[SweetSub&VCB-Studio] Boogiepop Phantom / ブギーポップは笑わない Boogiepop Phantom 10bit 720p HEVC BDRip [Reseed Fin]

Boogiepop Phantom BDRip
ブギーポップは笑わない Boogiepop Phantom BDRip
10-bit 720p HEVC + FLAC, MKV format. ~ 400 MB / EP.
Official ENG + ENG (forced) PGS.
MKA contains commentary track + ENG FLAC 5.1 + 2.0.

Thanks to SweetSub for elaborating Chinese subtitles.

TL;DR: This release of Boogiepop Phantom is encoded using the US edition Blu-ray. We mainly tried to fix the occasional combing and haloing, and encoded in 720p. The rolling credits text in the ending of all episodes were completely remade.

The US edition Blu-ray of Boogiepop Phantom was release last year, which is the first HD remaster release of this title. There have been many examples of low quality HD remaster of old anime before, so we were surprised to find out that this one is actually not bad: details are significantly enhanced compared with DVD, and line art is not oversharpened. There are still some issues of course, such as remaining combed frames here and there due to imperfect IVTC, and wide haloing can be seen around most strong edges. These artifacts can be easily fixed with our routinely used anti-aliasing and de-ringing filters. As there is no real full HD details, we chose to downscale to 720p for this encode (for easy comparison, the screenshots below were upscaled to the source resolution using Spline36).

The real biggest issue of this Blu-ray, however, is that the text of the rolling ending credits of each episode is completely...destroyed (see the last group of screenshots below). Our friends at SweetSub joked that "there is nothing we can do unless we manually type out all the text and overlay them", and guess what, it turned out that the Blu-ray has all NCEDs included (except Ep.02) which makes this actually feasible...We managed to get all the text, proofread, fine-tuned typesetting in Photoshop to match the source (even fixed a few typos and misalignment in the source), and finally import the image into Premier Pro and export the rolling credits lossless video clip, then load it into our VapourSynth script, merged with the NCED, and replaced the original ending clip. We are guessing that the video master of Ep.02 is probably lost, thus the missing NCED. The ending of the Ep.02 Blu-ray also does not suffer from the same problem seen in other episodes, but it seems to be converted into 24 fps by directly deleting frames from the original 30 fps footage, which resulted unpleasantly choppy movement. We opted to cut out an NCED by ourselves using the same scenes in Ep.02, then overlaid the text and replaced the ending clip the same way.

We would like to especially thank our friends at SweetSub for this release: the translator spent a lot of time doing research on this anime title based on the original novel and the scenario (you can see his comments in the annotated version of the subtitle, if you can read Chinese), and provided us the complete scans of the scenario; the timer&typesetter did all the extremely tedious typing/proofreading/typesetting of the remade rolling credits, and gave suggestions on the preprocessing of our encode. This release is simply not possible without their effort.

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Reseed comment:
https://bbs.vcb-s.com/thread-6357-1-1.html
Fix an error in Ep.02 staff credit. The corresponding audio track and subtitles are renamed as well.

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Thanks to our participating members:
Collate: wenpens
QC: Enola
Upload: 神楽坂真羽
Seed: Seeding members of VCB-Studio CDN (refer to our website for full list)

Thanks to all resource providers:
CD: JustAfan@Nyaa, norikotakaya@Jpopsuki, 黒江CHLOE@TSDM(https://www.tsdm39.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=759556)
Scan: Jalapeño@LoliHouse, phage@SweetSub

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This is a release of VCB-Studio Monthly Reseed Project.
In the middle and the end of each month we shall renew previous torrents which may be:

→ of zero or few seeders so reseeding is required to resurrect it;
→ with some missing clips/mistakes so we would like to revise it;
→ separated releases that can be batched into a single torrent.

End of July 2020

Information:
https://vcb-s.com/archives/138