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Recently, Sentai Filmworks had a sale, and I thought of buying The Garden of Words and Children who Chase Lost Voices on DVD/Blu-Ray. I did some research, and from what I gathered, Sentai Filmworks tend to offer lower quality anime translations (e.g. video quality) at a cheaper price. Given that these are Makoto Shinkai Films, I would expect the quality to remain the same, but does anyone have any way of verifying this claim?

It's my first time directly buying a DVD from an anime distributor, so I'm not sure if Sentai Filmworks is reputable in terms of their video quality when porting over anime from Japan.

Aki Tanaka
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BestQualityVacuum
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    What problems are you concerned about in terms of the translation? Things like a literal translation versus a more accessible translation? Or things like typos and other outright errors? – Ross Ridge Apr 17 '17 at 19:56
  • Sorry, when I meant translation, I was referring to the video quality and not necessarily the translation of the script. I heard that at times with porting over anime, there are some issues with the quality of the video. – BestQualityVacuum Apr 17 '17 at 19:59
  • You might want to look for specific reviews of the movies you're interested. They often mention the quality of the video, especially if there are any problems. I wouldn't expect any problems though, the only way to save money by intentionally lowering the quality when authoring a DVD or BluRay is to turn up the compression so it fits on fewer discs, but that shouldn't be an issue for movies that will fit on a single disc regardless. – Ross Ridge Apr 17 '17 at 20:18
  • You should ask about this on Reddit's anime-related subreddits. Perhaps there's one for Makoto Shinkai's works specifically. They'd know about these things. – Hakase Apr 17 '17 at 20:23
  • For various reasons, anime pirates tend to be the most knowledgable figures outside the anime industry when it comes to questions of video quality. I will try to dredge up some particular sources later, but in brief: Sentai releases are generally known to have poor video quality and typesetting. I don't know if that holds true for the specific ones you're interested in. – senshin Apr 17 '17 at 22:47
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    @RossRidge Supposedly, there is somewhat widespread incompetence in the anime localization industry when it comes to video encoding, leading to noticeable variation in video quality among different releases of the same content. One concrete example I'm aware of is that the Italian release of _Madoka_ was reportedly encoded from the masters with markedly higher quality than the Japanese releases themselves. – senshin Apr 17 '17 at 22:52
  • Seems Sentai Filmworks "acknowledged" the issue on their [official Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/SentaiFilmworks/posts/809664172394030): "*An English audio track takes up a lot of space on a Blu-ray disk, [...] degradation of quality.*" (I only omitted the text to show the relation, not to misguide the reader. Read the source for their factual news). However, it seems it depends on the series itself. – Aki Tanaka Jul 01 '17 at 12:59

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