All The Anime Addresses the Gurren Lagann Ultimate Edition Issues

Earlier in the week reports came in that the Ultimate Edition of Gurren Lagann suffered from some rather amsuing but disappointg issues; well today All The Anime have provided an update to these issues so that hopefully everyone knows where they stand.

The first issue was that a wide selection of fans who received the product noticed that the third disc tray was either glued in the wrong place or had fallen off completely; this was down to a manufacturing fault and it seems in order to fix it viewers can either re-glue the disc try onto the card or request a replacement box.

DIGIPACKS:

People are reporting (and we’ve verified with some of our stock here now) – basically what we have established so far (to best of our and Sony’s knowledge) is that the printers did not leave the trays on the Gurren Ultimate digipack to dry long enough when glued – the result being most commonly the third tray is loose.

How printed goods work is this:

We / Sony commission a printer -> Printer produces printed goods -> Sony prints discs and integrates parts. What happened is the initial shipments of goods to the warehouse were also not up to scratch so the glue was likely knocked around even more.

What’s the fix?

We’ve gone ballistic with the printers, as has Sony who are mortified this has happened given the project was a labour of love there too! The end result is that we’ll be issuing replacement digi-packs as soon as possible (I’d expect by end of November latest) that are fixed and to ship them out to anyone impacted at no cost to yourselves.

We’ll be setting up a contact information form in due course over the next week asking for your details to get these out to you if you were impacted by it (which by our estimate is between 40%-50% of units which patently were rushed). Take a photo for now of any impact and we’ll sort that.

Basically if your product seems deffective, with the Glue not holding down the disc tray, then you will be able to request a replacement from All The Anime; however these won’t be available (until the earliest) till the next month. It probably goes without saying that this wasn’t All The Anime’s fault, and that (when discovered) Andrew was furious that so made sets had been effected.

The second issue was that several seconds worth of footage looked terrible, something which we picked up on in our Review, and that the Japanese audio suffered (at times) from low quality issues. Well it turns out that the ‘video’ errors were because the HD footage was replaced with low-quality SD footage – this was in place to fix an out-of-sync audio issue. The Audio issues on the otherhand were due to some decoding issues, something which All The Anime are looking into but finding it hard to replicate in-house.

On-Disc points

Some people have flagged that there are some video issues on episodes 5, 7 and 10 for Gurren Lagann. These issues were flagged in QC – at these points the images froze and the audio continued. We tracked down the reason for this – it was down to the masters we received having the audio but no video at these points.

If you’re curious about them and haven’t noticed them you’ll find them in these points only:

Episode 5: 20:47 – 20:56 (9 seconds, picture here)
Episode 7: 08:29 – 08:42 (13 seconds, picture here)
Episode 10: 17:27 (momentary, picture here)

At these points we made a call – we had to switch in the DVD footage as the best solution since no re-supply was possible in this case. Otherwise, you would have had 9 seconds, 13 seconds and a momentary image freeze with ongoing audio in its place. Not ideal. These are the only instances and as you can tell they are not over any crucial moments, so whilst annoying it doesn’t impact the overall viewing pleasure & quality of watching Team Gurren on your big TV.

Some isolated cases of audio sounding flat on the Japanese 2.0 have also been reported, we’re investigating now but it appears to be a Prologic II issue. While these instances were flagged during QC, the authoring house, ourselves and the majority of QCers couldn’t replicate the issue. However, a deft reviewer did flag a point on ProLogic II decoding that corresponds to what was described.

What’s the fix?

In the video’s case – there is none I’m afraid! It shouldn’t take away from the experience and if it does then we’re very sorry to hear it but there’s little we can do on that front. If it had breached 60 seconds or a manual capture error had occurred on our side then we’d be all over replacing this, but quite simply we can’t do that in this case. It’s a tough one but important to view in the context of the overall viewing experience and the price point of other markets.

So what exactly are All The Anime doing regarding this release? Well basically if you own the Ultimate Edition and your disctrays are falling out you can request a replacement – once they have been made – however regarding the disc issues (such as audio and visual errors) these can not be fixed and replacement discs can not be made. It may sound harsh but these ‘small’ errors dont disrupt the enjoyment of the show; besides bigger mistakes have been made (such as Un Go which doesn’t work on Panasonic Blu-ray Players).

The Gurren Lagann – Ultimate Edition, which contains both the series and movies in a special digipack box, is now available on Blu-ray; meanwhile a Complete Series DVD and Blu-ray set will be released within the coming months.