comparison can be found here, “Judgment v3” filtered and encoded from “TS WOWOW”.

it has been like 7 years since the last release and ~5 years since i started the grain re-construction work on this. this release has all the filtering from the previous v2 (sans the ones that aren’t necessary anymore) + some improvements:

• use of a proper TV stream instead of a re-encode of the pre-encoded source
• reconstructed grain
• improved stabilisation especially the extreme cases on/around scene changes
• rework of colour and range correction
• properly removed logo
• inclusion of the original stereo mixes as new default (there are some issues with mixing on the surround tracks, like missing sound effects)
• japanese 5.1 track from a new TrueHD source, some fixed/added missing sound sound effects
• inclusion of english commentary
• some minor sub fixes

though this isn’t the ‘holy grail’ of gits releases. the new source is overall cleaner, i could properly IVTC it, it has a lot less severe problems, but it does lose some minor dark details in a few specific scenes. re-constructing the grain did bring a a few problems itself, eg the grain can obfuscate some details since they appear less pronounced. not everything could properly be re-constructed so i had to add some grain in specific scenes or on specific level ranges, to make everything blend properly and to have a somewhat consistent look. on the bright side, this is most likely a lot closer to the original intend than before.

also thanks to all the contributors and supporters, sadly i lost my list with all the names.

anyway, there will most likely a v4 someday (maybe in a decade lol) with:

• new subtitles (i have a new completely reworked translation but it needs heavy editing, anyone interested?)
• re-create the look of the BD/DVD (eg colours/proper colour grading)

the changes from the previous release mostly still apply:

first of all i thank the_E_y_Es for his help. he spotted and marked lot of spots for me, which i could fix in return.

this is a re-encode of my original release, since the source/MPEG2 stream is not available anymore. this is a huge improvement over the original video and as before a lot better than the BD source.

this encode is not completely issue free and perfect. not all of the MPEG2/WMV artifacts could be fixed completely without damaging other areas of the video. the video is still quite dirty in places and not all spots have been fixed. tbh one could probably sit on this for an eternity and won’t be able to fix them all.

Video:

• Several 1000 frames (severely damaged by MPEG2/WMV artifacts) were restored (per frame)
• Several 100.000 spots on several 10.000 of frames were removed and fixed (per frame)
• Frames edges were fixed (per scene)
• Remnants of the Logo have been removed
• Colour and range correction have been made (red/yellow tints etc.) (per scene)
• Some combing remnants were fixed
• Heavy sharpening artifacts were removed as good as possible (ringing/haloing)
• Chroma bleeding has been fixed
• Everything was cleaned up to remove encoding artifacts
• Everything was stabilised
• Banding was removed (per scene)
• Frames were matched to the BD source (audio matches properly now)

Audio:

• Japanese audio: Sourced from a DTS-HD MA track
• Japanese audio: Cut to make it properly sync with the video (bad mastering, BD audio wasn’t in sync on the BD)
• Japanese audio: A missing dialogue line was added
• Japanese audio: The original Japanese ending theme was re-inserted (U2’s “One Minute Warning” replaced with “Reincarnation”)
• English audio: Sourced from the 6.1 DTS-ES track instead of the UK BD’s DTS-HD MA track because of severe mastering problems, same problems on the US DTS stream
• English audio: Problems were missing sound effects and bad mixing (more infos here and here)

Subtitle:

• The opening Sign was redone
• Song lyrics were added
• Dialogue styling was adjusted
• Some lines were fixed

for some history of the several stages of my filtering you can look at these two comparisons.