have show itself. So what was the issue? Unfortunately, in addition to the basic animation problems, the first episode is a serious snoozefest, and most of the show's potential buyers bailed after that. And sadly, I can't blame them, though things do pick up after that. But then Nishizaki got sued for copyright breach By Leiji Matsumoto. And then he got arrested for drugs and gun smuggling. So that was the premature end for Yamato 2520. The legal issues alone probably mean Yamato 2520 will never be reissued, which makes this an "endangered" work of anime. So, it is important that we keep the best copies possible circulating on the internet - preservation through proliferation. To that end, I'm going to do something a little different - In addition to my filtered x264 release, I'm converting this series to DVD9 MPEG2, otherwise untouched. That way, when x265 is ready for prime-time, somebody hopefully more competent than I can take the DVDs, clean then up better than I can, and put out yet another better version. An additional note about Tokio in Yamato 2520: Sadly, I discovered, when I went to capture it, that my Tokio disk was physically damaged. It appears the previous owner's LD player tried to eat it, and the player's head gouged the disk up. As a result there are some nasty analog errors that probably cannot be repaired. I polished the gouges as well as I could beforehand, and it helped a little bit, but the video is still pretty glitchy (see around 0:06:10 for some awful examples). Sorry! Still, its better than nothing - as near as I can tell I'm the first to capture and release this one. Project Notes (DVD): So, I had some delays due to health issues, but here at last is the DVD converison of Yamato 2520. I intended for the releases to be a week apart, but I had health issues. Some were personal, and the rest were from my computer - I got the first computer virus I've ever had in 25+ years of using a computer. FUCK YOU, ImgBurn, and FUCK YOU Avast "Antivirus." Yeah, I got virused trying to make these very DVD conversions. I don't have any experience with making DVD files, so I hope I did everything right. I just took the raw DV files captured from my LDs and converted them into DVD using the top quality settings. If you plan to use these for any sort of re-encoding for future subtitling projects (like, say, when x265 is ready), do be sure to run an IVTC filter at the minimum. In the end I decided against making .iso files due to my poor experience with ImgBurn and general inexperience. Instead I just zipped up the folders. Go make your own .iso files if you care. I was going to upload to asiandvdclub.org, but they're such picky pains-in-the-asses that I just said "fuck it." They rejects my torrent outright because it had .7z files in it, so fuck those guys. I'm here to preservse some anime, not play games.