This torrent contains encodes of episodes 1-153 of Dragon Ball from Animax TS caps that aired in 2011 and 2012 (and one episode from 2014 due to drops in my 2012 TS). I am identifying the dates of the broadcast in each episode because I have heard rumors that some Animax broadcasts may have reduced the frame rate, darkened or blended fast scenes, and the TS I capped absolutely did not. I started this project at the beginning of March 2025 and just finished on April 17. The goal of this project was to retain as much of the original quality of the film transfer as possible. As such, I performed no color correction or filtering of any kind that would smooth or kill details, while retaining as much of the original grain as possible. This was a challenge, because x265 was killing a lot of the grain by smoothing out the picture, and 10bit was causing digital artifacts to appear on all outlines, which is why the first 20 episodes have so many revisions documented in the filenames. Since x265 and 10bit were not working the way I had hoped, I went back to x264 with Film tuning and set the aq-strength at 1.5 to retain as much grain as I could without the file sizes absolutely exploding at CRF18. As it is, most of the episodes are between 800MB-1.2GB at 960x720p. I'm pretty happy with the result and I hope that others enjoy watching the film reel as raw as we'll ever see it as much as I did. This is the continuation of the Dragon Ball Z project I uploaded earlier in 2024. Why Animax? Unlike BS Fuji, FujiTWO or Tokyo MX, Animax aired Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z without altering the frame rate, picture contrast or blending fast frames. That's right - the Animax 2011/2012 broadcasts are DIFFERENT from the other stations. Just take a look at how FujiTWO looks in comparison to Animax via the link below. https://slow.pics/c/esRL7avC About the encoding process: - I used a custom eraselogo script to remove the logo -- The goal was to get as close to the original film scans as possible, so of course the logo has got to go - I used x264, CRF18, slow preset, film tuning, and aq-strength 1.5 - I used qtgmc to deinterlace the video to 59.94fps, then a custom string of selectevery commands to hand-decimate down to its original 23.976fps -- This is an imperative step, because letting an automatic decimation tool do its work will select the blended frames over unblended frames every time --- Upon analysis, I learned that each of the 5 parts of the episode (Opening, Part 1, Part 2, Preview, Ending) follow the same frame sequence every time (this is the same as the Dragon Ball Z Animax TS) ---- Thus, selectevery(10,1,3,6,8), selectevery(10,1,4,6,9) or other number sequences will yield the same pattern every time. Once the pattern with no blended frames is identified, it will work until the next cut in the film - I decided to downscale the video frame to 960x720 instead of the 704x528 size I used for my Dragon Ball Z encodes -- I could still see a picture quality difference between 960x720 and 704x528, so this made sense --- I could tell no difference between 1440x1080 and 960x720, so I am confident this was the right choice - Finally, Animax episode 153 did not have a preview - the same as the Dragon Box -- As such, I used my TS of Dragon Ball Z episode 1 from Animax to frame match the scenes to a VHS rip of the Dragon Ball episode 153 preview --- There were four clips that were slightly different than the original preview... There was nothing I could do to fix it, but you'd only notice if you did a side by side comparison ---- Of course, the episode title did not have the 次回 preview text above it, and DBZ episode 1 added Dragon Balls to the background ----- I manually added the 次回 characters with the correct spacing and two different fonts to emulate Dragon Ball's font face. I also went frame by frame via Aegisub to add a shake to the text that matched that of the film transfer to the best of my ability. Here are some comparisons of the VHS tape original 153 preview vs my Animax recreation: 1) https://slow.pics/c/suhYAocD 2) https://slow.pics/c/udwEUBD7 3) https://slow.pics/c/VTy98nfx As you can see, there are some slight differences, but this is better than nothing and at very least the video comes from the same Animax source. If this torrent sees a lot of love, I may redo my Dragon Ball Z encodes in this method at 960x720p. I feel bad that I missed the anniversary of Toriyama's passing, and I also missed his birthday... RIP... Thank you, and I hope you all enjoy! -edit 4/19/2025 -- Wellp, less than 24 hours and I already seeded 3TB, only a few people continued seeding after downloading. Sorry everyone... Guess we're not seeing love for this torrent. Was worth a shot. Too bad. Hope some of the 17 people who finished downloading this full set help keep this alive, because I hit my send limit.