[hydes] Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack [JPBD Remux][Dual-Audio] + ED CD

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Big thanks to:

• ghsushsu123: typesetting help
• Milpo Sclint: Milpo Sclint

Discord

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Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack

Video

With regard to video, there are probably only two releases of this movie worth considering: the original 2008 JP BD and the 4K HDR remastered 2018 JP BD. For this upload, I opted to use a remux of the 1080p disc from the 4K release, as even with its heavier usage of DNR compared to the 2008 original, it still manages to look nicer to the eye the majority of the time with its lack of windowboxing and improved color treatment. The DNR or possibly sharpening artifacts on the remaster that are visible in places are unfortunate but still something I can live with. The plus sides of the better colors and not having to zoom in overweigh the minuses for me.

Dynit does have a release of the older version too. However, I suspect even it won't be much better than the 2008 JP BD, given all the restrictions often put on overseas authoring companies by the Japanese that Dynit of course has to work with as well. Though I wouldn't be surprised if these restrictions were be the biggest hurdle only after all the extra time, money, and skill remastering a movie well would require.

The top encode using the remastered version is likely Beatrice's, which I've included in the comparisons below for you to weigh up against the remux. The remux is the nicest-looking to me, but I can see why some might prefer saving space on their HDD over squeezing out every possible bit of quality from the video. If you're keener on the space-saving thing, I highly recommend checking out Beatrice's encode.

Audio

The four audio tracks include a Japanese 2.0 Dolby Stereo mix, a Japanese 4.1 remix, a Japanese 5.1 upmix(?) from the Right Stuf release, and the English 5.1 dub, also from the Right Stuf release. The English dub replaces the sound effects with all-new ones, and I guess they're fine? Not a big deal either way for me as I tend to stick to the Japanese dubs with Gundam anyhow. The 4.1 remix seems quite interesting going by what user NLScavenger said about it here. And it does also sound like a robust mix.

Some other things I noticed were that the ED song on the Japanese 5.1 track has been EQ'd to be brighter and that the vocals during the ED song are skewed to the left on the English 5.1 track.

The Japanese Dolby Stereo track has been included on the original JP R2 DVD, the 2008 JP BD, and the 2018 JP BD, so I compared the three to see if there were any notable differences, and there were not. Beyond the expected deviations like the lossy DVD track cutting off earlier at the top-end, all three tracks were so similar that you'd be hard-pressed to find any audible differences between them. That being the case, I simply went with the 2.0 track from the 2018 BD here. One more release I would like to compare is the 80s LaserDisc from Japan, but seeing as the current offerings are decent already with no clipping or huge amounts of noise reduction, I doubt the LD could be much better, if at all. All my audio comparisons are also linked below if you're interested in any of them.

Subtitles

For the subtitles, I took EG's R1 script and fully retimed all lines, changed a decent amount of line breaks, added back three missing lines from the BD subtitles, and fixed any spelling errors and such that I could find. I assume EG or anyone who later used his subs didn't retime since the lines suffered from the same common DVD/BD timing problems as the subtitles for Memories did. I also typeset and motion tracked the title sign and did a quick style and fades for the ED. Considering everything, the presentation should hopefully be an improvement. Let me know if you find any errors so I can try to fix them!

I also couldn't help noticing that more than a few of the lines were taken straight from the English dub, which made some of the dialogue seem slightly off to me. Maybe the dub is accurate to the original Japanese, I don't know. I still hope someone properly goes through the translation someday to make sure.

Extras

As a pretty cool extra, I've included here from my own 1988 Mini CD the original single version of the ending song, "Beyond The Time" by TM Network. As far as I know, this is the only version of the song that does not fade out during the end section. The same single version on the CCA soundtrack album fades out, as does the Carol, A Day In A Girl's Life album version. Fading out a song when it really doesn't need to be is something that baffles me, especially in cases where you're essentially losing out on the "full experience" because the mixing engineer / producer / whoever decided it'd be a good idea. It might be reaching a bit, but you could even say that fading out Beyond The Time's outro is in the same vein as when Mark Knopfler's guitar solo in "Sultans Of Swing" received the fade-out treatment on Vertigo's original CD pressings of the Dire Straits album, which was just shameless.

Anyway, the Mini CD single had the song itself plus an instrumental mix which I’ve also included here. And finally, to top it off, I ripped the album version from the original 1988 JP CD pressing of Carol, A Day In A Girl’s Life. This album version, despite fading out at the end, is interesting because of how different it sounds from the single version. (It's also called the "expanded version" on the album itself for whatever reason.)

Comparisons

For the sake of documentation, Japanese 4.1, 5.1, and English 5.1 screenshots.

Japanese 2.0
Spectrograms, Waveforms, Masterings
Because the 2008 JP BD is windowboxed, the screenshots of it were taken while zoomed-in in mpv by 0.70 with spline36 enabled for scaling.
Video
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2008 JP BD / 2018 JP BD / Beatrice-raws

Specifics

Video:

1. 2018 JP BD Remux (1920x1080, 23.976fps)

Audio:

1. Japanese 2.0 Dolby Stereo FLAC (2018 JP BD) (default)
2. Japanese 4.1 FLAC (2018 JP BD)
3. Japanese 5.1 FLAC (2016 US BD)
4. English 5.1 FLAC (2016 US BD)

Subtitles:

1. Signs And Songs [hydes]
2. English [hydes] (default)
3. English PGS (2016 US BD)

MediaInfo