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Angry Spirited Away Fans Strike Back
peter_gzowski writes "Anime News Network is reporting that, 'The Japanese consumers in the Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures of Japan have filed a lawsuit against Walt Disney Japan over the red tint on the Japanese DVD release of Spirited Away.' Japanese consumers who purchased the Spirited Away DVD were very disappointed when they discovered a red tint to the film. A hundred thousand consumers complained, but Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan (a subsidiary of Walt Disney) pretended nothing was wrong with the disc. The original source of news of the suit can be found (in Japanese) at Mainichi. No response from Disney yet."
Does this say something about Buena Vista, Disney, the Japanese, or what?
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Apart from the other arguments, this suddenly reminded me of something I read when I was a kid. Apparently, according to the article, a lot of japanese have more sensitive eyes than most europeans (caucasian, white etc, this is not meant as a racist comment) and can detect subtle differences in hues of a colour that others don't. The article talked about japanese pearl divers being able to see subtle off-whites in the pearls and seperate them according to quality.
The point is: Are Disney's people in Japan mostly beefy white Americans? Is it possible that they literaly can't see the red tint in the DVD?
I've had a similar experience once when designing a website, and a guy from marketing kept wanting fucking wierd oranges and other strange hues until we discovered that he was colourblind.
The text of the quoted letter does not seem to bear out your statement. That's misleading. There was no claim in the letter that nothing was wrong.
Display histogram of this picture (I used Gimp but any program should work).
Then, have a look at the unified histogram values of the picture and the red one: they are almost identical !
Another thing to do is to decompose the image in order to see the strength of each component. You will see that the red is very very very strong compared to other (look at the [to be supposed] white and green leafs).
A desaturation make the image flat and ugly because there are too much red. It is like if the image had have been badly normalized because normalization do nothing.
There is no doubt that the color components are badly balanced. At least in this picture.
People with Brown eyes(on average) are less sensitive to flicker than people with blue or green eyes by about 5-10hz. (not sure about grey eyes).
The internet's a bit lacking on information, so here's some info on colour sensitivity...
Sensitivity to Color:
Different areas of human eyes have different sensitivity to color. For example, the eye is not sensitive to color at the periphery. It is only possible to discriminate between colors only +_60 of the straight head position. The color awareness range is about 90 to the straight head position. The eye is least sensitive to red, green, and yellow at the periphery. Thus when designing interface for large screen, blue would make a good background color.
The front of the eyes is more sensitive to red, green, and yellow. If we put small blue objects on the screen, which will usually be in the front of the eye, these objects will tend to disappear form the screen.
Discernment of color differences:
Eye is also least sensitive to changes in the shades of blue. It is very sensitive to changes in the shades of red. Eye is sensitive to the differences between colors in various degrees and the discernment of color differences is not uniform across the spectrum.
The eyes need to refocus for the colors, which are not near on the spectrum. Thus it would be difficult (tiring) for human eye to focus if red and blue are placed together.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The early CIE eye tristimulus models (the figures for spectral sensitivities of the eye's red, green, and blue detectors used in the CIE standard colour spaces) are still based on a very small sample of people. I beleve the first standards were based on only 17 people, all white, male Europeans. Even now, I think most standards are based on a sample of a little over four hundred people.
Why? Well, you cannot easily measure the tristimulus directly, so you have to get each of your subjects to match a lot of colours to characterise their eye's sensitivity over the whole spectrum. Then each person has a different yellow spot on their eye - the size and the density can vary quite a bit - so there is a fair amount of natural scatter. The case for natural tetrachromats claims the women's eye red response is bimodal, but when you see the tristimulus functions plotted out, it is really hard to see the evidence for it.
We do not have to rely on western figures. The Japanese had independently worked on colour science. The Ishihara who did the eye test patterns (he hand-painted the first ones using watercolours) did some measurements. But, again the populations measured were fairly small.
On the other hand, we know that the ability to remember and perceive colours is greatly affected by experience, and even the words used to describe colours. Tests on Bornean tribesmen that had separate words for yellowish-green (Wor) and bluish-green (Nol) were relatively better at remembering and distinguishing contrasts between these two colours then some other pairs of colours that the rest of us would find more easy. Now Japanese uses 'akai' for bright red paint, but also for skin colour (usually in connection with emotions), and brown shoe colour. Brown is usually 'chairo', which is 'tea-colour' but they also use 'kitsune-iro' (fox color) and 'tsuchi-iro' (earth-colour). If we are familiar with tomato red, brown, ochre, and brick red, we are bound to respond to colours and colour contrasts differently, but this does not mean we see them differently.
So, are Eastern and Western eyes different? The figures we have would suggest that you would not be able to identify the race of a person by their eye response - we are much more alike then we are different. If we measured a few tens of thousands of people, we might be able to drag some systematic difference out of the noise. But I don't think we could tell whether it was a genetic difference of a cultural difference, even then.
The pink cast on the DVD is much bigger than these differences. It's clearly an error. The suppliers ought to have offered a replacement DVD. Next time, they might. Give 'em hell, fellas, gambatte kudasai!
The fact that our eyes can barely detect color in our peripherary vision is not common sense to most people.. we assume that we can see color in our peripherary because it "seems" that we retain that color information.
But try this: tell your friend to bring an object from the left or right of you, deep in your periphary vision, and tell him to move it up and down, and come less and less deep in your peripherary vision.. tell him to stop when you can see the movement out of the corner of your eye. I'm willing to bet that you can't tell what color it is (at this point I've had my brain fool me by thinking it's definitely one color, when it turns out to be somehting totatlly different).
Your figure (127'000) is probably quite an accurate count for the number of people rushing through Tokyos Shinjuku station at any given second.
(For those who haven't experienced it yet, Shinjuku is the worlds busiest subway station with some 68 entrances or exits and on 7 or so levels ...)
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Yeah, but now imagine that the company that supplied that tape had been informed six months ago that the same problem occurred in all its products, and still refused to do jack shit about it.
They're not after the money for themselves (hell, 10000 yen doesn't buy a hell of a lot in Japan - the FotR DVD special edition goes for around 8000 yen here), but rather to prevent Buena Vista or other companies from pulling the same trick again.
you're BASOLUTELY RIGHT, of course - everything should be colour corrected for display with Rec. 702 colour gamut and primaries - if they DIDN'T do this then they were neglecting their professional responsibilities. I have to say that the Disney DVDs that I've seen have been of good overall quality, so this does surprise me rather.
That was classic intercourse!
Whether you like Disney or not, you have to admit that for many decades they were a quality brand. This showed up in many ways. They have been far more punctilious than other studios about preserving their films (sure, it's paid off in endless re-releases, but it's still a "quality" move).
Richard Schickel, in "The Disney Version," says that even in the forties Disney kept a tight rein on Disney-character-merchandise licensees. Many parents have observed that--whether or not you think the stuff is any good, anything with Mickey Mouse on it has always been durable and well-made. (In the seventies when the kids were little the "word" was that "that Winnie-the-Pooh stuff (from Sears) wears like iron.")
The theme parks are, or used to be, so well maintained that after a day in one you started to ache for the sight of mashed chewing-gum or a candy wrapper. Perfect paint jobs on all the rides, painted scenery in the rides with dozens of subtle pastels like the background paintings in a classic Disney cartoon...
And the home videos were always of good quality, too. Not that you noticed it much--it's the sort of thing that you don't notice unless there's a problem.
This is very, very strange. It doesn't sound like Disney at all. They used to be very careful stewards of their brand.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The green tint in The Matrix is on purpose. On the scenes 'outside' the matrix (on the good ship Nebuchedanezzersp? ) aren't off.
Well, the balls of rice that the girl on the right are holding should definitely be white.
My question though is "are the consumer's televisions" balanced correctly?
I was amazed when I got a the Avia video calibration disk at how much red was in my televisions by default. It seems that TV manufacturers make them more red by default so that display models will look good under store lighting. But when you get it home you don't look at it under store lighting and so you need to adjust things back to NTSC standards. (I can't speak for PAL, sorry Europe)
Anyway, movies from my DVDs look a lot better now that the color has been adjusted. Blacks are black, whites are whiter, and color balance is near perfect. My TV (57" Widescreen Sony) allows for multiple color settings as well. So I have one for Lights Out watching and one for when the lights are on in the room. Makes a big difference.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Guess things were working better than I expected. The disk seems OK when I use a normal DVD player, but the colors are not the same when I run it through my hollywood+ card/mini-itx box.... I have been banging my head against the wall when it looks like my TV/DVD may be auto-correcting this tint all along.
/me bangs head against the wall and starts mumbling about 'normals' and picking a poor reference CD
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Anyway, I had heard that there was a slight red tint before I got the disc, but HOLY COW was it noticeable. I don't buy for a second that it was intentional, for two reasons:
1) The "balanced for Plasma and LCD screens" excuse is bullshit. If Plasma and LCD screens displayed a different white balance or color gamut than CRTs, then no one would want them. I'm tempted to make an unaltered DVD-R of the film and take it over to the Fry's and try it out on their big Plasma TVs, but I know what the outcome would be.
2) The "we wanted a warmer look for the film" excuse doesn't fly, either. This is because even the Studio Ghibli logo at the beginning of the feature is way off. The other six Ghibli DVDs I have all have the same, pure blue Ghibli logo at the beginning. This one was more of a coral color; it's clearly a different color. After adjusting the color balance in the rest of the film back to Earth standards, surprise -- the logo looked normal.
So, in case anybody else is as much of a freak, here's how I corrected the color on my copy, using TMPGEnc:
Using TMPGEnc's "Custom Color Correction":
RGB Brightness (0, 28, 46)
RGB Contrast (0, 71, 134)
RGB Contrast 0 base (-10, 0, 0)
Basic Setting (0, 0, -10, 0, 0)
YUV Saturation (18)
That gets the picture very close to the original, as compared to the non-red-shifted trailer included on the Spirited Away DVD and Kiki's Delivery Service DVD.
Hey, there's another thought: maybe there's nothing wrong with the color -- maybe we're all just moving away from the TV really fast.
I wonder whether the lawsuit will do anything for non-Japanese residents...