Added Claymore to the anime ratings database...

I've added Claymore to the anime ratings database...

A brutal scourge stalks the land. Yoma, monsters driven by a hunger satisfied by only one quarry: Humanity. The dark breed knows but a singular foe: Claymore. Human-Yoma hybrids of extraordinary strength and cunning, the Claymores roam from skirmish to skirmish delivering salvation by the edge of a blade.

Claymore follows the exploits of Clare, a soldier in the service of the "Organization", as she slices and dices "Yoma". Yoma are humans that have been transformed into monsters. Claymores are half-human and half-yoma -- they have the minds and souls of humans, but, can draw upon the immense power of their yoma side to do their dangerous work. Claymores must be cautious with the yoma side of their nature, because, their yoma side might consume their human side and transform the Claymores into full-fledged yoma. Claymore is packed full of violence, bloodshed and gore. Scenes of people munching, people smashing, monster slicing and all manner of gore.

Claymore is mostly traditional animation with only a few CG elements. While, the animation quality in the series does not appear to contain any technical flaws, it does appear that the animators took some noticeable cost saving measures. Throughout the series the animators make use of some still shots and some panning sequences of still shots. There's one particularly unsuccessful sequence of birds sliding sideways across the screen. Thankfully, there's more than enough action to draw my attention away from some of the more obvious shortcomings.

The visual style of the series is dark and moody. It's rendered entirely in muted colors. Even the blood, is a few shades darker than one would expect. The most striking feature of the series is the way the eyes of the main characters are drawn. The Claymores have intensely silver, almost jewel-like, eyes. The yoma have brilliant gold eyes that appear to glow from within. In most cases, the eyes are rendered using traditional animation, but, when the story-tellers want to convey an extra level of intensity, the eyes are beautifully rendered using CG effects. Another interesting aspect of the appearance of the series lies in the blood of its victims -- humans and Claymores bleed red and yoma bleed purple.

Many of the themes in the series relate to the hazy line that seems to separate humans from the half-human, Claymores and the formerly-human, Yoma. Although, the story-telling is fairly good, there is a tendency in the series to venture into the "monster of the week" syndrome -- newer monsters, bigger monsters, badder monsters, etc... The only thing that saves the series from becoming too monotonous is its unflinching violence towards women and its appallingly callous portrayal of violence in general. There were scenes of torture and child abuse in the middle of the series that were fairly intense. Claymore is certainly not for the younger or more squeamish members of the anime community.

Overall, Claymore has some flaws and is certainly not for everyone, but, I still found the series to be engaging and entertaining.

Added Rocket Girls to the anime ratings database...

I've added Rocket Girls to the anime ratings database...

School is finally out for the summer and Yukari Morita has big plans this season. It's off to the Solomon Islands for her, in search of her long-lost father. Unfortunately, the archipelago stretches over 28,000 square kilometers and boasts a population of about 500,000 people. With odds like that, what's a girl to do?

Luckily for Yukari, the local Solomon Space Agency is in desperate need of a new astronaut. With their promise to help find her father, Yukari begins her part-time job as an astronaut!

I've seen the entire series and it's actually surprisingly good. I had my doubts when I first saw this item on the store shelf. It was calling to me, but, I still had my doubts.

The animation is crisp and bright. It appears to be mostly traditional animation with a handful of CG elements thrown in here and there -- nothing too spectacular. The CG effects are not blended very well with the traditional animation and, at times, appear somewhat out of place. The story-telling is somewhat contrived, but, still reasonably good. The humor in the series held my interest fairly well. There are no naughty bits or gore to speak of. The series is a nice character-driven drama -- there's very little action and very few visual effects.

Overall, the series is reminiscent of movies like the "Right Stuff" or "Apollo 13". There's quite a bit of technical jargon and a number of pretty images of the Earth, as seen from space. In some of the more technical aspects of the series, reality is stretched pretty thin. But, if you can suspend disbelief to some degree, I believe that you'll find the series entertaining.

There were no inserts in the case and only a handful of special features in the set. The most interesting part of the special features was a three-minute pilot episode. The pilot version reveals that the character designs had changed dramatically compared to the final version -- the characters originally had a slightly older, more realistic appearance.

I liked the fact that the entire series is in one package, but, I didn't like Bandai's decision to use multi-disc cases where the discs overlap one another. I prefer to have each disc on a separate panel, so, I moved the series to my own three-disc case.

Still, all things considered, I am fairly pleased with Rocket Girls, but, I'll admit that the series' may not be for everyone. In addition, the series' $50 price tag and its subtitled-only format may not inspire others to take a chance on the series.

I went ahead and added a couple of wallpapers featuring two of the lead characters in the series to my humble wallpaper gallery.

Stopped by AnimEigo recently...

AnimEigo is one of the pioneers of the American anime industry and is responsible for bringing such gems as Urusei Yatsura and Bubblegum Crisis to the U.S. I stopped by the AnimEigo site recently and got such a tickle out of their latest sale announcement, that I thought I'd share with you...

Would you believe it, 2009 marks our 20th year of operation. Ah, the good old days, when 45-minute OVAs on VHS tape sold for $40, and the fans were damn glad to be able to get them. Now you want them on DVD, you want liner notes, you want dubs as well as subtitles. Want, want, want... that's all we ever hear from you! What about our needs? What about the boats and sports cars all our employees deserve so very much? What about finally getting that corporate jet for Natsumi -- she'd settle for a small one, and they're cheap right now!

But Nooooooo! You keep insisting that we provide better products for lower prices! You keep insisting we "celebrate" our 20th year by giving you great deals on most of our titles! Don't you realize that unless we can charge higher prices, we'll have to let go essential staff members like the AnimEigo Fan-Girls -- those exceptional young women who ceaselessly labor to keep Bobby, Branson and Aaron cool as they labor under the hot Carolina sun to author DVDs for you?

No, you don't care. You don't care at all. And it just makes me depressed and tired. So tired, in fact, that I just can't bring myself to update the database and return our prices to their normal levels. I just don't have the energy. You're just going to have to put up with the incredibly low sale prices for a little longer.

I hope you can live with yourselves, you ingrates!

Now, if that doesn't inspire you to take your credit card out and order one of everything from the top shelf, I don't know what will. I am certainly one of the ingrates who spent $45 for the first episode of Bubblegum Crisis and I was damn glad to have it. Over the years I've probably spent close to $2,000 on AnimEigo's products. And, I'll keep coming back for more. Certainly, if, they ever renew their Spirit of Wonder license.

Adventures In Mighty B Land...

A couple weeks ago, I put together a DVD of several episodes of the Mighty B TV series. Fresh off my adventures in authoring a two and a half minute DVD, I decided to try my hand at remastering the episodes of the Mighty B, I had on hand.

BTW, for those who don't know the Mighty B...

The Mighty B! is a Nickelodeon show created by Erik Wiese, Cynthia True and Amy Poehler. Poehler also provides the voice of the title character, Bessie Higgenbottom. Its first episode premiered on April 26, 2008. The series was developed under the working title of "Super Scout" before adopting its current name...

Bessie Higgenbottom is a Honeybee scout (this series' portrayal of the Girl Scouts of the USA) who is determined to collect every single badge in Honeybee history. Honeybee folklore implies that in doing so, she’ll become a superhero called the Mighty B. Bessie often enlists the help of her dog Happy, her brother Ben, and her best friend Penny.

My new and improved DVD authoring software turned out to be, not so new and improved. It was relatively painless to set up a project file and add a menu, but, things started to go downhill from there. I had a lot of problems adding the content. The files could be added in bulk, but, when previewing the material to identify which episodes were which, the app would freeze and I would have to reboot. I went through a number of rounds of trying to identify my content and get the menu in order. It took several hours just to get the menu in order.

I noticed that the app would occasionally complain that my video drivers might not be up to date. So, I decided to check the NVidia website to see if there was an updated video driver and there was. It took about four hours to get the new driver installed. Fortunately, that seemed to fix the issue with previewing the content.

The next issue involved editing the content -- removing commercials. The editor would freeze when attempting to edit the content. Eventually, after several hours worth of effort and many many saves, I was able to get the content edited -- more or less. There was one episode that gave me a lot of problems. The editor, for some unknown reason, refused to show the end of the episode. So, I couldn't tell where the episode actually ended and where the commercials started.

After a day and a half of work, I managed to get the content ready for burning. I started the burning sequence and discovered that the app would have to process the content before actually burning the DVD. The processing would take about two and a half hours. About half way through the process, the app froze and nothing was burned to DVD. At least the app didn't kill a DVD, but, after rebooting, I found that the app could not pick up processing where it left off -- it had to start from the beginning. I tried a couple of times to get the app to complete processing and it refused. So after two days of effort, I've got nothing to show for my work, but, a two and a half minute DVD and a $90 hole in my wallet. I checked the web for advice on the app and discovered that there's a lot of pain out there. My next step will be to try a different software package.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Update

I picked up some new software and tried, yet again, to remaster the episodes of Mighty B that I had on hand. The effort was successful, but, altogether underwhelming. The quality suffered greatly during the transfer and mastering phases. But, all of my efforts were not in vain. I did figure out a process for burning web-quality content to a DVD and as long as I don't ask too much of my humble DVD authoring software, it actually works fairly well.

Babylon 5: Conflicts of Loyalty on DVD...

Recent discussions concerning the future of the anime industry and the industry's evolution into an online-only distribution model have prompted me to look into converting various file formats into a DVD format. I cobbled together some software and hardware in an effort to conduct an experiment to test the viability of transferring movie files on my computer to a DVD that will play in my older-model DVD player. The first candidate for my first foray into DVD authoring was a 2-minute-23-second teaser trailer for something entitled: Babylon 5: Conflicts of Loyalty.

Some time ago, I happened to come across a teaser trailer for Babylon 5: Conflicts of Loyalty. It's a trailer for a Babylon 5-themed mod for the game, Nexus. A very talented team of artists and programmers recreated 3D models of the various ships featured in the Babylon 5 storyline. Once created, the 3D models could then be inserted into the Nexus game environment. The trailer shows a series of in-game battle sequences featuring the Babylon 5-themed 3D models and set to a suitably melancholy music selection from the Babylon 5 TV series.

My initial test was successful, but, did not go as well as expected. I had to covert the original file to a lower-quality format, before converting it to DVD. It took about a half-hour to convert two minutes of material and the experience, in general, was not as user-friendly as I would have liked. The difficulties that I encountered highlighted the need for new software. New hardware wouldn't hurt either, but, there is no budget for new hardware at this time.

On the bright side, I came up with a nice cover for the DVD case. Even though, the teaser trailer is only slightly more than a couple minutes, I made up a DVD cover for it and I'll still keep it in the DVD archive.

For my second attempt, I upgraded my DVD burning software and added a handful of quick and dirty conversion utilities for any formats that were not supported. The new software made all the difference. I was able to set up a custom menu page and add my movie file to the DVD with just a few mouse clicks. As an extra feature, I even have an animated menu page. The picture quality was much better in the second attempt and the whole process only took a few minutes. And, best of all, my older-model DVD player didn't care about all the frills -- it played the DVD without any problems.

I found a nice utility that can handle those pesky FLV files very well. Although the utility claims to also handle flash (SWF) files, it's really not that good. I think that once I get my hands on a fairly decent flash converter, I'll be ready to venture out into the world and see what sorts of anime are available. It remains to be seen if Internet-quality subtitled anime will still look good once it's burned to DVD.