What does "upscale" mean in the Anime world?

[UniSol GR77]

This is important.

For instance, Baldios episodes #30-32-33-34 are upscales and not native HD like the rest of the series and the movie.
Lupin Series 2 (Red Jacket) is upscale as well.
Cyborg 009, Saint Seya and other TOEI series are upscales.

What does that mean? What is the source? Do they use professional and expensive programs to "recreate" the lost visual informations and thus rendering the image an "artificial" HD version of itself? Does it work?

Just wondering. Thank you.

[Pyoko]

There's nothing particularly special about the upscaling itself when it comes to anime. I don't believe there are any "magic" AI algorithms for recreating missing information good enough for production yet, so they use the same interpolation of values as in any other kind of upscaling.

Because animation is much simpler and cleaner what they can do is incorporate various techniques and filters for reducing noise or smoothing outlines much more successfully than with live-action. However too much of this and the effect becomes apparent and detrimental on animation as well, and it doesn't look good when applied to traditional animation sourced from film.

As for the source, there are three distinct cases:

A) If it's a show that was animated digitally they'll have rendered out a master at some specific resolution. They take that low-res master and scale it up to HD. Probably the majority of digital shows are included here, although to various degrees. Some may be upscaled from 720x480, others from 1280x720 or any other resolution. I don't know if it's standard to animate in HD yet, but for a long time it wasn't.

B) For shows animated using cels, the cels would be photographed onto film. The film would then be telecined/captured to standard-definition analog video and saved onto tape. For older shows these tapes would be analog which could then be digitized, for newer shows made in the '90s the tapes may have been digital from the start, but there would often be some conversion to analog video in the chain anyway so the end result would still suffer.

As SD analog video is terrible all around, this is the worst-case scenario and upscaling from such a source is pretty much guaranteed to look awful. Examples include Angel Cop and 3x3 Eyes, and bits and pieces of Outlaw Star where the source film was lost.

C) For the cel-animated shows above, they may have at some point decided to remaster it by doing a new scan or telecine of the film. In most cases this would have been done in HD and thus no need for upscaling, but there was a transitional period where this was done in SD for a number of shows. Although still SD, newer equipment and eschewing the whole analog domain means upscaling from this kind of source will be vastly superior to anything in B. Examples include Galaxy Express 999 and Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

[mysticwaterfall]

In regards to A) above, very few shows are done in native 1080p. Movies yes, shows no. See for instance, this now somewhat old list from 2017: https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comme...m_source=share

Otherwise yeah, I have nothing to add. Most shows are upscales to some degree unless you get lucky with something like Ranma where it's a new scan from the original film.

[jsevakis]

That’s a good synopsis, covers most of the bases. To be honest, the biggest factor as to whether something will upscale well or not, aside from just the general cleanliness of the standard definition video, is whether or not it can be cleanly turned back into 24P (or 30p in the case of a few early digipaint shows). While technically it’s possible to upscale something as interlaced, it pretty much always looks terrible, and a lot of the tricks to clean up the video don’t work very well. Unfortunately a lot of shows used film-to-video transfer equipment that didn’t cleanly line up specific film frames with specific video frames. Those are a disaster, and even if you resort to all sorts of dirty tricks to force it into a modern presentation, half the screen tends to be one frame ahead of the other, and it looks terrible. So there are a lot of older, even digital, masters that are a mess.

Lots of challenges here, and it can be hard to tell from an end user’s perspective.

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by Pyoko

There's nothing particularly special about the upscaling itself when it comes to anime. I don't believe there are any "magic" AI algorithms for recreating missing information good enough for production yet, so they use the same interpolation of values as in any other kind of upscaling.

Because animation is much simpler and cleaner what they can do is incorporate various techniques and filters for reducing noise or smoothing outlines much more successfully than with live-action. However too much of this and the effect becomes apparent and detrimental on animation as well, and it doesn't look good when applied to traditional animation sourced from film.

As for the source, there are three distinct cases:

A) If it's a show that was animated digitally they'll have rendered out a master at some specific resolution. They take that low-res master and scale it up to HD. Probably the majority of digital shows are included here, although to various degrees. Some may be upscaled from 720x480, others from 1280x720 or any other resolution. I don't know if it's standard to animate in HD yet, but for a long time it wasn't.

B) For shows animated using cels, the cels would be photographed onto film. The film would then be telecined/captured to standard-definition analog video and saved onto tape. For older shows these tapes would be analog which could then be digitized, for newer shows made in the '90s the tapes may have been digital from the start, but there would often be some conversion to analog video in the chain anyway so the end result would still suffer.

As SD analog video is terrible all around, this is the worst-case scenario and upscaling from such a source is pretty much guaranteed to look awful. Examples include Angel Cop and 3x3 Eyes, and bits and pieces of Outlaw Star where the source film was lost.

C) For the cel-animated shows above, they may have at some point decided to remaster it by doing a new scan or telecine of the film. In most cases this would have been done in HD and thus no need for upscaling, but there was a transitional period where this was done in SD for a number of shows. Although still SD, newer equipment and eschewing the whole analog domain means upscaling from this kind of source will be vastly superior to anything in B. Examples include Galaxy Express 999 and Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

IMHO, I pretty much think that CASE B is the most frequent one. I don't think they ever go back to the animation cels as CASE C. That would be expensive as hell, right?

That said, some upscaled animes look VERY good. So I don't know. Maybe those "magic" algorithms could exist, after all?

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by UniSol GR77

IMHO, I pretty much think that CASE B is the most frequent one. I don't think they ever go back to the animation cels as CASE C. That would be expensive as hell, right?

That said, some upscaled animes look VERY good. So I don't know. Maybe those "magic" algorithms could exist, after all?

I can't think of a single cel based anime being remastered by using the original animation cels.

What Pyoko means by Case C is that the original film a show was shot on can be re-scanned at a much higher resolution and a new transfer can be created.

[ps3bd_owner]

Originally Posted by professorwho;17679962[B

]I can't think of a single cel based anime being remastered by using the original animation cels.[/B]

What Pyoko means by Case C is that the original film a show was shot on can be re-scanned at a much higher resolution and a new transfer can be created.

That's what fans wish they would do, particularly Dragon Ball fans who only tend to get crappy releases on Blu-ray.

Unfortunately, the Saint Seiya release on Blu-ray is also a pretty mediocre one. If you really care about picture quality, go for the R2J DVDs or the R1 by ADV, but they never completed them (just till episode 060). :-/ I read that the reason ADV canceled was due to Cartoon Network dropping the series or something.

These screenshots are from ADV's release:

[Show spoiler]

P.S. If anyone is thinking about watching Saint Seiya via Netflix, just be aware they used the Blu-rays as their video source so.. yeah.

[Pyoko]

Originally Posted by UniSol GR77

IMHO, I pretty much think that CASE B is the most frequent one. I don't think they ever go back to the animation cels as CASE C. That would be expensive as hell, right?

It's important to separate how the shows were produced and how they end up in HD on the Blu-ray releases. Case B is how pretty much every single cel-based TV/OAV anime was produced at the time, but they would generally keep the original high-quality film stored somewhere, so they could create a new, proper HD master from that if they wanted to. Sometimes the film may be lost (misplaced, trashed, storage fire etc.) and then you're stuck with these poor SD tapes, but most of the time it's just a question of money, as scanning and restoring film costs a whole bunch.

The three cases I listed are only the possible sources for the times when a show is actually upscaled for Blu-ray. The most common case for cel-based shows on Blu-ray is not upscaling at all, meaning they've gone back to the source film and scanned it in HD or better, which is the right way to do it. The SD tapes from Case B have certainly been the source for a number of Blu-rays, but usually only when the rights holder/distributor has been too cheap to do it properly.

Cels are never used to digitize a show, that would be impossible, only the photographed film is used.

[voltz]

The majority of anime before Blu-ray was standard def, so when they remaster a source, they do it by getting the finest scan detail from the same source directly (film grain and all). Even though not high def itself, getting all the detail from film cells on a higher format always does brings an improvement to both the clarity and color grading. Sometimes HD can even be faked to an extent.

VHS and DVD still had their limitations, including being interlaced the entire time and stuck at a much lower quality then the master film.


I've also heard about the original Fist of the North Star being destroyed in a warehouse fire. That's pretty tragic.

[The Collector FX]

Originally Posted by voltz

I've also heard about the original Fist of the North Star being destroyed in a warehouse fire. That's pretty tragic.

What's even more tragic is the sad reality that a lot of film masters that were scanned from cels have either been misplaced or destroyed - both innocently and intentionally. A lot cel sheet anime will never see an HD release. (that doesn't involve a shitty upscale that is)

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by professorwho

What Pyoko means by Case C is that the original film a show was shot on can be re-scanned at a much higher resolution and a new transfer can be created.

Yeah, but we were strictly talking about "upscaling" from SD, not re-scanning at a higher resolution (HD).

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by voltz

I've also heard about the original Fist of the North Star being destroyed in a warehouse fire. That's pretty tragic.

Jesus, do you mean the original series? How?

[UniSol GR77]

I wrote a letter to Production REED, because I suspect that they remastered the series from 35mm original masters, while episodes #30/32/33/34 come from inferior 16mm and they have been incorrectly mistaken as "upscales". They look so fine! It's impossible.

[jsevakis]

LOTS of misinformation in this thread! Let's fix that.

1. No anime ever gets remastered from cels. Ever. The cels were not kept by the studios -- most were thrown away, some were sold or given away.

2. Even if you COULD re-photograph anime from the cels, you wouldn't want to. How the anime was photographed is part of the show and the art of anime, something that you want to preserve.

3. There is zero evidence of any anime being "lost in a fire" -- that's a weird rumor that starts about literally every mildly popular show that doesn't get a re-release in a long time. However, it is true that we are not sure if the "uncut" version of the Fist of the North Star movie still exists, and it's possible that the negative was permanently altered to create the censored version. We are not in a position to know.

4. What determines if something is HD or SD is the way the video is stored. Film is its own thing, and can be scanned to a video signal as either. However, 16mm holds less detail than 35mm, and its effective resolution is closer to SD than HD. The vast majority of anime TV series were shot on 16mm, movies are always 35mm, OVAs could go either way depending on budget. Some shows, including most OVAs, were transferred BEFORE editing (and had some of their film elements lost), making remasters impossible.

5. UniSol_GR77, you're really hung up on Baldios. The TV series was shot on 16mm, those four episodes' film elements have not been found (or had deteriorated badly -- 16mm film stock tends to fade), and so the Blu-ray uses upscales from the old analog SD masters. Pretty simple, really no controversy there.

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by jsevakis

LOTS of misinformation in this thread! Let's fix that.

1. No anime ever gets remastered from cels. Ever. The cels were not kept by the studios -- most were thrown away, some were sold or given away.

2. Even if you COULD re-photograph anime from the cels, you wouldn't want to. How the anime was photographed is part of the show and the art of anime, something that you want to preserve.

3. There is zero evidence of any anime being "lost in a fire" -- that's a weird rumor that starts about literally every mildly popular show that doesn't get a re-release in a long time. However, it is true that we are not sure if the "uncut" version of the Fist of the North Star movie still exists, and it's possible that the negative was permanently altered to create the censored version. We are not in a position to know.

4. What determines if something is HD or SD is the way the video is stored. Film is its own thing, and can be scanned to a video signal as either. However, 16mm holds less detail than 35mm, and its effective resolution is closer to SD than HD. The vast majority of anime TV series were shot on 16mm, movies are always 35mm, OVAs could go either way depending on budget. Some shows, including most OVAs, were transferred BEFORE editing (and had some of their film elements lost), making remasters impossible.

5. UniSol_GR77, you're really hung up on Baldios. The TV series was shot on 16mm, those four episodes' film elements have not been found (or had deteriorated badly -- 16mm film stock tends to fade), and so the Blu-ray uses upscales from the old analog SD masters. Pretty simple, really no controversy there.

Overall: great post. Kudos to you.

Well, I'm a Baldios fan and "expert", that's it.
I agree about the 16mm angle, I'm sure you're right on this. Maybe the film stock for those episodes has been originally re-used for creating the movie, back in 1981, thus it has become unavailable in the aftermath.

[jd213]

You can see the composite artifacts in those last Baldios episodes, they're definitely upscaled. They did do a good IVTC on them, however.

[mysticwaterfall]

Originally Posted by UniSol GR77

Overall: great post. Kudos to you.

Well, I'm a Baldios fan and "expert", that's it.
I agree about the 16mm angle, I'm sure you're right on this. Maybe the film stock for those episodes has been originally re-used for creating the movie, back in 1981, thus it has become unavailable in the aftermath.

If anybody here knows its Justin, he actually does anime blurays. He did KOR for Discotek, for instance.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by voltz

Even though not high def itself, getting all the detail from film cells on a higher format always does brings an improvement to both the clarity and color grading. Sometimes HD can even be faked to an extent.

Film is analogue and doesn't have a resolution. Very good film could probably be scanned in 8K with unimaginable results.

If anime was hand-drawn and shot on film, it's effectively high definition. A 2K or 4K scan then released on Blu-ray would be high definition with nothing fake about it.

[UniSol GR77]

Originally Posted by jd213

You can see the composite artifacts in those last Baldios episodes, they're definitely upscaled. They did do a good IVTC on them, however.

Thanks.