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Answerman - Why Do Colors In Blu-ray Re-Releases Of Classic Anime Look Different?

Quote:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "CORRECT."

If only everyone would realize that this applies to anything that is even somewhat subjective. Far too often people go off the handle and start screaming at everyone else because their opinion does not match who they are talking to. Many people find it so hard to acknowledge that different opinions are a thing and just attack.

I'll think about this the next time I spend half an hour trying to get the color balance on my television "just right".

That statement is outright false, though. There is a such thing as "CORRECT". "CORRECT" is what the original artists decide is "CORRECT". Does it look bad to you? Maybe. But if that's how the person that created it wants it, then it's correct.

Still, I want to believe that the people remastering old anime have a general consensus of what can be accepted as quality visuals. If the people who remastered Cowboy Bebop remembered watching the show in horrible quality in a VHS tape and decided that the remaster version should look similar to that, everyone else should have been mad about it.

What used to amuse me about [adult swim]'s many many replays of Bebop is that their original broadcast tapes seemed to have darkened over the years. I can remember certain scenes in the finale "The Real Folk Blues" that wound up looking like the animation equivalent of filming in a coal mine at midnight.

Along this same topic, one of the things that's always confused me about animation fans is how many have this visceral gut-reaction hatred of DNR processes.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "CORRECT."

Along this same topic, one of the things that's always confused me about animation fans is how many have this visceral gut-reaction hatred of DNR processes. Now I fully understand that it's a technique that can utterly butcher fine background details if done improperly, but at the same time I don't understand the huge love affair so many people have with visible film grain. If it's a matter of "keeping it like it was meant to be seen," then grain is actually an obstacle, because the original animation materials wouldn't have had it in the first place! Unlike live-action film, where the only record of a performance is the recording made of it, animation has actual physical (digital now) materials of everything that you're seeing on-screen. If you go back and look at existing cels, you're seeing the original artwork clear as day, with no grain overlaid on top of it. Given the choice, in an ideal world, that's how I'd like to experience animation.

This topic seems perfect for the upcoming Fruits Basket Blu-ray release.

pinoyfreestyler wrote:

This topic seems perfect for the upcoming Fruits Basket Blu-ray release.

At least that was animated digitally, and shouldn't have this problem.

...which will bring a whole host of other problems once it is to be transferred to Blu-ray, being from the early digi-era. Sometimes you just can't win...

Back in the analog days, Japanese NTSC used a different black level from American NTSC. Engineers in Japan tweaked the IRE level to mimic that of Europe's PAL standard. That's why imported VHS tapes from Japan could look slightly dark on American setups.

It doesn't seem to affect imported digital media (DVDs) as much. However, sometimes a Blu-ray release of the same movie can have the brightness settings turned way up by the American distributor or adjusted totally differently by a Japanese distributor.

Black levels are also nowhere near as set in stone as fans seem to think they are -- Japanese NTSC spec puts it at 10 IRE higher than North American equipment, but in HD some masters follow that spec and some don't. Sometimes American gear is used by Japanese companies, adding effects that hit American black levels while the rest of the show has Japanese black levels. I can't tell you how much pain and headache that causes US distros.

Just how dangerous can this be? With American classic movies and shorts getting these digital restorations, it can be hard to tell which is an unchanged original version (nothing is changed beyond adding the film to the disc). As such, each derivative version has a new copyright. Thus, not being able to tell which is the original, even if the original has fallen out of copyright, companies have effectively given the film a perpetual copyright. Even Berne Convention minimum of life+50 also falls under this. News flash: perpetual copyright is against the Constitution.

Colours can be serious business. I thought it was in Tales of the Industry but can't find it... there was a tale of a distributor having trouble working out what specific shade a character should be when they were making a pack-in toy version for their DVDs, which ultimately ended up in the license being torpedoed half way through releasing it.