Castle of Cagliostro (R2)

First created on 15th Aug 2003. 19th Aug 2003: added trailer shots. 29th Nov 2003: use CSS for most elements.

visits since 15th Aug 2003

Note: this page may take some time to load due to its size (514 kB).

Castle of Cagliostro is one of the first anime DVDs I bought, for 4700 Yen in Apr 2001. I bought it at the time when it was released.

I remember being disappointed after the first viewing. I guess I didn't expect a light-hearted adventure. :-) However, it was compelling enough for me for watch a second time, and a third, and a fourth..

The dub-titles is very annoying. It differs very much from the Japanese dialogue! The English track/dub-titles is much more verbose. I thought there was something wrong with my setup! Also, the translation is very Americanized. I was able to appreciate the show better after I downloaded the proper subtitles and watched the show using DVD Subber.

Time	R2 DVD
0:01:15		The strong EE is very annoying.
0:05:25		Another example of EE.
0:05:32		What you need to do after losing a bet. :-)
0:07:28		A rare instance of MPEG artifact.
0:16:00		Nice view.
0:37:40		If this looks familiar, it should. This is the CoC's R1 cover.
0:43:52		This is the art on the disc.

A close-up look

(This part requires Javascript.)

The original BMP file upscaled by 300% using bicubic interpolation. The image is lossless PNG. The bicubic image is displayed by default. Note that the aspect ratio follows the original file (3:2 instead of 16:9). Nearest neighbor (59 kB) Bilinear (191 kB) Bicubic (208 kB) If the image is physically larger than 5 x 4 inches on your display, then it is close to what you see when projected (taking viewing distance into account). Not many DVD are optimized for projections or digital displays. Most look good on TVs only.

From the trailer

On the second disc, there is a featurette that compares the restored footage with the original trailer.

The trailer is not anamorphic, so the black bars are cropped away. Interestingly, the original footage is in 720 x 370, and the restored one varies from 720 x 390 to 720 x 400.

Time	Original	Restored		From the movie
0:00:19			I captured slightly earlier in the trailer because the image is obscured by huge text a few frames later. Note that the restored trailer looks different from the movie.	0:37:40
0:00:49			I matched the wrong frame for the restored footage, but it doesn't matter. The original trailer is very blue-ish. The restored one seems to have (a lot of) red added back. The movie looks better color corrected.	0:10:27
0:00:56			Noticed the lack of EE in the original trailer?	0:12:38
0:01:09			Too red in the restored version. The footage is slightly different in the movie.	0:17:07
0:01:12			The trailer has compression artifacts. Note that the trailer is much wider on the left and bottom.	0:01:15
0:01:30			Has some cropping as well.	0:06:23
0:01:43			I can't get the exact framing in the movie. Is there more than one footage?	0:00:21

PowerDVD 4.0 is used; no hardware acceleration; original video profile. Weave mode is used. The images are resized using bicubic interpolation to restore the proper aspect ratio. The original files are not available on this webpage. No sharpening is done. They are converted from BMP to JPEG (quality 9) using Photoshop 6.0.