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Answerman - How Was Anime Retouched for Television In The Old Days?

Video Toaster was also one of the big go-to's back in the 90's since it was a lot more affordable and incorporated LightWave 3D for CGI animation. Even a number of fansubbers used it.

Guile wrote:

I dunno. The paint job hides the horrible anatomical incorrectness of the original. I mean, seriously, human legs and waists don't work that way.

You never seen a woman dressed in the time of tight corsettes mate? Also female pelvises tend to be wider than males. If there is any error in the one on the left it is the width of the thys.

DiC's Sailor Moon actually had very little video retouching. They usually just cut problematic scenes altogether. Whenever a shot DID have some manipulation, such as the front of Serena's school, they would just take a still frame, paint the new words on top of the kanji, and use and recycle that ONE still frame any time they needed an establishing shot of Crossroads Junior High. For the most part, DiC kept the kanji in the background. The breast lines in the transformations were removed, but I want to say they sent those sequences back to Toei themselves, or had them specially edited by someone else. Then there were those cheesy CGI scene transitions, but that's not quite the same thing, same with whenever they retimed the animation for whatever reason.

I recall some older Toonami interviews/the Edit List columns mentioning a software called Inferno they used for the visual edits.

PurpleWarrior13 wrote:

DiC's Sailor Moon actually had very little video retouching. They usually just cut problematic scenes altogether. Whenever a shot DID have some manipulation, such as the front of Serena's school, they would just take a still frame, paint the new words on top of the kanji, and use and recycle that ONE still frame any time they needed an establishing shot of Crossroads Junior High. For the most part, DiC kept the kanji in the background. The breast lines in the transformations were removed, but I want to say they sent those sequences back to Toei themselves, or had them specially edited by someone else. Then there were those cheesy CGI scene transitions, but that's not quite the same thing, same with whenever they retimed the animation for whatever reason.

Actually they did have qutie a bit of retouching in the transformation scenes. DiC digitally airbrushed over all the transformation scenes of the Sailor Soldiers to remove all the bodylines to make them look less naked.

Ahh! Toonami's edit of Tenchi Muyo. I don't think Toonami will ever live that down.

The early days of 4Kids Pokemon were just like that. Most instances of video editing were painfully obvious. I've never even seen the Japanese version, but I can STILL easily point out exactly when something was edited. Of course, by the time they got to Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece, they had a more advanced software. I wanna say for Yu-Gi-Oh!, they even had access to the original animation files, and could manipulate the lip flaps, etc.

In addition to Lil' Goku's Lil'-Goku having to be
retouched, I remember seeing some episodes of DBZ having to blur, or "digitally cloud" non-battle scenes where the villain would pound on a good character like Krillin or Lil' Gohan with actual onscreen connecting punches.
(Since fantasy martial-arts is allowed on US children's television, but not any violence toward kids, or actual real-world contact of hitting people which could be imitated.)

would just paint over the problem areas. I have a Sailor Moon cel where the hair coloration was incorrect, so they just slapped another layer on top of the cel with the correct color.