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Top Gun
Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4575
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 Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 8:15 pm
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| residentgrigo wrote: | | Let´s be honest though. It´s the 4 to 3 format that is going to 100% kill these shows, Bebop, Batman TAS and so on for audiences who didn´t grow up with knowing such a format. You could throw all your resources into upgrading the picture quality here but no teen or young adult who comes into my library would ever continue watching these if they randomly showed up in a new Youtube window. These might as well be black and white silent films to them... It hurts but that´s how the cookie crumbles. |
I've seen people claim this, but I've yet to hear any hard evidence supporting it. I mean hell, this is the generation that grew up not learning how to turn their damn phones horizontally while taking a video, so if anything they're more used to extreme pillarboxing than us old types ever were.  Plus, if you're a good parent and properly raise your kid with a healthy dose of classic cartoons, they won't mind it at all.
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Tylerr
Joined: 13 Nov 2010
Posts: 475
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Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 11:23 pm
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| residentgrigo wrote: | | Let´s be honest though. It´s the 4 to 3 format that is going to 100% kill these shows, Bebop, Batman TAS and so on for audiences who didn´t grow up with knowing such a format. You could throw all your resources into upgrading the picture quality here but no teen or young adult who comes into my library would ever continue watching these if they randomly showed up in a new Youtube window. These might as well be black and white silent films to them... It hurts but that´s how the cookie crumbles.
Buffy or The Wire tried to fake 16 to 9 conversions recently by working of the original footage but purists don´t want those either and basically no one will be left happy no matter what you do. |
why would it kill it? They could simply zoom in to get the 16:9 just like they did in the old days.
if the kids aren't turned off by the old art styles and animation then i doubt they'd even notice.
personally i can't stand black bars, i'll stretch the picture to get rid of them. Faces look weird but i get used to it quickly.
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PlatinumHawke
Joined: 02 Nov 2006
Posts: 204
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 12:04 am
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| Zalis116 wrote: | | That would fall into the "old enough that it was originally shot on film and could be rescanned in HD" category. It's stuff from roughly 2000-2006 that falls into that SD digipaint doughnut hole . |
Amusingly Escaflowne was new enough to have more than a few digital effects and textures added in. Ao whenever those scenes show up they're sourced from tape masters rather than film... and the image quality drops sharply.
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Jadeliger
Joined: 23 Jul 2016
Posts: 5
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 1:24 am
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If an animation studio kept the original assets (the original art files the animators drew) for a digipaint show and still had the original software, could they re-render the show at a higher resolution?
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Zin5ki
Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:11 am
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| Takkun4343 wrote: | | Have you ever checked to see if changing the video options on the player is possible? I had interlacing problems with my Guyver and Please Teacher DVDs whenever I played them in VLC, but after turning deinterlacing on, both are perfectly watchable. |
That seems to be one of VLC's saving graces. It has its own share of filters as well, if I recall correctly.
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varmintx
Joined: 31 Jul 2006
Posts: 1200
Location: Covington, KY
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:22 am
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| katscradle wrote: | | Digipaint is why I haven't re-purchased some older shows from this time frame on BD even though they were re-released. How good could they really look to make it worth it? |
Well, the better codecs used for BDs make for a lot less macroblocking and other anomalies. But, video is only half the product. The lossless audio can often be a pretty vast improvement over the DVD's Dolby Digital offering.
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fuuma_monou
Joined: 26 Dec 2005
Posts: 1817
Location: Quezon City, Philippines
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:31 am
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| Jadeliger wrote: | | If an animation studio kept the original assets (the original art files the animators drew) for a digipaint show and still had the original software, could they re-render the show at a higher resolution? |
IIRC, that's how we got an HD remaster of Gurren Lagann.
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chronos02
Joined: 25 Feb 2009
Posts: 267
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 4:58 am
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| Jadeliger wrote: | | If an animation studio kept the original assets (the original art files the animators drew) for a digipaint show and still had the original software, could they re-render the show at a higher resolution? |
That depends on quite a few factors. When creating a shot, there are very many elements in the frame window which are saved in the "original", but these were almost always meant to be used for an ouput of SD or below-SD quality (576p to 360p), so the source files didn't have all that much resolution, and I suspect many to have used 800x600 formating that was later on "cut" when outputing the final render. So you'd end up having a bunch of layers like in photoshop, each with a specific resolution, but all matching the square in which the frame had to be shot, and I believe in the early 2000s there wasn't a lot of control on wether these layers were pixel accurate or simply scaled from lower resolutions to fit the frame, after all, the ouput would be downscaled to SD standards, so artifacts popping from overscaling would most likely disappear, or go unnoticed in the TVs back then.
What this means is... you might be able to get a meaningful higher resolution frame if the source materials used in the composition are above SD standards, so rendering a 720p image might work. It also helps that most elements in the composition are separate, so applying a modern filter to upscale them might work fine, but it depends on that source material, if it's a non-composite source, it will probably look good, if it's not, it might look bad (composite as in being made of different source assets).
In the end, though, the only way to get a good HD render of early 2000 shows is it go to the very source materials used in the composition and rework them to be in HD, this can be done using upscaling algorithms, but not every source material allows this, and in the end, the amount of work that it'd require is no joke, and as of now, it's probably better to simply redo the entire show than to remaster the source files. Also, more modern systems simply allow to update those source files and the program used for composition will simply be updated and the shot can be redone without much effort, but for older shows, they'd need to manually readd all the elements into a new composition, trying to be as similar to the other as possible, and that could drive anyone mad...
However, we're in luck, science keeps progressing, and new upscaling filters will appear that upscale SD images to 1080p, making them look as if they were originally shot at that resolution. There are already some that work very well, but they're not compatible with every kind of scene, color, and/or "camera speed", so we'd better wait tightly for these new advancements to come to us, instead of buying subpar BD remasters that look like a blurry mess. You better keep those old DVDs and VHS-to-DVD recordings, they might just get an incredible boost in a few years.
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Kalessin
Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 931
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:07 am
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| Jadeliger wrote: | | If an animation studio kept the original assets (the original art files the animators drew) for a digipaint show and still had the original software, could they re-render the show at a higher resolution? |
That would depend on how the images were generated. If you're dealing with something where the computer is generating the image from information that it's given, then you could just tell it to regenerate the images at a higher resolution - but that's how you get computer generated images, not your typical animation (though elements of it may be generated that way), and shows aren't normally fully computer generated - especially in the digipaint era. As I understand it, most of the stuff is essentially drawn by hand - just with using a computer (either with a mouse or with a pen with something like a wacom tablet), and in that case, you're not really rendering anything. You're just taking that image and displaying it at a given resolution (though some effects may be rendered on top of the hand drawn stuff). And odds are, they're normally going to draw to the resolution that they're going to be displaying it at, because doing more than that would be a waste of time and resources (especially if you had no idea that HD is going to be a thing in several years). And if they draw to the resolution that's being displayed at, then there won't be any additional information to be gained by going back to the originals (though presumably, you could get rid of the interlacing cleanly by going back to the originals, since they're obviously not drawing the images interlaced in the first place).
Now, if they ever draw the images at a higher resolution than the target resolution, then going back to the original materials would mean being able to get more detail, but I don't know how common that is, and I don't know how common it is to even have the original materials anymore. Certainly, given the fact that they clearly have all kinds of issues when releasing digipaint shows on Blu-ray, it doesn't seem like they have the original materials anymore in most cases - or that they don't think that it's worth the cost to go back to the original materials to create the show again vs simply upscaling the video that was created from the original materials.
If they do have the original materials though, and it's a show where they really want to make it look good on HD, then presumably, they could always upscale what they have and then increase the detail, but that obviously entails doing a fair bit of redrawing that I expect most studios wouldn't do even if they could, because it likely wouldn't be worth the money. It wouldn't surprise me if that's some of what happened with a show like Gundam Seed where they somehow redid it as HD rather than simply upscaling it, but I don't know what they did or how much more HD the result really is (I haven't seen the HD version yet), and studios simply aren't going to go to that kind of effort for most shows.
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MarshalBanana
Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5316
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:34 am
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| Quote: | | Rather than the old fashioned way of drawing animation on paper, tracing it onto acetate cels |
You mean photocopying it on acetate cels, tracing hasn't been done since the 60s.
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MarshalBanana
Joined: 31 Aug 2014
Posts: 5316
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 5:38 am
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| PlatinumHawke wrote: |
| Zalis116 wrote: | | That would fall into the "old enough that it was originally shot on film and could be rescanned in HD" category. It's stuff from roughly 2000-2006 that falls into that SD digipaint doughnut hole . |
Amusingly Escaflowne was new enough to have more than a few digital effects and textures added in. Ao whenever those scenes show up they're sourced from tape masters rather than film... and the image quality drops sharply. |
I have wondered how those cel animated shows from the 90s, that had digital effects and/or CGI were stored. Were they put back onto film or kept as a digital file. I'm re-watching Cowboy Bebop at the moment, and there are a handful of digital effects and the odd 3D model on every 3 or 3 episodes. And that is just the noticeable ones.
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Top Gun
Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4575
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 7:32 am
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Re: re-rendering original assets at a higher resolution, I'm reminded of what South Park did with its earlier seasons when releasing them on Blu-ray and for HD broadcasts. Because Matt Stone and Trey Parker were digital packrats, they kept all of the original digital animation materials, including files for now-obsolete software. As a result they were able to go back and re-render everything from scratch, and the new HD renders actually contained more visible elements that had been cut off in the show's original aspect ratio. It was really an absolute best-case scenario.
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FLCLGainax
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 11:54 am
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I'm guessing digi-paint anime from this era done for theatrical release (like 'Spirited Away') would fall into the same category as cel-produced anime, as it was outputted to film?
Did Ghibli save the original files for 'Spirited Away' and 'My Neighbors the Yamadas' or are all HD transfers taken from 35mm?
I ask, because apparently Disney saved the original CAPS files to their early '90s digipaint films (like 'Beauty and The Beast' and 'Aladdin') and whether Ghibli was doing the same or not regarding their own output.
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danpmss
Joined: 30 May 2015
Posts: 763
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 2:56 pm
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| fuuma_monou wrote: |
| Jadeliger wrote: | | If an animation studio kept the original assets (the original art files the animators drew) for a digipaint show and still had the original software, could they re-render the show at a higher resolution? |
IIRC, that's how we got an HD remaster of Gurren Lagann. |
And also Gundam SEED / SEED Destiny.
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katscradle
Joined: 05 Jan 2013
Posts: 469
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Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2017 3:08 pm
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| varmintx wrote: |
| katscradle wrote: | | Digipaint is why I haven't re-purchased some older shows from this time frame on BD even though they were re-released. How good could they really look to make it worth it? |
Well, the better codecs used for BDs make for a lot less macroblocking and other anomalies. But, video is only half the product. The lossless audio can often be a pretty vast improvement over the DVD's Dolby Digital offering. |
Thanks. Maybe I'll try to upgrade eventually. Though I should probably revisit a few series in the first place to see if I even care anymore.
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