½           Zhentarim DivX Presents

Title : Neon Genesis Evangelion [Renewal] Director's Cut
Parts : 4
Genre : Action / Sci-Fi
Release Date : December 2004

Feature Length : 25-29 Minutes
Size : 4x350mb
Audio Languages : Japanese 5.1 & english 2.0
Subtitles : English/English for dubtrack (srt) & German (srt)
Audio Encoding : He-Aac for 5.1 & Ogg Vorbis quality 4 for stereo tracks
Video Frame Rate : 23.97 fps
Video Resolution : 704x480 (Displayed in original 4:3 format)
Video Codec : 4-pass DivX 5.2 with single b-frames
Source : R2 NTSC DVD (video) R1 NTSC DVD (English audio)
Ripper : Rayek

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Just what are these Directors cut episodes?

They are extended versions of episodes 21-24.
Each episode has between 2-6 minutes of new scenes added, some quite noticeable, some not.
All in all, they improve the storytelling and flesh out some of the characters more then the original TV episodes.
They also set the stage for End of Evangelion to a greater extent then the originals.

"Which ones should I watch?" Watch these ones. The original 21-24 are quite pointless after these became available.
Since the Eva timeline is as twisted and evil as Anno`s mind, heres the order in how to view the show once and for all:

-Episodes 1-20.
-Director`s cut eps 21-24.
-Episodes 25 & 26.
-End of Evangelion.

What not needed to watch: (As in wont contribute anything to the storyline)

-Death: Was only made to whip up the fanbase before the cinematic release of End of Evangelion.
It is a 1hr recap of episodes 1-24, with some 5 minutes or so of new footage, most of it also in the Directors cut eps.
Completely useless.

-Rebirth: This is just the first 30 or so minutes of End of Eva.
Was attached to Death in order to whip up the fans before the cinematic release of End of Evangelion.
Completely useless once you get End of Eva. (Was never encoded as it was not remastered in the first place, thank God.)

-Old versions of eps 21-24: Who needs these when the DC eps are available?
Was only included in the release because some fanboys surely wouldnt been able to sleep without them.

Same encoding procedure as with the TV eps, except slightly more humane bitrate (yay!) since theyre longer.
People with slow cups might still experience stutter though. And a thing that has been consistant through the whole renewal
project is the annoying "source is perfect film unless things move fast" issue.. some places there was no whole frames at all,
and these directors cut eps was particulary bad, so bad that sometimes frames had to be imported from the tv versions,
sometimes it couldnt be fixed. Retiming of the english audio done using Adobe audition 1.5.

Particulary evil stuff here, as ADV replaced some of the "ok" dub actors in the show with drunk garden gnomes.
This made retiming & listening to the dubtrack a teeth-grinding & hair-loosening affair.
Lets just say the splendid 5.1 original track is soul-saving here.

Subs made mixing some fansubtracks with ADV subs, plus lots of manual typoediting & translation fixing.
Retiming the 1-frame kanji-cutscenes was as usual hellish.

Guess I here at the end can spill that I with porpuse didnt smooth the renewal project as much as I could without killing to much detail,
as you usually can with these new all digital sources. I think Evangelion was one of the very last shows with 100% handdrawn cels,
backgrounds etc. To even smooth the show a tad to much would be herecy.
I decided on a line of noise that unless you watch your anime with your face almost pressed against the monitor should be quite painless.

Thanks to Buso-senshi and to Tachikoma for the fansub & german translation.

Thanks again to Mentar for helping with the subs.

Hopefully I manage to preserve some dignity as I handle the subs for the movies myself..

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