With some major American studio jumping off the HDDVD ship and onto the BRD bandwagon, maybe that format war will be coming to an end soon.
But that is neither here or there. One small point I want to address is that a while back there are some reports of porn studios siding with the HDDVD format, citing lower production costs. Nonetheless, it’s highly questionable how much weight that has on the format war–simply because when it comes to porn, the internet has long been declared the winner. Indeed, the internet is going to win also in the non-porn category, and it already has started to in some cases in the form of on-demand delivery via cable/telephone providers and, increasingly, things like Apple TV, X-Box Live and Netflix.
That said, there has been fewer TV anime (read: virtually none) that made me think “WOAH Hi DEF” than True Tears. On the grey file trading channels of the intarweb people can find “high definition” encodes of whatever shows. And quite frankly 90%+ of them suck. The reasons why they do vary–sometimes the raw is just a poor upscale; other times it’s the fault of the subsequent encoders for other reasons; frequently it’s just because the source sucked.
The high-def formats are suppose to be attractive, in my eyes, because they wow you. It’s not because they merely look better than what we had before. In fact a tell-tail sign of what is an upscale and what is not–if it doesn’t punches you in the face, it’s not real HD. Sure, you can blow things up and make it look better (especially when it comes to anime) it’s still no substitute for a proper high-def treatment. And while True Tears doesn’t kick my balls like, say, the High-def 5cm/s trailer that was released over a year ago, it stands head and shoulder above its HD kins this season.
High-def anime is now more common than ever. The usual TV broadcast channels are doing the switch. It’s about time we get the same treatment in terms on home video. Com’on Japan. Don’t make me QQ for you.
In fact, the next person who mentions reverse-import gets headshot.
January 31st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
One points out that the process of converting to high-def video for ordinary TV is all on the back end – you buy a different camea and you use different storage formats. But the actual acting/talking head news presentation/whatever is identical. It’s not any HARDER to make it in high-def, it’s just slightly more capital intensive.
Not the case with anime. ;p
However, nobody’s going to be talking about reverse-importation with True Tears, because it’s coming out here at $40 for a two-episode disc, to be released (relatively quickly, certes) on seven volumes for a 13-episode series. Of course, nobody’s going to buy it here either…
January 31st, 2008 at 8:54 pm
…especially because it’s not in HD. If it was I would hit it.
And while producing a HD anime is not the same as you would with just pointing a HD camera around, it isn’t as far fetched as you say. You do realize that there are quite a few anime that are/were already broadcasting in HD, right…?
February 1st, 2008 at 1:57 pm
True, the technical issues aren’t tremendous or anything.
At the same time, you’d have to be a loon to release high-def anime over here. Higher production costs (’cause you don’t own Blu-ray authoring systems) and a fragmented market (the niche of “anime fans who also own HD systems” is very small indeed) combine for low sales. This is in a market where even hits don’t make a whole heck of a lot of money!
Not saying that it’s impossible, or anything like that, but the HD releases we’ve had so far have sold extremely poorly.
February 2nd, 2008 at 12:40 am
It’s not just anime that sold poorly, but yea, that goes back to what I was saying at the very beginning.