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Answerman - Why Do Colors Look Different In Remastered Classic Anime?

When Saint Seiya got that terrible upscale for the BD release, what bothered me even more than the DNR and the outline-darkening filter was the fact that they didn't bother color-correcting the first 28 episodes or so, which are filled with green skies that are obviously not supposed to look like that, especially if you compare them to the original cels or even the broadcast masters.

Eh.....This is wrong. "Correct" is very simply however the artist intended it to be. You correctly state later that they might not remember how they wanted it to be, but I also think you underestimate people's memory when it comes to stuff like this.

Yep, that's what I meant. I was under the impression that PAL generally can show a wider variety of color more distinctly than NTSC, but I'm not entirely certain about how. I was curious if that affected their authoring process in some unique way, what with the materials coming from a place meant to broadcast in NTSC.

Now I'm curious what sort of wrinkles related to color could come up after converting into PAL.

Broadcast TV shows during the analog era were, for the most part, not susceptible to these issues because of SMPTE bars and tone. When a production company would produce a TV series or similar programming they would apply SMPTE to it that would allow a station to sync up their equipment to whatever was sent to them. For the most part unless someone was asleep at their job - possibly not surprising if you had to work the late shift prior to AIR programming going off the air to bars and tone for the night - the major discrepancies were in the TV set & cables themselves the viewer possessed. It's for the most part that if you ask someone how they viewed Cheers or Different Strokes or The Facts of Life it was probably very similar because there was a defined "standard" being sent out by the stations.

Anime in Japan also being NTSC likely had some sort of similar standards to sync to when syndicated at home, however for the US market most all anime productions were never in their original pass or generation. A good deal of anime appeared on the West coast on local stations prior to blocks like Cartoon Network and the syndications & stations used to be doc'ed in the early 90s in Animerica (if I dug out my old boxes of Animerica I could probably jot down exactly what was shown...). Those stations likely couldn't rely on SMPTE for the programs because they already received a pass through a color timer. Most of what those stations were showing were probably already available copies of various anime.

Even some recent anime has it's own pass issues. Prior to the era of modern streaming services and simulcasts many fan sub groups pulled their video direct from Japanese TV broadcasts and would subsequently time, subtitle, and then re-encoded. Even in HD formats incoming anime roughly ~10 years ago was susceptible to grain and issues with color. If you watched a ripped version of say Bakuman or KissXSis (trying to think of circa 2010 shows...) then they would likely have noticeable variances even in a DVD release. Nowadays with digital signals most everything is 100% produced and sent out digitally so discrepancies are only going to exist when the subsequent BD release is touched up and altered (a whole different topic entirely).

Working with older SMPTE is pretty nice though and interesting if anything from a time capsule perspective [I get paid to work with older historical analog formats and put them into digital forms. Literally all eight hours a work day I have some old analog format playing and being encoded to something modern].

I really need to look at the Outlaw Star BD! Love that show. Any new Extras in that release?

And yeah. GSC is one of my favorites. I did the Kickstarter, probably like you did.