Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

by **Jim Ballard** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 2:54 pm

Moving away from the fun in the CineMassacre thread, I thought I would chime in with an update on the HD project.

The official website has been updated: http://www.nihon-eiga.com/godzilla/
There is also an official blog being updated daily: http://hd-godzilla.cocolog-nifty.com/

It turns out the remastering was quite extensive. They went back to the master positives (one generation away from the original camera negative), cleaned and swabbed the film frame by frame, washed and dried, converted to HD, cleaned further frame by frame on computer, color corrected, etc.

They are airing a new movie every night, having started with GODZILLA on Saturday (Oct 25th), GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN on Sunday, and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA today.

Unfortunately, the only I've seen so far seems to indicate that it's still in pretty rough shape. It calls it "awful" and "horrible", and says it was "poorly remastered". Mocks the so-called color correction, and says the night scenes looks like someone bumped up the brightness in Photoshop giving it some kind of "whitish black" look.

Too bad.

Everyone seems to be praising G54 and GRA though.

by **canofhumdingers** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 3:24 pm

by **Joseph Goodman** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:08 pm

by **Legion** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 7:06 pm

by **kidnicky** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 9:34 pm

by **Legion** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 9:40 pm

by **Joseph Goodman** » Thu Oct 30, 2008 12:55 pm

Just going by the mangled Google translations, the posters on seem to be saying that "Godzilla Vs. The Thing", "Ghidrah", and "Monster Zero" are looking great.

by **Jim Ballard** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:11 am

"Earlier this year, a joint collaboration between Toho and the Japanese Movie Speciality Channel saw the restoration of the entire Godzilla series in high definition (HD). Between October and December, all 28 of the newly remastered titles were broadcast in HD on the Japanese Movie Speciality Channel in Japan.

Join SciFi Japan as we take a look at the tremendous work undertaken to prepare Godzilla for the world of high definition!"

http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2008 ... -in-focus/

by **Cookie** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:02 pm

Nice article! Now time to just wait for the blu rays!!

by **Legion** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 12:06 pm

by **Benjamin Haines** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 3:04 pm

I'm just really, really curious to see how King Kong vs. Godzilla looks after this process.

by **Legion** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 3:05 pm

Has anyone actually seen how these films look? Info on the restoration process is nice and all but at this point I'd rather see for myself.

by **Andrew Nguyen** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 3:27 pm

A truly excellent article. Also I think we all here share the sentiments of Legion in waiting to see for ourselves how these turned out.

by **GodzFire** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 8:13 pm

A great read. I just wish they went into more detail. Having worked on restoring my own family's film reels, and researched/read a bunch about this already, it kind of feels they are just generalizing the process.

What I'd love for them to go into detail about is the condition of the physical film for each of the movies, what prints were used, etc. THAT'S the true treasure.

by **Baradagi** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 9:43 pm

The Showa titles and special have been available to download in 720p (downcoverted from 1080i) for about two months now if you know where to look... KING KONG VS GODZILLA shows the most improvement-

by **Jim Ballard** » Mon Dec 29, 2008 11:31 pm

I was rather dissapointed how many scenes in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA were up-converted from the DVD. The opening text explains that it's mixed up like that because a lot of the film doesn't exist. I knew it was the case, but I hadn't realised to what extent.

But what they have done is, of course, a vast improvement!

by **Tom R VanSlambrouck** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 12:07 am

Wow KKvsG really does look like it benefited from the conversion. I know it's been said before but I really can't wait for Toho to release the Blu-Rays and since we're in the same region as Japan maybe they'll get subbs to.

Sadly Sci-Fi Japan is having a DB error right now so I'll have to read the new article later.

by **Baradagi** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 12:53 am

A few examples of color correction-

by **GodzFire** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 5:06 pm

by **Jim Ballard** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 8:34 pm

I put together a little comparison of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA's restored film elements against the DVD Toho release:

(2.60MB!!)

Obviously as it's a small compressed JPEG so you can't really judge the HD version properly, but at least you can compare the print quality, colour correction, etc.

by **Legion** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:32 pm

Wow.

If King Kong vs Godzilla can look like that I can't wait to see how the rest of the Showa series looks.

The Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla screen cap also looks great, especially for a shot that never looked crystal clear in the first place because of the animated effects processing. A couple of days ago I watched the Sony DVD of this film on my 52' LCD TV and was blown away with how incredibly clear it looked. A HD version of the movie would probably blow me away.

Please Toho, lets have some blu rays next year!! Please.

by **Benjamin Haines** » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:46 pm

What has been restored of King Kong vs. Godzilla really does look incredible. Thanks for the comparisons, James and Baradagi.

I'm still completely satisfied with DVDs and haven't had even the slightest inclination to transition to Blu-Ray until this whole Godzilla restoration project came about. Whenever Toho gets around to putting these on Blu-Ray, whether or not they include English subtitles will make or break my decision to upgrade. The US and Japan apparently both have the same Blu-Ray region coding, so who knows?

Monster Zero x SciFi Japan - Archive Only

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