Forum - View topicVice & Luna - Invasion of the Old-Timers, Part II
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Vaisaga
 Posts: 13242 |
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Gonna have to disagree with Vice for once. DYRL is amazing and still looks fantastic even by today's standards.
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belvadeer
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"The magic of laserdisc format is lost on the youth!"
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Darkmagick
 SubscriberPosts: 472 |
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But...Macross Frontier isn't even 10 years old yet...
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Chrno2
 Posts: 6172 Location: USA |
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It's funny because there are quite a few people while not anime fans that don't even know what a LD is. My niece will be 17 and she's never seen a discman or better yet a "walkman". But yet we have devices in our home that have cassette tapes. But the person I was trying to explain what an LD was. she was an 80's kid who was now in her early to mid 20's. She had never seen or heard of them. But I will admit that they a type of magic that to this day can't be matched. A YT'ber that many know, the AVGN did a segment on LDs. And I could see exactly where he was going with it. DVD might be a higher quality but there is something about LD that DVD couldn't match. I'm not a videophile, so they would know this better than me.
I do have a few LDs in my collection, but nothing to play them on. My old Pioneer DVL-700 LD/DVD player has a malfunction in the tray. So I can't use it anymore despite the fact it still works. Macross DYRL needs a release badly. I mean this was the one Macross film that has circulated through VHS traders and anime clubs since the late 80's. And it's hardly seen a release. I remember when it was at it's 25th anniversary it got a release in Japan, but it's never made US release. I'm really curious as to why NO ONE has considered releasing it. It is a product of it's time. Dated yes, but still holds up to this day. Dating back to an animation style that you don't see today. And I'm talking about massive missile attacks and explosions the likes of Gunbuster. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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It's been wrapped up in the whole Harmony Gold "all Macross is part of Robotech" thing for a couple of decades. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5958 Location: Virginia, United States |
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FINGERS!......
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zrdb
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So what is vhs and Betamax? LOL
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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LD's are like beta, minidisk, 8-track, and blue amberol; generally only relevant to punchlines. |
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Chrno2
Posts: 6172 Location: USA |
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LOL!! Yep. My first exposure to beta, I was shocked how high the recording quality it produced on the extended setting. It was BETTER than VHS. Yes, I hung around a lot of older anime fans who owned both VHS and BETA machines. They did a lot of recordings for friends and anime clubs they held. But I often wondered why BETA didn't take off. Then someone mentioned that the porn industry might have had a reason for why VHS become popular. Don't know if that's true. Blue amberol? Now there's a history lesson. LOL!! But hey vinyl is making a comeback. Not just now but a good while back. In fact they were manufacturing record players that produced the old crackling sounds that your great-great grandparents used to hear when they listened to music. LOL!!
Don't you hate when that happens. Apparently this is worst than the 'Earthsea' case. But that's done. But I'm sure there are other examples. Thanks for that info. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Kiddie-winkies, you literally wouldn't have anime in the US if it wasn't for laserdisc thirty years ago. Am I misusing "literally"?...No: LITERALLY. Would not. Be here. Japanese VHS and Laser were both on the same NTSC video region as the US, which made it very easy to import Japanese anime VHS's and laserdiscs, except for one problem: Japan had bureaucratized its VHS industry into a rental-only business, which means that if you wanted a cassette tape of DYRL, it would run a hundred bucks or so...Any old-timers remember insane $100 "Rental pricing", for VHS titles they didn't sell in the stores? In Japan, that was pretty much ALL of them. Laser, OTOH, was what it was in the US: Nobody rented it, so it was sold at the price you could buy it. And if it was the "Half hour??" of two OAV episodes, one per side, that was a quick and easy purchase that might run the Yen equivalent of $30. Slightly more if you were importing it to the US to play on your own stateside Pioneer LD player. That made it a quick and easy mass-market purchase for anime series and movies that wanted to market themselves to their own Japanese fanbase at home--And with no studio except Voyager seriously making more than a halfhearted effort with LD in the US market, if you were a loyal late 80's-early 90's LD fan in the US, at least half the titles in your collection were Japanese imports, even of US action movies. Oh, and one other advantage back then: LD couldn't be Macrovision coded. If you were an underground anime fan, you bought laserdisc to make what US fans did buy and trade at the clubs and comic-con markets: Bootleg VHS tapes. First-generation tapes would become second, third, and Nth-generation tapes as they changed hands around the clubs--or were sold over bootleg tables at the comic market, along with the new Godzilla films and old Ultraman series--but even raw, without fansubs, there had to be a pristine, full-color, spotless ideal first-generation, and that was what JP Laser delivered. (Most people in the 90's, who snubbed laser for "losing" the tape-vs.-laser battle in the 80's, didn't find that out until DVD came along at the end.) It was also easier to store--rather like your LP collection--and every gaming con, every sci-fi con, every comic-con, had the "Video room", where your local import-laserdisc fan would sneak you into a back room where some hidden folk were peeking at Akira, Beautiful Dreamer, DYRL, Dirty Pair or Outlanders, and say "First one's free, kid...  " And so it was.
It's genuinely hard to tell who the comic strip is trying to parody, but "I won't watch anything older than Macross Frontier", is pretty much saying it all about our New Online-Streaming Hipsters, who have such a wealth of options at their fingertips...Ah, the new technological freedom to be a loud amnesiac dolt, unlike the problems of the suffering earlier generation. |
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Stampeed Valkyrie
 Posts: 861 Location: PA |
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I have a few of the LDs from SDF Macross TV sitting in my collection, along with some other good classic anime. LDs were in decline way before I got seriously into Anime and it was the defacto best picture quality until you got into VCD and DVD.
As for DYRL.. for those wanting to see it.. seriously consider importing Bandai's Collectors edition, which came with lots of really neat artwork, a PS3 game and Flash Back 2012. The real selling point was how all the colors all of a sudden instantly popped out at you with the remaster. DYRL is probably well known for its darkness in color grades.. this gets corrected with the Blu-Ray remaster and all the colors just pop out at you.. I remember in the very Beginning of the movie the SDF-1 comes out of Saturn's Shadow.. and on the remaster it looks pretty amazing.. And Vice can sit on it.. just sayin. |
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Emma Iveli
Posts: 679 Location: Hobo with internet |
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Man Vice is being annoying in this one. I'm not one for old anime, but mostly because it's not my thing. But if it was a get together with friends like I'd be okay with checking it out... hell my two best friends love all GeGeGe No Kitaro with one of them being a member of the Cyborg 009 Fandom so I wouldn't be surprised if we watched those. Like I said last time I grew up spoiled due to where I lived, but I'm not that spoiled! Grow up a little Vice...
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4555 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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Just to be nitpicky, the spindle hole in that Laserdisc is a bit too small, even taking into account the webcomic art style fudge factor for small technical details.
Well, she's obviously never been on any bus I've been on as I still use my CD Walkman in public all the time, though it does have a radio as well, but I mainly use it to listen to CDs.
An advantage of Laserdisc is that it's an analogue video format so the video was, by definition, uncompressed, with the trade-off being that the discs are huge and only hold an hour or half-an-hour of video per side (depending on whether it's a CLV or CAV disc). Well-mastered DVDs had the video compressed in such a way that it wasn't noticeable, but poorly-mastered DVDs often had video compression artifacts that are easily visible even on old CRT televisions. |
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Chrno2
Posts: 6172 Location: USA |
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Thanks for that info. Would the poor compression on DVDs also explain some of the problems with playback? The fact that you see this with DVD. And I don't know if it's because it's digital, but I've never seen this happen with LD. This was one thing I was worried about with BD. Because it's hard to tell if it's the player, encoding or both. And does encoding entail the compression process? *Ooops!!! Meant to write LD not DVD. Last edited by Chrno2 on Tue Jan 23, 2018 7:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Yes, laserdisc was starting to make a comeback in the mid-late 90's, back when "Home theaters" were starting to become a luxury thing, and home-theater nuts Siskel & Ebert were starting to make time on their show to point out that LD really did look better than, y'know, tape. Even though you were lucky to find one LD store in a college-town city, there was starting to be some curiosity about the fact that un-decaying first-generation laser video had better picture and sound for the 90's rise of blockbuster movies--and, of course, the commentaries and extras on Voyager/Criterion--but that comeback was situated right in the middle of DVD's first demos. LD fans didn't really know what the point of DVD was (what, it's smaller, and you can also play it on your computer?), and first-time curious fans who went looking for LD found DVD demos instead, and put all the credit for Looking Better on this brand new disk thing the stores were talking about. Even worse, major studios--who had been trying to put all their money on the inferior but studio-profitable pay-per-view DiVX format, and were stuck with the other format they hadn't noticed until now--didn't really know what the point of DVD was either except "Little LD's". And pretty much just dump-wared whatever 90's-action-movie LD masters they had lying around, with whatever "compression" was needed for the change of format. Which, as Tenchi notes, wasn't always pretty. Of course, DVD's dual-audio and subtitles pretty much re-invented the anime market, when the movie market couldn't figure them out--But there had to be some root in us old-school fans who knew that laser was an easier way to keep episodes on one disk without hitting the fast-forward button and ruining the tape, and that it had room to put the dub on, too. |
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