Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 BD Batch
Oh boy, there’s a lot to say here, especially regarding the audio. The Japanese audio for this show was recorded in Dolby Atmos, which is basically a really fancy surround-sound format. The main problem here is the only software you can use to compress it and not throw away the extra data needed for the format is with some extremely expensive software that’s never even been pirated/cracked as far as I know. Which is basically to say it’s impossible right now. Therefore, I was forced to keep the audio mostly as-is which results in an extra ~1.5gb per episode for the 1080p encodes. For comparison, Netflix has said software and compressed the audio for their stream of this show and it’s about ~140mb per episode. Now you might be saying, why not just use their audio? The main reason is it’s not trivial to tell if the BD audio has any changes. Netflix’s audio also seemed to be slightly out of sync, though I could’ve fixed that if I really wanted to. For the 720p encodes, I just did my usual AAC encode of the 2.0 mix included with the BDs. If you think the 1080p encode is bloated, then download 720p or re-encode the audio yourself if you don’t have the hardware to play Atmos audio anyway.
As for the dub, I used Netflix’s audio since it’s the only source available currently. The 1080p uses their highest-quality audio, 640kbps 5.1 E-AC3, while the 720p encode uses 384kbps 5.1 AC-3. I didn’t opt to use their 2.0 audio for the 720p encode since their 2.0 audio’s quality is rather bad and low bitrate. If there’s even a BD source for the dub audio, I’ll probably v2 this release.
In terms of non-audio things, the video isn’t filtered very heavily. The main issue with this is there is some (almost certainly unintentional) aliasing on the character models in some shots. Normally I would try to fix it, but it seemed quite difficult to do so without making other parts of the frame quite blurry. And since it doesn’t affect many scenes, I didn’t bother with it.
Lastly, as you might be aware, Netflix announced that the second half of this show is airing sometime this year. It could honestly be released at any time since Netflix doesn’t really stream shows in sync with the usual anime seasons. There’s also a recap movie that I might sub if it gets a BD release and that’s uploaded.
tl;dr Bloat because of fancy audio. Deal with it.
Posted by herkz under Blue Menace, Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Releases | Permalink