yukichigai
Mar 2005
 Video Tech Geek
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Late as always
Yes yes, late as ever.
Before rating this I have to of course mention the source, and the nuke. "p2p source"... sure, why not. Could be, though I've yet to find the source it comes from myself. The fact that no DVDRs (at least that aren't converts of the XviD version) have appeared anywhere would seem to track with that. As for it being a workprint...
Okay, depends on what you mean by a workprint. As far as I can tell nothing major is missing, no duplicate scenes (a la the Episode 3 workprint a few years ago) and no special effects or anything else seem to be left out either. Then again, I've not seen this in theaters, so there might be some scenes or effects missing. If that's the case, then sure, it's what I'd call a workprint, but otherwise it's just an internal viewing copy; counters do not a workprint make.
Finally, I don't buy the source being a VHS tape, or any tape for that matter. Video quality, particularly the chroma layer, is far too detailed to be any consumer analog format, and outdoes most "pro-sumer" (non-digital) tape formats as well. Without seeing the actual source I can't be sure, but it's far more likely this is from a digital source than a tape, probably a DVD. (A crappy DVD maybe, but still)
Therefore, rating as a DVDSCR:
Video - 6: This is much, much better than anything else out there, but it suffers from numerous issues. Firstly, it's grossly undersized, meaning there are tons of compression errors and lots of block noise due to the low video bitrate. The compression errors are almost nostalgic in way: I've not seen this many inverted pixels and motion trails since the last time I watched my DivX 3.11 copies of Ranma½. The counter at the bottom is fairly annoying as counters go, though fortunately it doesn't obscure any vital bits of action. (Personally I blurred them out with an adaptive blur overlay on each individual number anyway) While the counter takes off some points on my rating, the bulk of the reason is because of iMBT's shit job of encoding this video.
Audio - 9: Audio, by contrast, is done far better. Good bitrate, in sync, sounds great. Decent encoding job. Not much more to say.
Movie - 8: I liked it. I expected a bigger, better dénouement (that's "ending" for you philisitines) than what we got though. The action scenes leading up to the final scene gave you this great sense of buildup, and then the final scene kind of just... well... ended. Still, damn good film throughout; I really hope there will be a sequel.
Bottom Line: Best version out there at the moment, but it's riddled with quality issues due to inept encoding. If you're one of those people who twitches when there's a moving counter on the screen you might want to avoid this copy and wait for the R5 to come out. Otherwise, it's a decent watch.
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