That's beyond heartbreaking. Everything is somehow getting worse but I'd held out hope that something universally considered a masterpiece might get better treatment. Do you know if a better release exists in Japan?
My wooden peg leg and the parrot on my experienced and still active privateer shoulder tell me no.
That is the way. Arrr.
Anime piracy and subtitles, even with globalization, is on a different level. Especially with the detail and effort that goes into some fansubs.
Yeah exactly that. I had a crunchy roll subscription but shitcanned it in the end because the quality of the releases is an order of magnitude better from the pirates.
If you want another known bad case: https://sephirotic.wordpress.com/2015/10/11/neon-genesis-eva...
Eh, we lost the original moon tapes and George Lucas suppressed the theatrical Star Wars cut. Very common even in the modern era for this sort of thing to happen.
At least for the theatrical Star Wars cut there's an excellent fan restoration 4k77 based on a 35mm IB technicolor film scan. The amount of work fans do to restore work they care about more than the corporate owners is always both amazing and heartwarming.
The 4K Bluray copy I have seems to be an improvement over both?
Note: This is the HDR screenshot so colours look wrong unless tonemapped to a SDR display.
Still some cropping and way too much DNR, but not as bad as the 1080p BDs indeed. Some people recommend it over the HDTV source (which was a bitstarved WMV3 encode) for its better handling of action sequences (i.e. without horrible macroblocking).
BD: http://comp.judging.it/content/Koukaku%20Kidoutai/1080p-3/BD...
HDTV: http://comp.judging.it/content/Koukaku%20Kidoutai/1080p-3/Ju...