Macross F vol 1 Blu-ray outsells DVD

[Buster Darkwings]

http://life.oricon.co.jp/56899/full/

The BD sold 22,000 copies in the past week, while the DVD sold 18,000 despite BV shipping more copies of the latter.

I see a flood of new title announcements coming soon in Japan.

[Buster Darkwings]

And for those who can't figure out the chart, MacF's 1st week sales have also far exceeded those of Jumper (9000 discs), The Golden Compass (5,000), and Enchanted (5,000) which were also recently released on BD in Japan.

[Quarkboy]

Heh, I coulda told ya that just from the display at yodabashi camera last week (sans hard numbers, anyway).

The real question is, is that it? How steeply will they drop off? Did it actually effect PS3 sales as well?

22,000 is great, even for DVD sales, but it's still not close to the 100,000 or so DVDs that the new NGE movie has sold. If Macross can get up then into the 50,000 range, then it becomes a real game changer.

People also have to keep in mind that the blu-ray only cost about 15% more than the DVD... the markup isn't as bad as it is in the US.

[Buster Darkwings]

22,000 is great, even for DVD sales, but it's still not close to the 100,000 or so DVDs that the new NGE movie has sold. If Macross can get up then into the 50,000 range, then it becomes a real game changer.

It seems that anime releases generally sell around 50% of their total sales in their first week. How much did Eva 1.01 sell in this period?

People also have to keep in mind that the blu-ray only cost about 15% more than the DVD... the markup isn't as bad as it is in the US.

I don't think so. Catalog releases might be a lot more expensive than the DVD, but new releases are generally $30 MSRP (or sometimes $35 if it's a 2-disc special edition) on DVD while the Blu-ray is $35 or $40.

[Fencedude]

22,000 is great, even for DVD sales, but it's still not close to the 100,000 or so DVDs that the new NGE movie has sold. If Macross can get up then into the 50,000 range, then it becomes a real game changer.


Its a total of 37,000 units sold though, which is REALLY good for an anime TV series, in fact if it can keep up those numbers it'll be where the number 2 selling anime last year was, more or less.

Also, you can't really compare a movie with a TV series in terms of sales, its not particularly fair or apt...

[Westlo]

This is according to Oricon.. Oricon seem to do things slightly differently.. according to the link that announced the 55k shipped for dvd with 45k shipped for blueray the 3 Macross Frontier singles as well the ost had sold the following. Oricon figures in brackets... (oricon figures are about a week old, haven't had the time to check for this weeks sales)

OST = 190k (134k)
Triangler = 120k (84k)
DC/Don't Be Late = 120k (95k)
Interstellar Flight = 90k (52k)

This was the same with the Triangler single, a thread on jpopmusic.com for it at one stage had "50k Oricon, 70k Billboard" in the topic name. Anyone able to explain this?

Anyway back onto the main topic, 40,000 copies combined is amazingly good for an animated tv series. If I combined the blueray and dvd figures together the top 5 single volumes sold this year according to Oricon would look like...

2008/01/25 42,415 Gundam 00 Vol. 1 (Two episodes)
2008/07/25 40,000 Macross F Vol 1 (Two versions of Episode 1)
2008/02/22 35,359 Gundam 00 Vol. 2 (Four episodes)
2008/03/25 32,856 Gundam 00 Vol. 3 (Four episodes)
2008/04/25 30,722 Gundam 00 Vol. 4 (Four episodes)

Last years would be.

2007/01/26 62,527 Code Geass Vol. 01 (One episode)
2007/02/23 52,702 Code Geass Vol. 02 (Three episodes)
2007/03/23 47,710 Code Geass Vol. 03 (Three episodes)
2007/01/26 44,899 Haruhi Vol. 7 Limited Edition (One episode)
2007/04/25 43,106 Code Geass Vol. 04 (Three episodes)

[Danime]

Not that I have any idea about the facts, but I would assume they collect the data at different stages, i.e number of items shipped to the wholesaler, number of items shipped to the retailer, exact number of items sold from the retailer, digital downloads, etc.

[Njr Scrawl]

Maybe it will encourage a DYRL BR release, which I want more than all Frontier together!

[Ingraman]

Maybe it will encourage a DYRL BR release, which I want more than all Frontier together!

I bought DYRL on DVD when it was first released several years ago, and decided to skip the remastered DVD in favour of a presumed BD release at some point in the future. I hope that it gets announced soon.

As annoyed as I am that it doesn't have subtitles, I am one of the many buyers of the Frontier v1 BD, and I'll probably buy at least the next couple of them. I'm still trying to decide upon Gundam 00; maybe I'm hoping to hear something from Bandai about a US BD release to go with the eventual DVDs.

[Njr Scrawl]

I've got my MacF BR today. It has the Honneamise label. No region code. There are 2 tracks, apparently. Case pack-ins include a little sheet of small stickers & a booklet covering the history, episode 01 versions & characters + mecha (incl line drawing) designs. There are also background & art gallery pages.

I hope there will be an official AoD review for Mac F. Reviewers (& anyone else) can always get fansubbed versions for translation online to make appreciation & appraisal of each volume easier.

[Skywise]

There won't be. Fansub "translations" are also not an option as we're a legit site.

[Westlo]

Anyone know what the second week sales were? The DVD version stayed at #3 for anime dvds in its second week.

[Njr Scrawl]

There won't be. Fansub "translations" are also not an option as we're a legit site.

So for BR policy, AoD will only review those with English subtitles &/or dialogue? :depressed:

[Skywise]

Except in very special cases, yes. You have to remember that the reviewers have to understand Japanese, which I don't believe any of them do at the moment.

[hissatsu]

Does anyone have sales figures for the second week for Macross Frontier Vol. 1? It stayed at the #3 spot for DVD sales, but knowing what the actual sales numbers for DVD & Blu-ray were would be more interesting.

[Ashyukun]

I finally got around to watching my copy of this. It looked every bit as good as I'd hoped it would. The character animation did look a bit out of place at points though- particularly when Ranka was stumbling around in the forest. The background (tree roots and grass) looked stunning and detailed while Ranka looked overly simply drawn.

[Quarkboy]

I also watched mine on my big TV and unfortunately noticed many very small flaws.

If you look carefully on pretty much any CG scene you can see pixelization artifacts on textures and some shimmering when fine detail scales. It seems like Japan still has a long way to go before they can really produce 1080p quality animation for TV. This would look flawless at 720p I think, but at the full 1080 on my 42 inch TV there are flaws. Tiny flaws that I shouldn't care about, I suppose, though.

No problems with encoding except for a bit of banding that was probably in the original.

[Danime]

I also watched mine on my big TV and unfortunately noticed many very small flaws.

If you look carefully on pretty much any CG scene you can see pixelization artifacts on textures and some shimmering when fine detail scales. It seems like Japan still has a long way to go before they can really produce 1080p quality animation for TV. This would look flawless at 720p I think, but at the full 1080 on my 42 inch TV there are flaws. Tiny flaws that I shouldn't care about, I suppose, though.

No problems with encoding except for a bit of banding that was probably in the original.

So you're saying that's a problem in the animation? Not something that can be fixed by a re-encode? That kind of sucks, but something I probably won't be looking out for : P

[Ashyukun]

I also watched mine on my big TV and unfortunately noticed many very small flaws.

If you look carefully on pretty much any CG scene you can see pixelization artifacts on textures and some shimmering when fine detail scales. It seems like Japan still has a long way to go before they can really produce 1080p quality animation for TV. This would look flawless at 720p I think, but at the full 1080 on my 42 inch TV there are flaws. Tiny flaws that I shouldn't care about, I suppose, though.

No problems with encoding except for a bit of banding that was probably in the original.
I was watching mine on a 40" 1080p set. In the approach scene at the beginning where Sheryl's ship is flying over the Frontier fleet I noticed some shimmering on the small lights on the edges of the ships- but I couldn't tell whether or not that was intentional or a flaw.

Still, flaws and issues and all, it still looks decidedly better than the broadcast HD encodes that I've seen so far. Unfortunately, I'm probably not going to be picking up the rest of it unless I either get a lot better at Japanese or come up with a really good video idea using it... it's beautiful to watch, but I like being able to understand what's being said at the same time. :P

[Skywise]

That's the thing about HD though - it'll hopefully push animation studios to better quality animation to compensate. Ultimately this can only be a good thing in the long run.

[zipCode]

Aliasing has been a problem with most of digital japanese animation. The aliasing is everywhere, characters, cg, but more noticeable on the cg due to the motion. By the looks of it, it's animated in 720p, which of course doesn't help.

[Skywise]

What aliasing?

[zipCode]

Was a reply to the talk about the shimmering people complain about.

[Pyocola]

There definitely is a lot of variance to it, it's not as easy as just a question of whether it's animated at 1080p or not. Some scenes may be 720p, in others the 3D rendering/compositing is poor, in some the backgrounds may be full HD but not the character animation, or the line-art might not have been drawn with sufficient anti-aliasing, yet other scenes are bobbed from 1080i etc. etc.

The biggest problem I'm guessing is the fact that there is often so much outsourcing and so many different studios collaborating, all probably with their own techniques, software and workflow that it would be very difficult for everything to look uniform.