Big thanks to the following people:

ghsushsu123 / sus123: help with TS
SomethingRandom: help with TS

Join the Discord! We’re looking for translation checkers and some typesetters for the Ghibli project.

Memories - Enthusiast’s Collected Edition

The best picture quality, Dual audio & Refined subtitles + Extras

Video

This is my kind of “hybrid remux” of the 1995 anthology movie Memories. I’ve used the recently released US BD for the first episode, “Magnetic Rose”, and the 2014 JP BD for both the second episode, “Stink Bomb”, as well as the third episode, “Cannon Fodder”. So, why US BD for Magnetic Rose? As you might know, Magnetic Rose has about 4 minutes worth of digital animation shots throughout the movie, which don’t look very good by today’s standards. The resolution is clearly very low and they’re full of artifacts. For the new US BD, these shots have been restored with an upscaling technology called “AstroRes”. I don’t know exactly how it works, but the results look very nice, especially when you take into consideration that the original resolution of the digital animation might’ve been around as low as 640x360. To better match the film footage, they also colour corrected the restored shots and added some grain to them. I know upscaled stuff isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I see the AstroRes’d cuts here as way more seamless and easily digestible than the unrestored versions.

I don’t think there exists a non-windowboxed master of this movie. The US BD has been zoomed in by the looks of it (less headache for us, yay), and the JP BD is windowboxed. The solution to the windowboxing on the JP BD is to zoom in on the picture in your player. If you’re familiar with my Redline upload, this is the same situation, but with different zoom values. Stink Bomb and Cannon fodder are different sizes in terms of the viewable video, so the required zoom amount also varies between the two. To get Stink Bomb to full screen in mpv and its variants, zoom in by 0.90, and to get Cannon Fodder to full screen, zoom in by 0.99. Then in MPC-HC and its variants, Stink Bomb needs a Pan & Scan zoom of 1.0640 and Cannon Fodder needs one of 1.0720.

Zooming in always means losing some sharpness in the picture, but unless a new master is made, this is the only way to comfortably view these films. Also, to clarify, all the encodes found here on nyaa and on other torrent sites have been zoomed in on by cropping the image. These zooms in mpv and MPC-HC do the same thing, but by using them, no encoding is needed.

I was originally going to use the 2008 JP release for Stink Bomb and Cannon Fodder, but after finding out about the 2014 release and comparing the two, I found the 2014 one to be superior with slightly more detail and less blotchy grain. All the encodes on the other hand look more noticeably worse but don’t take up as much space. DAC’s video has also been heavily degrained so it looks quite different compared to everything else. Something for everyone I guess.

Audio

All the audio for each episode has been taken from the US BD. It had less noise reduction than both of the JP releases and no upsampled tracks like the 96kHz version of the 5.1 mix on the 2014 JP release. The US BD also has a brand new English dub, and this might be the first time I thoroughly enjoyed an English dub of an anime. It is leagues above the shlock dubs most anime get. I highly recommend checking it out, even if you don’t usually watch dubs. As for the tracks themselves, we have the dub in both 2.0ch and 5.1ch mixes and the original Japanese in both 2.0 and 5.1. I tend to generally watch the movie with the 5.1ch mix, but the other tracks are also there for a reason. I recommend sampling all of them and seeing which one works the best for you. The Japanese 2.0 mix is apparently the theatrical mix, so if you’re looking for the original experience, that would be the one to go with.

Subtitles

The subtitles are what I put the most “work” into here. The US BD has a new translation, for which I have retimed all lines, done typesetting when it was worth it, and slight editing in a few places by taking lines from the older translation where I thought they read a bit better. The PGS subs on the BD were pretty poorly timed. Lots of bleeds, no lead-in on a lot of lines, flickering lines (short gaps between lines), etc. I also split lines that had been joined together on the BD that made more sense being apart. Should be a more pleasant viewing experience now.

Of the three episodes, only Stink Bomb had signs worth typesetting. I’m still no expert, but I’d say they blend in decently now. One of the signs I took from Afro’s release, deemed it was nice looking enough, and only added motion tracking to it. If you do not like the modifications I’ve done, I’ve included ToishY’s subtitles as well, which use the old translation and don’t have any modified signs.

Let me know if you find anything wrong with the subs, audio or video. I went through everything a couple of times and fixed as much as I could, so you shouldn’t come across any huge issues. But, this being my first release of this calibre, there’re bound to be things I overlooked. I’ll happily do a v2 if there’s something that merits it.

Extras

We also have two nice extras! “Special Video Preview”: A half-hour-long short documentary on Memories from the time of its release, which includes interviews with Katsuhiro Otomo (Cannon Fodder), Koji Morimoto (Magnetic Rose), and Tensai Okamura (Stink Bomb). And the other one is a full Cannon Fodder storyboard comparison video. Someone actually went through the trouble of animating Otomo’s storyboards to match the movement of the final film. People are crazy.

Zooming with mpv and MPC-HC

If you’re using regular mpv and don’t know how to edit the default zooming settings, add the following lines to your “input.conf” file:

Ctrl+w add video-zoom 0.001
Ctrl+q add video-zoom -0.001

After adding these lines you’ll be able to control the zooming with CTRL + “w” / “q” in increments of 0.001. Hold down the key to faster reach the desired values. (You can of course replace the keys and values with whatever suits you personally)

For MPC-HC, you can apply the correct zoom by first right-clicking anywhere on the video, then go to the “Pan&Scan” tab and click on “Edit”. Create a new preset and set both zoom values as the desired values. In the case of Stink Bomb, it’d look like this. And that’s it, you’re done. You can now apply the zoom from the Pan&Scan tab whenever you want.

Comparisons

Additional comparisons between the AstroRes’d versions and the unrestored versions of the digital shots in Magnetic Rose

Specifics of this release

Video:

1. JP BD* Remux (1920x1080, 23.976fps) *Magnetic Rose is US BD

Audio:

1. Japanese 2.0 FLAC (USBD)
2. Japanese 5.1 FLAC (USBD) (default)
3. English 2.0 FLAC (USBD)
4. English 5.1 FLAC (USBD)

Subtitles:

1. Signs [hydes] (ass) *Stink Bomb only
2. English (new translation) [hydes] (ass) (default)
3. English (old translation) [ToishY] (ass)

Extras:

1. Special Video Preview (720x480i, 29.970fps, eng subs) 29min
2. Cannon Fodder - Animated Storyboards Comparison (1920x1080, 23.976fps, eng subs) 22min

Full-sized bitrate graphs

- hydes