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Answerman - Why Can't Some Older Anime Be Remastered?


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NBlaze53



Joined: 17 Dec 2016
Posts: 27
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:57 am Reply with quote
ParkerALx wrote:
Hardcore Dragon Ball fans in Japan have actually collected the show's original broadcast audio using old TV recordings. Whether it ever makes its way onto an official release is yet to be seen. Toei has allegedly declined the fan-sourced audio at least once in the past. Samples have made their way onto YouTube, though.

I won't say where but the Broadcast audio recently leaked online, someone released it matched up with the Japanese Dragon Box footage. All 291 episodes plus both TV specials.
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MarshalBanana



Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5296
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 4:21 am Reply with quote
sputn1k wrote:
Studios also do not keep the original cels for long, as the celluloid rots very quickly and takes up too much space in storage.
I don't know exactly when this happened, but Cels are no longer made of celluloid, but instead cellulose acetate. Presumably as they last longer.
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Just Passing Through



Joined: 04 Apr 2011
Posts: 276
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 5:34 am Reply with quote
writerpatrick wrote:

It's particularly noticeable in the way the video quality of the HD classic Star Trek episodes are better than those of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. The original series used film while TNG used tape.


The Next Generation Blu-rays would beg to differ. They were mastered from the original film negatives, and the effects work recreated and recompositied in HD.

The funny thing about all that fuzzy looking television from the late eighties early nineties, especially the hour long dramas, is that they were all shot on film. They were edited, and with sci-fi, the effects work completed on video for easy distribution to the networks. But the raw footage is all on film. Where there is a budget and a will, and the film still exists, we now get those shows on Blu-ray in full, or partial HD (with up-scaled effects composited with HD live-action film elements). Hence A-Team, Magnum, Knight RIder, Airwolf, Quantum Leap, The X Files and the like all coming out on Blu-ray now.

The clue is often in the crappy NTSC DVDs. I've watched fuzzy looking shows like Due South and LA Law on DVD, often put together from whatever second or third generation video tape could be scavenged from a network or network affiliate (occasionally with ad bumpers left in), and suddenly through the video fuzz, there is a film artefact like a scratch, or a cigarette burn on the print.

Ironically it is British television which suffers the most from a lack of foresight, as far fewer UK shows were ever shot on film (usually just the shows with a lot of location elements like the ITC action dramas of the sixties), and most of the shows were shot directly on video.

But don't look to digital as the solution to our future proofing woes, as the upgrade and obsolescence cycle for digital formats, media, storage and playback, especially for raw footage is twenty times faster than analogue's move from film to video. The machines and software that might have created the effects for Babylon 5, say, no longer exist, digital storage is only as robust as the medium it is stored on, and ironically the best way to protect movies and TV being made now might be to preserve it as analogue film.

There was a project in the 1980s in the UK to create a digital Domesday book on the 1000th anniversary of the original, cataloguing the state of the nation at that time. It would be recorded digitally to last just as long. Well, we still have the original Domesday book, but the digital Domesday book was recorded on laser disc, to be played on proprietary hardware that connected solely to a BBC B computer, with proprietary software. It didn't last 10 years.
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Lord Starfish



Joined: 25 Nov 2014
Posts: 154
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 8:00 am Reply with quote
Just Passing Through wrote:
writerpatrick wrote:

It's particularly noticeable in the way the video quality of the HD classic Star Trek episodes are better than those of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. The original series used film while TNG used tape.


The Next Generation Blu-rays would beg to differ. They were mastered from the original film negatives, and the effects work recreated and recompositied in HD.

I was about to say that. I have several of those TNG Blu-rays and while they might not be perfect, the care and effort that went into restoring the entire show from the original raw recordings, while keeping it as close to the original experience as possible (ergo, they only replaced things if they absolutely had to, like how a few exterior shots of the Enterprise couldn't be found so they had to redo them in CGI, but even then they were careful to preserve the framing and lighting of the original shots as closely as possible) is admirable. There were a few instances here and there where they couldn't find the original negative for a certain shot and had to upscale from the broadcast tapes, and those few moments are extremely obvious, but this accounts for less than ten minutes total in the entire show.

I understand that this kind of effort is far from cost-effective, and I seem to recall hearing that Paramount actually lost money on the whole thing, but the TNG HD restoration still to me is a prime example of what I wish most restorations of old shows would be. I may not have watched the show as a kid, but whenever I want to watch any kind of movie or TV-series, I typically want to see them as they were originally made, and so the lengths they went to to recreate the show as accurately as possible in HD are very much appreciated.
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor


Joined: 25 Oct 2003
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 11:52 am Reply with quote
And then there was the case of the Macross Plus film canister being used as an ashtray (at this point last night I lost my original version of this post while discovering that the MangaUK podcasts are all gone from iTunes):
https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/2012/10/22/festivals-and-preserving-film/
https://schoolgirlmilkycrisis.com/2012/07/11/booth-usher/ (see also the comments)

MarshalBanana wrote:
Awhile ago there was something about how the BBC had to take a lot of their old film stock and remove it somewhere as the film it was shot on, turned out to be highly explosive.

That wasn't an issue with Doctor Who as it was recorded on magnetic tape and was simply recorded over.
It was an issue with a lot of old Japanese hentai (I had linked the source video yesterday but on this machine my results are filtered..) which has been made available for the first time ever recently when someone with a basement full of materials seized by the censors decades ago watched Inglourious Basterds and realised they were sitting on a bomb made of porn...

MarshalBanana wrote:
sputn1k wrote:
Studios also do not keep the original cels for long, as the celluloid rots very quickly and takes up too much space in storage.
I don't know exactly when this happened, but Cels are no longer made of celluloid, but instead cellulose acetate. Presumably as they last longer.

I've also heard about cells being "washed" and re-used, up until they became too cloudy.
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DeTroyes



Joined: 30 May 2016
Posts: 520
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 4:10 pm Reply with quote
Armor Hunter Mellowlink is another of the older shows with lost masters. Apparently they were destroyed in a fire at the post-production facility sometime in the early 1990s, and subsequent releases of the series have all come from the LaserDisc master.

At least three episodes of the original Astro Boy are still lost, as are almost the entirety of another Tezuka series, Big X. But stuff keeps turning up, sometimes in the most unlikely of places, so there's always the possibility more episodes will find their way back. One can hope.
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peno



Joined: 06 Jul 2016
Posts: 349
PostPosted: Tue Jul 18, 2017 6:01 pm Reply with quote
Speaking of this, is it possible that 4K Media lost sound effect track for Yu-Gi-Oh? The Czech dub of Yu-Gi-Oh from this year (believe it or not, the series was never released in Czech before) only contains music and dub voices. I wonder if it's the fault of dub studio, or if the dub studio simply did not get the right track. Seeing how this is their only dub I've heard, that has this problem, I tend to think the latter is the case. Some episodes are also in mono, not stereo as it should be, but this is most likely the studio problem, since I also noticed this in some of their other dubs, like Degrassi or Monster Allergy. Monster Allergy is especailly bad in this, BTW, switching between mono and stereo many times during episode. So, I think the mono/stereo is dub studio problem, but the missing sound effects, I don't think so.
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TiredGamer



Joined: 11 Mar 2004
Posts: 246
Location: Florida
PostPosted: Wed Jul 19, 2017 1:45 am Reply with quote
Lord Starfish wrote:
I understand that this kind of effort is far from cost-effective, and I seem to recall hearing that Paramount actually lost money on the whole thing, but the TNG HD restoration still to me is a prime example of what I wish most restorations of old shows would be.


You heard right, CBS lost a ton of money on the Next Generation remaster. If something like Star Trek can't make money back on a huge restoration, it makes the reticence of anime companies a little more understandable.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 4:19 am Reply with quote
Since there are a lot of remasters and versions released, it can be hard to know which is the original unaltered TV/theatrical version. The reason why this is an issue because that version is the one that people could use freely when it becomes public domain.
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Alan45
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Joined: 25 Aug 2010
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Location: Virginia
PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 7:48 am Reply with quote
@Kadmos1

By the time current anime becomes public domain it will not matter. The only people interested will be scholars, museum employees and a few enthusiasts.

Even if you assume that the current seventy year period remains unchanged (which I would not bet on), we already have people claiming that ten year old anime is "too old" to watch. Tape is already old enough to fall apart. I expect DVDs and Blurays likely will not last that long. Regardless only specialists will still have the hardware necessary to play them. Even if you could play them, people will wonder why you would want to see something that isn't a thee dimensional holograph.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 11:07 am Reply with quote
Alan45 wrote:

Even if you assume that the current seventy year period remains unchanged (which I would not bet on), we already have people claiming that ten year old anime is "too old" to watch. Tape is already old enough to fall apart. I expect DVDs and Blurays likely will not last that long. Regardless only specialists will still have the hardware necessary to play them. Even if you could play them, people will wonder why you would want to see something that isn't a thee dimensional holograph.


If anything, I'd bet the 70-year period will get even longer (at least in the United States). You can't have perpetual copyright, but you can keep lobbying again and again to extend the period.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 10:36 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon, look up "perpetual copyright" on Wikipedia:
Quote:
Perpetual copyright can refer to a copyright without a finite term, or to a copyright whose finite term is perpetually extended. Perpetual copyright in the former sense is highly uncommon, as the current laws of all countries with copyright statutes set a standard limit on the duration, based either on the date of creation/publication, or on the date of the creator's death.

The 1st example is quite common with that stupid thing that is the Berne Convention. Also, even trademarking a name acts as a perpetual copyright. That violates the spirit/letter of the Copyright Clause of the Constitution. Even though a 200-year copyright is still technically limited, by practical purposes it is infinite.
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Alan45
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Joined: 25 Aug 2010
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 21, 2017 7:08 am Reply with quote
Kadmos1 wrote:
Quote:
That violates the spirit/letter of the Copyright Clause of the Constitution.


That is just your interpretation. Nothing passed by Congress and signed into law violates the Constitution unless/until the Supreme Court says it does. To the extent that it has been tested, current copyright law has been upheld by the courts. If you want to continue beating your head against the brick wall of copyright law, that is up to you. All you will get out of it is a headache though.

My point is that even under current law, by the time current anime falls into the public domain very few will care, which is part of the intention of the law. Both technology and public preferences in entertainment are moving too rapidly. The pace of change is, if anything, accelerating.
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