Some of the still frame overlays do change how those scenes appear to the viewer. While not earth shattering to the story, they do alter how these scenes were intended to be presented by the original Japanese creators. The endings and openings changes are also unfortunate.

"Platinum" edition notes: The ioverlays are not used at all in the most recent "platinum" edition. Soft-subtiles are used for most (if not all) sign translations. The proper endings are used. The final discs will reportedly include both the "Director Cut" versions and the original TV broadcast versions of episodes 21-6.

Different versions: All ADV releases (VHS and DVD) except the most recent DVD releases are based on the original Japanese TV broadcast version of Evangelion and do NOT use the expanded "Director's Cut" episodes 21-24 that are available on LD and DVD in Japan due to licensing issues. Of course, this is not an edit by ADV, but is mentioned here to avoid confusion. All references in this editing report describe changes from the version of Evangelion that aired on Japanese TV.

On the first release of DVD volume 1, ADV used a large number of overlays to translate signs and other on screen Japanese characters. Volumes two through eight of the orignal DVD release do not contain overlays, but they do use hard subs for translations similar to the VHS sub and dub releases.

The overlays are also very crisp and stand out against the softer and grainy original video, especially when the video shakes slight behind the perfectly still overlays.

Some of the worse examples:

• Shinji's door is shown with a note from Misato on it. In the original, this is a panning shot from top to bottom, while the ADV DVD release uses a freeze frame of the altered video to translate the sign into handwritten English.
• Shinji reads a computer message from his classmates. In the original, the camera pans across the text as if he's reading it. In ADV's DVD release, the scene is still and the camera doesn't move until the scene cuts back to the original video.
• A map is redrawn to translate a small piece of text on it. Unfortunately the map is in motion and ADV's attempt to recreate the original animation is very obvious and distracts the viewer.

Some samples of the overlays (when I have time, I will do some screen grabs of the non-overlay VHS version):

In all episodes:

The opening edited out a screen near the end of the opening with Hideki Anno's (the director of Eva) name in large characters on it (probably a ego trip) and replaced it with a blank screen with a smaller directed by credit in English.

Episode 8 (on ADV DVD Volume 2) and Episode 16 (on ADV DVD volume 6):

The ending for episode 8 was tinted red (probably due to this being Asuka's introduction episode) in the original AND in ADV's sub and dub VHS releases. On the second DVD, the ending is the regular blue ending. Since it appears that ADV made an ending with English credits for the DVD release (the sub and dub VHS releases both used the original Kanji credits (see below) followed by a English credit scroll at the end of the tape), there probably wasn't a red version with English credits to use on episode 8 where it belonged.

Also, the original ending for episode 19 was grayscale with pink Kanji credits in the original AND in ADV's sub and dub VHS releases. On the sixth DVD, the ending is the regular blue ending.

Fortunately, they remembered to use the different versions of 'Fly Me to the Moon' that played during the endings. I'm not sure exactly why the original Japanese creators chose to change the endings on these two episodes, but I'm sure they had their reasons and I wish ADV would have respected the original creators decision instead of reusing the same ending on every episode on the DVDs.

The "Platinum" release on DVD restores the red ending credits to episode 8 (and will reportedly use the gray ending for episode 19).

Evangelion Episode 8 ending credits (red animation with white Kanji credits)

Evangelion Episode 19 ending credits (gray animation with pink Kanji credits)