Discotek Media has licensed the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog

The one on Youtube isn't complete though, is it? It was missing music and was pretty short. This one could be more complete... hopefully.

I still have my Shout Factory SatAM set from 2007, but a Blu-Ray re-release would be cool. Especially if they can add more features.

 

I've gone ahead and pre-ordered the set for myself. Should it prove to sell well, I hope they can consider trying to license the two other American cartoons, the OVA, and eventually, Sonic X in Japanese, which I feel would be the hardest to license out, out of all of the ones mentioned here.

I feel like the other shows would be worth owning alone, just for the box art, as I imagine releases of those other shows by Discotek would probably also have some good box art to them, much like the AoStH set.

 

Ya but then what about when his pupils move around and side to side within the white part? Haha.

 

If these are "definitive" versions (I mean the box arts don't even have blue arms for once!) I'd happily pick these up. I've been wanting these in some form for the longest time. Here's hoping they can also release SATAM and (not that I am a fan of it, but I'm all for preservation especially if it's higher quality) Sonic Underground.

 

I thought I remembered someone here trying to piece together this promo. Sorry nobody seemed to be super helpful on that.
I'm glad the series finally has a super respectful release.

 

I've been watching the footage put out by the Discotek Twitter, alongside the screenshots. It's still an SD production, but it does seem to look about as good as one could ever hope it to look. I'm still super curious about the interlacing situation, though, and if they deinterlaced it at all. The video files posted onto Twitter do not show any visible interlacing, so maybe a part of that video work was spent just deinterlacing the show? A good call, if so, since I recall some users complaining about the Sonic X set and its interlacing.

Another thing I noticed video wise is that some artifacts like dot crawling and rainbowing still seem to persist in the image. Granted, it's very minor, and hard to notice, so I doubt it will be an issue for most, but I figured some of the video work may extent to cleaning such artifacts from the image. Perhaps not. Below is a link comparing one of the frames they posted from Twitter, vs the Shout! Factory DVD. The Twitter image was a PNG file, so I feel this is a fair comparison. Both images have been cropped to remove the black bars, and both are at the same size (though the alignment is a smidge bit off). Use the white bar in the middle to compare between the two images: https://imgsli.com/ODYzNTI

It seems like the lines on Discotek seem a bit weird (look at the spines and smirk on Sonic), and the colors are desaturated, oddly. How curious...

 

Cartoons gonna cartoon lol

 

Disc 1: episodes 1 to 50
Disc 2: episodes 51 to 65

Sounds balanced to me.

Is there a reason for that? I mean, why not a 33-32 split? Or a 32.5-32.5 split which cuts the 32nd episode exactly in half.

 

Probably because the second disc is loaded with the bonus features. Dunno if it's 35 episodes' worth, but.

 

It’s better to do it this way, it’s more convenient when picking which episode you want to watch. You’ll only need to switch discs if you want to watch one of the final 15.

Sonic Christmas Blast is probably on disc 2 as well, so it would be 16 episodes really.

 

One is a BD50 (50GB) and one is a BD25 (25GB), so splitting 65-ish episode shows like that make sense. You're allocating 1gb-ish to each episode that way.

It makes no financial sense to do 2 BD50s and would be annoying and more expensive to make 3 BD25s. We could have crunched it all down onto one BD50 if we really wanted to bitstarve the show and make it look like bootleg garbage, but that's not how we roll! Sonic says.

Also yes, Sonic Christmas Blast! is on disc 2.

 

Pretty sure that Shout! cranked the colors and contrast up a bit for their release; we chose not to mess with it, since I think that the Shout! version came out a little blown out for my tastes. If you look, there's more ringing on the Shout version too (check around Sonic's cheek near his smile.) I don't know if that's the masters they dug up or if they tried to sharpen it.

 

Yup, that was me. I ended up paying a production assistant to comb through all the episodes to help me find all the scenes to restore it.

 

Well that explains the color situation. Thanks for clearing that up! Do you reckon the sharpening situation is also why the lines on Sonic's smile and spines look a bit off on the Discotek still? To me, it looks like a deinterlacing, or scaling issue that Shout! doesn't seem to have, but I am not 100% certain.

 

They're just 90s masters, but also you're pulling from a Twitter video which is already screwing with the scaling. It's not a fair comparison at all.

The Blu-rays aren't deinterlaced but the video posted for web more or less have to be, too, or else most video sharing sites will automatically try to do it for you.

 

Very disappointed to hear the Blu rays aren't deinterlaced. Your Sonic X set is inferior to the DVDs for this very reason (the Y TV thing doesn't help either).

Still, given the quality of the DVDs for this series, I expect this new release to be an upgrade.

 

It's worth noting that I actually pulled the frame from this thread: https://twitter.com/discotekmedia/status/1470861024093872131

That being said, you make a fair point. Ill wait until I get the set in the mail, before I properly judge it. Thank you again for answering my questions! A bit saddened the set isn't already deinterlaced, but I sorta understand why it isn't, since trying to deinterlace old shows like this can be a pain (retaining the frame rates of video effects like fade ins and outs, any sped up clips, stuff that just a simple IVTC could miss, you know?). People complained about Sonic X not being deinterlaced, but to deinterlace that show would be a massive undertaking to really do it right, especially due to how 4kids edited the show.

I've compiled all of my observations of the Discotek set here, for anyone that wants to read a sort of condensed version of some of the known details on it. Information comes from a mix of Kushami, and Brady on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lebrickster/status/1471220778913968153

This is all still a set that I am looking quite forward to, in the end. All of my questions about these specific things was not to put it in a bad light, but just question things I personally wanted to know about, and I feel like I now know what I need to know. Thank you Kushami, and Brady (if he's reading this) for taking the time to answer my specific questions!

 

Now that's a reply that actually makes sense, I didn't think about that, thanks.

 

Uh, the Sonic X DVDs aren't deinterlaced either. At least not the US ones.

And, to be honest, if you knew anything about the source of Sonic X you'd know that in a lot of cases it's missing fields, so if you try to deinterlace it there's a lot of compromises you'd have to make and it wouldn't come out perfectly. I'm pretty sure they edited Sonic X on a mid-2000s AVID, while interlaced, and if you look at, say, a bunch of the racing shots in the first episode, it'll be immediately obvious to you that they sped the footage up after animating it because you'll see that there are a lot of fields missing from where the AVID just deleted them to speed up the footage. It's an inherent source issue, and they sped up a LOT of scenes in Sonic to make it seem faster. (And yes, this is even in the Japanese version, I checked.) This also happens in the intro to both the Japanese and US versions; there's a scene where Tails presses a button in one of the intros and it's absolutely screwed up at the source level. This is all throughout the show.

The Sonic X dub also doesn't seem to exist without the TV Y bug- a lot of the 4Kids masters are like this.

As much as I like progressive video, sometimes it doesn't make sense to deinterlace sources which have multiple framerates or extreme source level field problems. Adventures of Sonic is one of those cases too, where it was edited on video.

 

Here is an example of a scene in Sonic X where they used an AVID (or whatever editing rig they had at the time) to speed up the footage. It is a scene with multiple fields without mates, so a proper IVTC is not possible. Scenes do this all throughout the show, and even the intros do it.

You could deinterlace it in a few ways:

A.) Blend the fields together. (Second shot.)
B.) Use a deinterlacer that tries to reconstruct the missing field using algorithms or AI to try to guess and fill in the blanks, and the results are usually pretty pixelated/stairsteppy. (Third shot.)

This also means the motion is more than 23.976, and closer to 30.

This is why all the recent Kids Station re-airing in Japanese are upscaled to 1080i, and aren't progressive.

Have some screenshots.