I have odd and ecclectic tastes in anime. And I have a soft spot for magical girl shows. Miracle Girls is one of my favorites. I like it because it doesn't follow the typical "monster of the week" format. You might even argue that it isn't a magical girl show as much as it is a slice-of-life with psychic powers. In some ways its more like Kimagure Orange Road in its treatment of psychic powers. But KOR always irritated me, because the psychic powers in that show were mostly used for dumb plot devices and "comedic" effect. I feel like MG integrates it a lot better.
So far as I am concerned, this show has all the makings of a real winner. It covers a wide range of emotional ground, and it has a great soundtrack. It might have been a ratings winner, but there was one little problem: It was the direct timeslot competitor to the original Sailor Moon. Whoops. As such, it is a largely forgotten series that has never been reissued on DVD. The laserdics are rather rare. I spent over a decade looking for them, and when I found them, I paid dearly. Now, everyone gets to enjoy!
This was captured before and encoded in h263. I think I managed to improve things while modernizing to h264. The LDs had a moderate case of jittering, which I was able to compensate for. However, the jitter filter sometimes causes other issues - specifically, it sometimes has trouble with walking and running sequences. I had to splice up episode 7 and stitch it back together because I noticed such issues. There might be other cases where I missed - there will probably be a little bit of black bars at the top and/or bottom of the screen that temporarily appear that I missed. If anyone notices that, say something please, and I'll do an errata release at the end.
In addition to the jitter this series uses a lot of fine gradiant shading. Additionally, the original source is unusually noisy, so I had to turn my denoising filter up a notch. These factors led to a lot of banding issues. I introduced a new filter to the mix, Gradfun3, to correct this, and it seems to have done a decent job of it.
I plan to release this in three parts: 1-16, 17-32, 33-51.
Raw max bitrate DVD included for archival purposes.