When there's no budget and people are willing to work infinitely on something as a passion project that will probably almost always be the case. The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from. I've seen the "original" 16mm prints that were made available to Funimation. Let's just say they were not given pristine masters. When those prints were made, they had no way of knowing their use 20 years later.

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haunter 8 hours ago | parent [-]

>The sources they are working from is something I'd be curious to know where they came from

They basically merged the Region 2 (Japan) Dragon Box DVD release with the Region 1 (NTSC USA) one.

>This merge of the two Dragon Boxes aims to get more detail at the boundary ranges of luma in order to obtain a higher dynamic range in a natural manner, without artificially distorting the luma through sigmoid-like functions. This is made possible due to the brightness difference between the North American NTSC and the Japanese NTSC-J standards and how the DVD compression codec (MPEG-2) handles this difference. Basically, MPEG-2 gives more 3 bitrate to brighter areas. Darker areas get less bitrate and so the image details there are blurrier and often destroyed. Fortunately for us, the North American NTSC standard has brighter blacks compared to NTSC-J, which means that MPEG-2 was able to allocate more bitrate to the dark areas on the R1 Dragon Box compared to the R2J, even though the latter has a higher overall bitrate. In addition to better dark details, the R1 Dragon Box also has more dark details. This is because DVDs have a limited luma range, and the brighter blacks on the R1 allowed more dark details to pass through that limited range. These same extra details missed the cut on R2J and were clipped away instead. So what does all this mean? It means that the R1 Dragon Box has better preserved dark details while the R2J Dragon Box has better preserved mid-and-bright details.

https://jysze.github.io/SoM-DBZ-Merge/mergeproject/R1R2.pdf

And then this merged release were used for the color correction

	▲	dylan604 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If they are using anything from the Orange Box set, then I really feel bad for them. If anything, they should have used the Blu-ray release. The R2 Dragon Box was a really clean copy that we were left jealous of the source they used. I do remember seeing that and being impressed. It was at that point that they decided to go back and transfer the prints they had again. The original transfer was protected for NTSC broadcast, so a lot of limiting would have been done. Blacks at 7.5IRE and video levels set to 100IRE. They may have pushed the chroma to 110IRE, but I can't remember. It's been a really long time since I've seen them on a scope. They also edited them without protecting the film cadence which made a progressive DVD difficult. The quality of the Blu-ray release was about as good as it was going to get with the 16mm prints provided as source.