Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Was Anime Retouched for Television In The Old Days?
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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I recall some older Toonami interviews/the Edit List columns mentioning a software called Inferno they used for the visual edits.
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rizuchan
 Posts: 980 Location: Kansas |
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When I was in middle school, I took a short unit on video production. We recorded something onto VHS, and then edited our video with a strange, tablet-like contraption that plugged into the TV's RCA and used it to overlay text and clipart. I think we saved the changes by just rerecording onto another tape. We never got to try because they were too cheap to actually give us more than one tape...
This was the early 00s, so PC video editing had been around for a while, and I had even done a bit myself, so I found this process baffling. I always wondered if a device like that really was ever used in video editing or if it was basically a toy. The text and pictures were so cheesy, it looked too bad to even be a PBS show from the 80s. |
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FLCLGainax
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The retouching effects in those older bowlderized versions were quite primitive. I got the impression Funimation was still even using a system like that up until the mid-2000's. The paint would "shake".
It seems like Cartoon Network (and earlier Adult Swim) had a large enough budget to do lots of touch up on Tenchi and Rurouni Kenshin. Surprisingly, even Paranoia Agent had a bit done to scenes which could have been easier to just cut. Nowadays, aren't the edited versions shown on Adult Swim done by the distributors (like Aniplex)? |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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Ahh! Toonami's edit of Tenchi Muyo.
 I don't think Toonami will ever live that down.
Paintbox, We had 3 suites of those until almost 2000 when we replaced them with Avids. 
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Brand
 Posts: 1029 |
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Paintbox explains so much of 80s graphic and motion design. It was really interesting to watch that video.
It is also interesting to see something like that be a whole hardware/software combo when today most computers will run Photoshop or After Effects. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2034 |
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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.
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. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1121 Location: Puget Sound |
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In the early 80's my dad worked for a couple of years at a company that used a minicomputer and a dedicated hardware box (that exposed and processed the slides) to produce graphic slides and a control tape... these slides would then be put into an array of slide projectors controlled by a controller with the tape inserted to produce what amounted to a large screen (as much as thirty feet on a side) animated PowerPoint presentation. The demo was a horse running, and it was loud as heck as the projectors with the slides for the legs and heads would cycle back and forth between slides. Setting up at a customer site was a real joy... first you had to make sure you had enough power, and before the PC became ubiquitous few presentation spaces or conference centers had enough outlets or outlets with enough amperage. (Twelve professional grade slide projectors draw more power than you'd think, you could see the slides without dimming the lights much.) Then you had to put the projectors loaded with calibration slides into the projector frame and spend as much sometimes as three or four hours carefully tweaking on little bitty screws to align them all so the presentation slides wouldn't look like crap. Oh, and if we were lucky they had a large enough screen... The box that produced the slides came from Europe, and I don't know what happened there... But here in the US the company went belly up after a couple of years because huge animated presentations were a very new thing, and because they were expensive to create and present there weren't many customers. Overhead projectors were cheap and common and well understood and there were any number of companies that would take your images and make large slides of them for five or ten bucks a slide. Of course nowadays, huge projectors are common and you just show up at the presentation site and plug your laptop into them and project whatever is on the laptop screen - you don't even need any specialized software. You can even use Wordpad if you turn the font size up. (Don't laugh, I've seen it done!) |
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Hypeathon
Posts: 1176 |
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Yeah, these days they are. Funny story, in one of the Toonami Pre-Flight episodes, Jason DeMarco and Gill Austin mentioned how after Outlaw Star standards and practices were done by Cartoon Network. Prior to that show, the Toonami crew at William Street themselves were independently making the calls as to what may have needed to be edited for s&p without any higher-up at Cartoon Network realizing. It wasn't until someone accidentally ran the unedited version of one of the episodes of Outlaw Star (it's wasn't the hot springs one since that never aired in the first place) that someone at Cartoon Network noticed and decided from there on what should be edited for s&p and how. I'm pretty sure no one at Adult Swim cares much if older episodes of Toonami Pre-Flight were presented outside of them since they don't archive their older episodes anyway from what I understand. But just to be safe, I'll just say in quotes, "Jason and Gill discuss Outlaw Star", and leave anyone interested to figure out the rest. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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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.) And as for the "digital bikinis" in CN's Tenchi, I put that down more to the OVA's fault than CN's, for putting all those bathtub boobs in in the first place. It was a bit of a culture shock for those raised on the saner and more responsible Universe series, as was most of the OVA series, and CN was just asking for trouble by going completist. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6280 |
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I believe the episode in question was the episode where Gene and the older McDougal brother meet regarding Gene handing over Melfina. I believe they even did this with an episode of Tenchi Muyo OVA. |
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Lord Dcast
 Posts: 644 Location: 'Straiya |
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Oh my god that voice in the video's Tom Baker.
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Topgunguy
 Posts: 258 |
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Even Ninja Turtles suffered by having Michelangelo's nunchucks removed even though katanas, bo staffs and sais were a-ok.
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Hypeathon
Posts: 1176 |
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There was a 107 Facts about TMNT from Channel Frederator on Youtube in which nunchuks were banned in the U.K I think and that had to do with the apparent removal of Mikey's weapon. Mind you, I'm paraphrasing and I don't remember the details from the top of my head. But I do recall that being brought up. |
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Guile
Posts: 595 |
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Yu-Gi-Oh edits looked pretty bad and obvious. It would just add out of place glowing colors to swords or knives. The biggest stand out is the cards themselves. In the original they look just like the OCG but in the dub they look terrible and photoshopped. Even in modern times with Zexal they are still doing really obvious and terrible paint jobs that look like MS Paint. 
People like to make fun of the invisible guns but honestly that looked better than when they tried to turn them into glowing laser guns or slingshots |
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Covnam
 Posts: 3819 |
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Really? I think they should be proud that they found a way to get it on tv without simply cutting the scenes/episodes or just not showing the series at all. Plenty of people would never have seen Tenchi if not for that. |
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