#### Big thanks to: * **ghsushsu123**: for typesetting help * **WPR**: for capturing and providing the Japanese 2.0 LD track + subtitle TLC and QC * **[Krycek7o2](https://nyaa.iss.one/user/Krycek7o2)**: for expertly fixing an issue with one dialogue line in the LD track #### [Discord](https://discord.gg/PMrccmpYTu) #### For more Tomino, check out the [Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked](https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1557152) upload! Ghibli stuff is stalled at the moment, but we are working on a Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 movie trilogy release, among some other things! ___ ### Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (v3) What's new in this v3: * Revised English translation by MechLovin with some TLC and QC by WPR Changes the v2 introduced: * Markedly better Japanese audio with far less noise reduction from the 1990 JP LD * Further QC'd (official) subtitles, including a new translation of the ED song taken from the 2016 US BD ### Video With regard to video, there are probably only two* releases of this movie worth considering: The 2008 JP BD and the 4K HDR remastered 2018 JP BD. For this upload, I opted to use a remux of the 1080p disc from the 4K release, as even with the heavier usage of DNR, it still manages to look more attractive the majority of the time thanks to its improved color treatment, mostly sharper look, and lack of windowboxing. While the DNR artifacts visible in places on it are unfortunate, they're overall something I can live with. The positives outweigh the negatives for me in this case. The best encode of the remastered version is likely Beatrice's, which I've included in the comparisons below for you to weigh up against the remux. The remux looks the nicest to me, but I can see why some might prefer saving space on their HDD over squeezing out every possible bit of quality from the video. If you're keener on the space-saving thing, I highly recommend checking out Beatrice's encode. (*There is a 2012 Dynit BD release of this movie too, and I can’t say for sure due to not having seen it, but going by their other work, it could be an improvement over the original JP BD. However, I suspect even it won’t be able to beat the 2018 JP BD, given what they had to work with and all the restrictions often put on overseas authoring companies by the Japanese that Dynit has to abide by as well, meaning it’s probable that they weren’t allowed to do any kind of crazy restoration work (assuming they wanted to in the first place). Although I wouldn't be surprised if these restrictions were the biggest hurdle only after all the extra time, money, and skill remastering a movie well would require.) ### Audio Similarly to the LD track in the recent [*Akira*](/view/1548873) upload, the Japanese 2.0 Dolby Surround track captured by WPR from the [1990 JP LaserDisc](https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/29990/BELL-376/Mobile-Suit-Gundam:-Chars-Counterattack) really takes the spotlight here. I wasn't previously exactly sure how much noise reduction the BD and DVD tracks had, but listening to the LD track and [comparing it to them](https://slow.pics/c/xWUNN3GZ) made the amount of filtering very evident. The newer releases sound noticeably more muffled, and to demonstrate the difference a bit, I imitated [blah-ray's](https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/) method and made a quick audio comparison clip of the ED song: [](https://vimeo.com/737175865) (I didn't include the 2001 JP DVD and 2008 JP BD tracks in the video since they are virtually identical to the 2018 JP BD track.) The differences in the sound caused by the noise reduction begin at around 3 kHz, and seemingly everything up to 20 kHz is affected from there. After 6 kHz, the DVD and BD tracks start to dip more significantly (4-7 dB). It's also worth noting that the NR may mask some of the distortion present in the mix, but that doesn't make up for the audible loss in clarity and detail. The rest of the tracks include: * Japanese 4.1 remix from the 2018 JP BD * Japanese 5.1 upmix from the 2016 US BD * English 5.1 dub from the 2016 US BD All the above BD tracks appear to have been made using noise-managed sources because they all sound more muffled and generally more devoid of air than the LD track. For completeness' sake, they are nice to have. However, seeing that the healthier LD audio almost makes them redundant, there's not much point in going with any of them over the LD track when actually watching the movie. The LD track is the recommended choice for the optimal experience. The English dub is somewhat note-worthy due to the fact that it replaces the sound effects with all-new ones, and I guess they're fine? Not a huge deal either way since most people probably tend to stick to the Japanese dubs with Gundam anyhow. Lastly, some other things I noticed about the tracks were that compared to the other NR'd tracks, the ED song on the Japanese 5.1 track has been EQ'd to be brighter (guess the producers of the Right Stuf release noticed the muffled sound of the track they had to work with), and that the ED song vocals are skewed to the left on the English 5.1 track. The full audio comparisons are linked below in the "Comparisons" section if you're interested. ### Subtitles The new subtitles in this v3 are a revised version of the official subtitles by MechLovin with some translation checking and QC by WPR and full retiming by me. Below are my previous notes on the old v2 subtitles, which I've left included as a legacy option and listed as "English (Official)" in the tracklist. The new subtitles have had the same things done to them as the v2 subtitles when needed. The ED song translation is also the same as in the v2 subtitles. Considering everything, these new subtitles should present better and hopefully make more sense than the earlier versions. Other than that, let me know if you find any errors, and I’ll get to them as soon as possible. > The v2 subtitles are the same official ones from EG's upload I used in the v1 but with slight new improvements on top of the retiming and various clean-up done for the first one. I noticed that multiple lines were unnecessarily split and were missing commas a lot of the time, so I went over things again and, this being another Tomino work, mainly did what I did with the subtitles for *Ideon: Be Invoked*. The timing was tweaked again for a decent amount of lines to help readability, italics and a couple of missing lines were added from the PGS subtitles, and I also fixed a few other new errors I caught this time. The typesetting I'd done for the title sign and ED I kept the same. > > In addition to the above, the ED song now has a new translation taken from the US BD script. The old (v1) translation is still included in the Signs & Songs track for anyone who might prefer it. ### Extras As a pretty cool extra, I’ve included here from my [1988 Mini CD](https://www.discogs.com/release/1368722-TM-Network-Beyond-The-Time) the original, full-length single version of the ending song, “Beyond The Time” by TM Network. As far as I know, this is the only version of the song that does *not* fade out during the end section and instead lasts an additional 40 seconds longer. The same single version on the CCA soundtrack album fades out, as does the *Carol, A Day In A Girl's Life 1991* album version. Fading out a song when it really doesn't need it is something that baffles me, especially in cases such as this where you're essentially losing out on the "full experience" because the mixing engineer / producer / whoever decided it'd be a good idea. It might be reaching a bit, but you could say that this outro getting faded out is in the same vein as when Mark Knopfler's legendary guitar solo in "Sultans Of Swing" received the fade-out treatment on Vertigo's original CD pressings of the *Dire Straits* album, which was just mad. Anyways, the Mini CD single had the song itself plus an instrumental mix which I’ve also included. And finally, to top it off, I ripped the album version from the original 1988 JP CD pressing of *Carol, A Day In A Girl’s Life 1991*. This album version, despite fading out at the end, is interesting because of how different it sounds from the single version (it's also called the "expanded version" on the album itself for whatever reason). ### Comparisons [**Japanese 2.0**](https://slow.pics/c/zaGqLtGE) | [**Video**](https://slow.pics/c/J09fBs0o) (Because the 2008 JP BD is [windowboxed](https://i.imgur.com/ArHKLa8.png), the screenshots of it were taken while zoomed-in in mpv by 0.70 with spline36 enabled for scaling.) [Additional screenshots of the Japanese 4.1, 5.1, and English 5.1 tracks.](https://slow.pics/c/vH3tG4jm) ### Specifics Video: 1. 2018 JP BD Remux (1920x1080, 23.976 fps) Audio: 1. Japanese 2.0 Dolby Surround FLAC (1990 JP LD) [WPR] (default) 2. Japanese 4.1 FLAC (2018 JP BD) 3. Japanese 5.1 FLAC (2016 US BD) 4. English 5.1 FLAC (2016 US BD) Subtitles: 1. Signs And Songs 2. English (MechLovin) (default) 3. English (Official) 4. English PGS (2016 US BD) [MediaInfo](https://pastebin.com/raw/0UT4Wkss)