Ever noticed that our #DragonBall, #DBZ, and #DBGT releases are a non-standard resolution and differently shaped compared to the raw Dragon boxes? Well, there's a good reason for that. Ever heard of PAR and DAR? 🧵
PAR, or Pixel Aspect Ratio, describes how the width of a pixel in a compares to its height. Digital devices have a PAR of 1 (square pixels), but were not the norm when Dragon Ball was produced. Example with PAR of 1, then our version.
When DB was animated, the standard analog display could pack more information horizontally than vertically. The industry had to optimize the data on DVDs for the consumer end, but this PAR can only be approximated by DVD players. DBOX PAR is 10:11
The 10:11 PAR isn't perfect, as we discovered. We tested it, and found a lesser-known industry standard of 160:177 looks best overall on Dragon Box. Meticulous comparisons were made using circular objects in the video. Example here using our PAR.
The correct DAR, or Display Aspect Ratio, is still the standard 4:3. This is the aspect ratio of the entire image. Using our PAR, this creates a few "extra" pixels on the sides of the image. What do we do in this case? We had three options...
1. Prioritize a 4:3 DAR at all costs without cropping. This leads to an incorrect PAR and so the image will look vertically stretched compared to what is intended.
2. Prioritize correct PAR without cropping. This leads to a picture that looks correct but is wider than 4:3 and will sometimes show part of the image that is not meant to be shown (e.g. inconsistent and blurred black bars), since DVD authoring always predicts overscan by CRTs.
3. Prioritize the correct PAR and a 4:3 DAR, which is achieved by cropping away the overscanned part. This results in resolutions such as 708 x 480 (which is resized to 708 x 531 on most players after the PAR transformation). This project uses the third option.
The first post of this thread shows the difference between raw DBOX and our version of DBZ. Here's another example. You can see in the first picture that the edges are just black bars.
Many episodes in DBOX either had black bars or other strange artifacts on the extreme sides of the image. "Crop" became a dirty word in the DB fandom due to the Orange Bricks, but our crop gets rid of the things you don't want to see.
You can read more about the subject here if interested https://t.co/ENszSQgIWI