An inside look at the new Sailor Moon Blu-Ray releases!
Posted on November 10, 2014 by Raven Orange
Tomorrow is November 11 and do you know what that means? Yes, Sailor Moon makes her triumphant return to North America and this time on Blu-ray!
Sailor Moon Limited Edition uncut blu-ray DVD release November 2014
You’ve been watching the two new episodes of the classic 90′s anime each week here on Neon Alley and Hulu, but there’s nothing quite like having the Guardian of Love and Justice herself in a shimmery box right on your shelf. Today, we’re going to show you something really special and let you peek at some of what went into the Blu-ray releases.
The original Sailor Moon series, based on the magical girl manga phenomenon by Naoko Takeuchi, began airing on Japanese TV back in 1992. Television was much different back then, and anime was broadcast to fit the televisions of the time. That’s why, when you watch it now, you see the black bars on the side. Most screens now use a wider aspect ratio of 16:9, whereas when Sailor Moon debuted, television aspect ratio was generally the squarer 4:3. Rather than doing any cropping to the image, the black bars, called Pillarboxing, were added to maintain the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
The original footage for Sailor Moon, being from way back in 1992, is also older than many fans who adore the series now. In 2009, Japan released the seasons on DVD using the best materials available, Unfortunately, the original film from 1992 just does not exist. In making our Blu-ray releases, we used the same masters used to create the those beautiful releases, but make them work for the modern Blu-ray format.
To create the Sailor Moon Blu-rays, we used the masters used to create the 2009 Japanese DVD sets. To make the footage for Blu-ray, a proprietary process was used consisting of clean format conversion, inverse telecine to return the source to its native framerate, correction of inherent alieasing issues and the sharpest SD to HD conversion possible. After this, Pillarboxing was added to maintain the 4:3 original aspect ratio of the footage and then it was processed to a high bitrate mezzainine encode for Blu-ray production. After these correct combinations were worked out, the final product was processed.
These are completely different masters than what was used for the 2003 North American DVD releases that many fans have in their collection. Let’s take a look at the change using episode 2 as an example. These shots compare the 2009 master to the North American Blu-ray releases coming out tomorrow.
Quite different, right? Of course, due to the materials and the fact that each episode is different, there’s still some minor imperfections and every episode will have some small variations. In handling the series as carefully as possible, no additional processing was done. For those of you getting the DVD only releases, you’ll also notice the difference in the picture compared to previous DVDs available in North America. However, we will be omitting pillarboxing on the Sailor Moon DVD sets going forward. The Blu-rays will still have them, though.
So there it is, a little bit of tech talk and a peek behind the scenes on the return of the legendary anime, Sailor Moon! If you like these cool little extras, don’t forget there’s lots more behind-the scenes cool stuff like in-studio footage, The announcement panel and so much more on the Limited Edition sets. Be sure to grab yours before they sell out!
I thought that was all they were doing, but just wanted to make sure.
