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Answerman - What Does It Cost To Remaster A Classic Anime?

There are some old 16mm shows that desperately need new scans. Sailor Moon is an obvious example. Look what happened when they tried to upscale that ancient 2003 remaster. The movies (shot on 35mm) did get new scans though from the original negatives, and look fantastic. Toei has to still have the original film for the TV show. They're just too lazy to do a new scan.

PurpleWarrior13 wrote:

There are some old 16mm shows that desperately need new scans. Sailor Moon is an obvious example. Look what happened when they tried to upscale that ancient 2003 remaster. The movies (shot on 35mm) did get new scans though from the original negatives, and look fantastic. Toei has to still have the original film for the TV show. They're just too lazy to do a new scan.

Pretty much this, when the 90s Laserdisc releases looks better than later formats, you know it's a problem.

Comparison: https://twitter.com/renren0718/status/877065902755205121

Digital scans are typically billed by footage -- literally the number of feet of film that's being scanned. This can be a little tricky to figure out, but generally 100 feet is about 2 minutes 45 seconds of footage for 35mm, and 1 minute 40 seconds for 16mm. That means that a standard TV episode would be around 800 feet of 16mm film, and a 90-minute feature would be around 8,100 feet of 35mm film. Costs vary wildly by lab; a typical 2K 35mm film scan would cost $0.25 - 0.40 per foot for 2K ($2,025-3,240 for a 90-minute feature) and $0.50 - 0.60 for 4K ($4,050 - $4,860 for a 90-minute feature). 16mm is low-resolution enough that most labs won't bother with 4K, but 2K would cost around the same per foot as 35mm (coming out to $240-320 per episode).

All of this adds up to quite a bit of cash: US$5,000 and up for a feature, and $1,700 and up for a TV episode. You can see how for a very long series, the costs would quickly become overwhelming. This is why many content owners decide to just upscale the standard definition masters if they're decent

Old film has a tendency to really produce some unexpected color, and it simply must be adjusted to bring the image into line with what people expect to see on a modern HD television. Vintage Kodak film stocks in particular are notorious for colors that fade unevenly after decades of storage, eventually causing every color but red to fade away entirely.

Color fading is an issue because of the introduction of Kodak’s Eastmancolor in 1950. Eastmancolor was a huge deal at the time because it used a single strip of film rather than the three separate film rolls required to create a Technicolor print. 1950s Eastmancolor prints were probably gorgeous when they were first screened, but since the dyes were unstable, most of us have only seen them as magenta.

It was not until the late 1970s that filmmakers became widely aware that their works were fading and raised the alarm. At the forefront of color preservation efforts was Martin Scorsese, who famously said that he shot Raging Bull (1980) in black and white “to avoid the color problem entirely.”

Finally, audio needs to be digitized and resynchronized to the final video. Sometimes this is a cinch: just capture the old master tape, line it up, and export. But often far more needs to be done: perhaps the tape has stretched and no longer synchronizes. Or maybe it has drop-outs that need to be patched from something. Maybe the only audio source that could be found was an old film optical track that sounds terrible and needs major sonic restoration applied. You never know what you're getting 'till you start working. Audio restoration isn't cheap either.