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NEWS: Sentai Filmworks Screens World Premiere of 4K Restoration of Ninja Scroll Anime Film at Berlin

Why did Hidive choosed of all places Berlin, a city in a country where such service doesn't exist, to host a screening event for a movie they own?

Can't wait to see how this 4K UHD restoration will come out and look. I assume this will not have any HDR at all.

I wrote:

Can't wait to see how this 4K UHD restoration will come out and look. I assume this will not have any HDR at all.

Considering the UHD for Macross II is set to have HDR support, it's not out of the question for Ninja Scroll to be graded for HDR too.

I wrote:

Uh, question: what kind of HDR does the JPN 4K UHD BD used, Dolby Vision, or HDR10?

No HDR at all. Someone in the Blu-ray.com forums confirmed they bought the JP BD, but it was SDR. However, that doesn't necessarily mean GKIDS won't try to apply some light grading. Although, to be honest, most 4K HDR cel-animated titles I've personally seen tend to not benefit from HDR that much. And the ones that do get HDR grading, unfortunately, also seem to get DNR'd a lot, so I guess that's the tradeoff: color boost at the sacrifice of grain and detail or vice-versa.

Tony K. wrote:

Although, to be honest, most 4K HDR cel-animated titles I've personally seen tend to not benefit from HDR that much. And the ones that do get HDR grading, unfortunately, also seem to get DNR'd a lot, so I guess that's the tradeoff: color boost at the sacrifice of grain and detail or vice-versa.

I wonder if that is due to cel animation being evenly lit. From my limited knowledge of HDR, I know it is a lot to do with high contrasts between colours and brightness. Cel animation(digipaint to some degree) is either bright or dark, not a mixture of the two in the same frame. So by nature it is extremely low dynamic range.

Yes. HDR is supposed to bring out colors/contrast/blacks, but more so in the sense of natural lighting that was captured on film. However, since a lot of cel-animated works have all that "lighting" baked into the source (literally colored into the frames, unless you start considering the era of digitally drawn stuff), there's not as much natural lighting to actually pull from, and the HDR just ends up accentuating some of the color and/or grain.

But making the grain look more pronounced can overdue the already filmic look, even more so on OLED displays, then possibly lead people to think "why is there so much fuzz on the picture?" Not to mention all that grain adds a crap ton of extra detail and information, hence, taking up more memory on the disc, which then leads to the company having to use a 100GB disc for the product instead of a 66GB one, thus increasing production costs.

But yeah, it's as you said, the dynamic range is low because there just isn't as much contrast in cel-animation versus something like live-action, which has all sorts of lighting elements to account for.

I've actually avoided buying the 4K for Akira (1988) after hearing about how much grain they took out. I even downloaded a pirated rip just to see the end result, didn't even make it past the opening motorcycle scene, deleted the file out of disgust, then just said I'll stick to my old Bandai BD with the supersonic 5.1 mix (which apparently wasn't even correctly ported over in the U.S. UHD).

Ghost in the Shell (1995) looks pretty great. But that's the only cel-animated title I've seen in 4K that actually retained a lot of the grain structure.

Anyway, concerning the Perfect Blue UHD in Japan, they supposedly didn't touch the grain at all and just cleaned up much as they could of everything else (dirt, print damage, stabilization, etc.). People who have seen that version say it looks fantastic. Whenever theater tickets go on sale here in the States, I'm pre-ordering, then scheduling that day off. And hopefully, GKIDS will release that on 4K disc/streaming over here as well.