[Gomen-Time-MCS] GARO - Beast of the Midnight Sun

10bit Softsub
8bit Hardsub

Over the holidays, we noticed something interesting on the Japanese TV schedule. GARO MakaiSenki, Pirate Sentai Gokaiger, and Kamen Rider Fourze were all off over New Year's, leaving the fine folks at Over-Time completely free for a week. Having this movie on DVD and not really wanting to scrub the movie version over again, nor really wanting to deal with shifting the TV version lines to fit, we approached them with an idea: why not give it a full translation?

It makes sense, right? They've done everything GARO since the release of this particular feature, so perhaps they'd like to take a stab backwards in time? Fortunately, they agreed to our suckers deal, and we encoded the video for them as they did the hard/tedious work of timing and translating. And yes, we know that was the end of December and now it's late February; we just got back to the States after a strange Wild Turkey related romp around the world that ended with no clothes but more tattoos. We think.

So here we are. This looks quite a bit better than the previous release thanks to not being xvid, but there are still some significant flaws that will never be ameliorated so long as this DVD is the best available source. You see, where the TV series (and from what AzraelNewtype has told us this is true of MakaiSenki as well) uses occasional interlacing in action scenes, this movie field blended. Don't know what that means? Have a look:

That's a half-height field straight from the DVD source. See how the blade appears to be half in two places at once? This isn't the result of a cute blur, though it makes the result blurry almost by accident. And let us be clear here, all of these are roughly identical on consecutive frames. This isn't something that can be fixed with srestore(), because it wasn't the result of a conversion between 24/1.001 and 25fps that has occasional horrid blending.

If Bandai Visual ever releases a Blu-ray version of this, we'll probably be able to give you an improved version. Except they may never, as there may not even actually be a higher resolution source available to release, such as in the case of the early Hesei Kamen Rider series. Unfortunately, for now you will have to deal with this, though we have never heard anybody complain about this in practice in any of the previous releases, so this may be much ado about nothing.