During more recent episodes of Dragon Ball Super, fans have been seeing some notable frame-rate issues during some of the more suspenseful fight scenes, appearing rather choppy in comparison to what was shown to the Japanese audience and subtitled viewers.

Twitter user @Terez27 posted an example of this issue from last week’s episode, Episode 113, showing the Toonami broadcast of Goku’s battle with Caulifa, in comparison to what was shown during the Japanese premiere on Fuji TV as well as the DBS Blu-rays.

In response to the complaints and concerns, Toonami head Jason DeMarco posted on his Twitter on the day following that night’s Toonami broadcast, that they would be looking into the issue.

On Friday, Jason DeMarco explained the situation in a twitter thread that the frame-rate edits were done intentionally by Cartoon Network’s editing department as said scenes failed an industry-wide procedure called the “Harding Test”, which tests TV series for provocative images that could cause harm for those suffering from photosensitive epilepsy, and thus were edited accordingly. While said scenes will still see edits in frame-rate to prevent viewers from having an epileptic episode, Jason has discussed with the editing crew to tone down the edits (to two frames a second, down from one previously) to make said edits less noticeable for viewers.

The full thread has been archived below:

#toonami and #DragonBallSuper fans, an update on last week’s slowdown of action scenes. Here goes: SO. Remember the Pokémon flashing episode that triggered a bunch of epileptic episodes in viewers? Since then, TV networks have something called the “Harding Test.” Every show, commercial, etc is run through this test to make sure it doesn’t have flashing frames that could trigger folks with epilepsy. The last few eps of DBS have had fight scenes that are cut to about one frame per edit in some places- they evidently fail the Harding Test. Our program edit folks, who do these tests, normally just slow the cuts down in these scenes to about four frames per second.

In the case of these DBS eps, it made the fight scenes look insanely slow. Program edit does this routinely, so they didn’t even think to notify us. Thanks to you fans who let me know, we asked program edit if there was any way they could slow these scenes down LESS. So from now on, they will he slowed (if they fail the test) to two frames a second, down from one. We tested it and it looks WAY better. Anyway, that’s the best we can do because obviously, we don’t want to be causing people to have epileptic episodes. Thanks to all of you who let us know what was going on, and hopefully we have nipped the worst of this in the bud for the future. enjoy DBS tomorrow! #onlytoonami