- 1080p -
Audio Track 1 (Default): English 2.0 FLAC
Audio Track 2: Japanese 2.0 FLAC

Subtitle Track 1 (Default): English Signs & Songs (.ASS)
Subtitle Track 2: English Dialogue [UTW modified] (.ASS)

Dual-audio remux featuring my own 1080p encodes and modified UTW subtitles. I tweaked the timing of the OP/ED karaoke to be more consistent with fades and scenechanges in the video, restyled the dialogue, reworked some of the TS, removed the 'TS notes' (I thought they looked horrendous and usually didn't add much to the scene) and fixed a couple more errors and scenebleeds that UTW left. I was also able to add italics for all kinds of dialogue that needed it (TV, phone talk, internal thoughts, et cetera) thanks to the extensive work my friend basheer_naimi provided.

Similar to Deanzel's release, I opted to use the English 2.0 LPCM 16bit tracks from the UKBD, rather than the AC-3 192kbps ones from the USBD. Everything was synced and encoded to FLAC in Audacity.

Video-wise, Fate/Zero is a bit of a doozy. The BDMV contains an outrageous amount of film grain (the most I've ever seen in an anime BDMV), resulting in astronomically high bitrates when attempting to encode it. Episode 15 is particularly brutal. At first I was just going to make a remux using the very best 1080p encodes I could find (which, after a lot of downloading and comparing, turned out to be the 86.4 GB release from Salender-Raws), but upon closer inspection I noticed the encodes suffer from heavy discolorization compared to the BDMV due to very strong chroma denoising. There's also the complete lack of debanding that made me shy away from Salender-Raws. The second best was mawen1250, but the luma denoising was far stronger than Salender-Raws and there was plenty of artifacting and detail loss from a lack of video bitrate.

And so, I had no choice but to do my own encodes. The heavy amount of film grain makes for an extremely sensitive source, so I stuck with adaptive BM3D denoising and only targeted bright areas to ensure minimal detail loss. Other filtering includes rescaling, insaneAA, anti-aliasing, some chroma denoising, debanding and dehaloing. 1080p credits, signs and logos were all manually excluded from filters that would otherwise damage them. I experimented a couple of hours with x265 but ultimately wasn't satisfied with the results, so I stuck with x264. Downscaling to 855p didn't look very good either. Perhaps in a few years from now I'll re-do these encodes with AV1, as I do think 96 GB for 25 episodes is pushing it (although interestingly enough, x264 still reported a lot of these episodes as not being transparent). If you want smaller files that offer the same quality, I'm afraid you're out of luck. Any other 1080p release out there is noticeably worse, and there's not many (if any) great native resolution encodes to choose from, let alone x265/AV1 ones.

This release wouldn't have been possible without Moodkiller, so big thanks to him for allowing me to encode these episodes with his rig.

Enjoy!