Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid (Blu-ray)
Movie - 4.5
Fans familiar with the FMP! franchise should know what to expect. But for those who don't, Full Metal Panic! (yes the exclamation always goes at the end every time outside of Fumoffu), is a series based on said light novels following the adventures of.. well, a lot of people. Sousuke Sagara is the main character: a soldier since childhood, 17 to the present day of these stories, and is an officer of the special-ops/military mercenary police group known as Mithril. At one point or another, he had to infiltrate a high school to serve as bodyguard for a girl named Kaname Chidori who is a person of interest to a lot of shady organizations for reasons I won't go to spoil. In performing his duty, though, a lot of the franchise's charm comes from many different angles. To this day, there are 3 different series in the following order: Full Metal Panic!, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, and Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid. FMP! is a mix of action, comedy, drama, mecha,...
Digitally Remastered and Packaged in a New Smaller Boxset
Funimation has taken one of its most well respected mecha franchises and decided to give it digital remastering treatment for an upcoming Complete Series box set release.
Coming in at a total runtime of 320 minutes, Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid (TSR) The Complete Series spans 3-discs packaged in a pair of thin packs within a nice cardboard outer slipcase. As with the previous release, the set comes complete with the TSR OVA, Episode 000, 7-part featurette (scouting in Hong Kong), textless songs and a crop of Funimation anime trailers.
Language options are quite thorough with English (Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround or original broadcast Stereo) and Japanese (Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround or original broadcast Stereo) with the option of running English subtitles below either language track choice.
The program wears an appropriate TV 14 rating due to some violent sequences, themes of conflict, and a bit of non-suggestive female (incestual) nudity...
In addition to being upscaled from SD, the opening animation is not encoded properly and frames are dropped.
While it still looks good (much better than the highly compressed DVDs that have tons of blocking artifacts), this show was originally animated in SD resolution and was upscaled for Blu-ray (it's still worth buying if you don't already have the DVDs or are bothered by their compression artifacts).
What's more, it was encoded at 1080p24 despite the opening animation being animated at 30 frames per second. This means that while the main show animation is fine, the opening appears choppy on Blu-ray compared to the DVDs. The movement is not as smooth since frames are missing.
Since 1080p30 is not supported by Blu-ray, the opening would need to be encoded at 1080i in order to show all 30 of the frames per second. Since it's not possible to have the opening at 1080i and the rest of the show at 1080p, they could either encode all of the show at 1080i (like the Japanese Blu-ray release), or encode the show at 1080p while encoding the creditless opening in the extras...
Click to Editorial Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment