[The First Slam Dunk](https://myanimelist.net/anime/45649/The_First_Slam_Dunk) **Subtitles**: AnimationNight **Additional timing**: motbob **Additional editing**: motbob **Additional translation**: R1 **Additional TS**: motbob Contains 2.0 and 5.1 audio. You'll have to search out another release if you want the 7.1 Atmos track, sorry. Please leave feedback in the comments, good or bad. Please read this short [playback guide](https://gist.github.com/motbob/754c24d5cd381334bb64b93581781a81) if you want to know how to make the video and subtitles of this release look better. All components of this release are released into the public domain to the [greatest extent possible](https://gist.github.com/motbob/9a85edadca33c7b8a3bb4de23396d510). __________________________________ The First Slam Dunk is basically the most challenging material you could ever encode at a limited bitrate: sharp lines, high motion, and two layers of grain. So it's not a surprise that all of the sources have issues, even the [UHD Blu-Rays](https://slow.pics/c/v3ciraK6). Though it's a bit hard to tell in the comp, the Italian UHD BD appears to have used DNR. If it's a choice between DNR and the Japanese UHD's mosquito noise, I'll take the former. The movie was produced at 1080p SDR, and luckily, converting the UHD disks to a 1080p SDR image is straightforward. There is no HDR content whatsoever except for text elements (overlays, credits). This encode is a descale of the ITA UHD's luma and a downscale of the JPN UHD's chroma. The 1080p official sources are inadequate. Both the JPBD and the USBD were blurred by the authorers to make them easier to encode. [Here](https://slow.pics/c/xUHBU9t6) is a comparison between this encode and the official 1080p Blu-Rays. You can see that although the USBD generally loses terribly (particularly in terms of chroma), it has significantly more grain in comp 14. I just want to note that this isn't a product of me using the DNR'd ITA UHD; both the UHDs [don't seem to retain as much grain](https://slow.pics/c/gxOxJnLb) as the 1080p BD does in static scenes. A 4:4:4 release sourced from the UHDs would look better than this encode due to better colors, but for compatibility reasons—and because it might have doubled the filesize—I didn't go with that. This means that there's a question of whether watching this or the ITA UHD would provide the best experience, but I get the feeling that viewing BT.709 video in a BT.2020 package isn't going to be ideal. Not to mention being stuck with a simple Lanczos2 upscale.