Son_Gohan wrote:You mean a diffusion filter. Professional animation companies will use this technique as well. What do you think they use it for? It's not to make a picture more clear, quite the opposite.
The Dragon Box footage isn't very clear to begin with. Since so it's so stale, there's only so much you can do with an aged product without taking it out of balance. Grain can serve a similar effect in regards to masking imperfections and such but is too antiquated for modern video. Most people here would've grown up watching FUNI's products so they will be conditioned to the kind of methods that work to expose more detail and clarity; thinking that's right way of going about it. When you see something that does the opposite of that, it's a drastic shift and is very unsettling, but is not something your eyes wouldn't be able to adapt to.
jjgp1112 wrote:
What about your approach, which involves blurring the image to insane degrees, is "natural," exactly? It's by far the most unnatural and over-processed stuff in this thread, and I can't even fathom how much of a mess it would be in motion, let alone the stills you've already posted.
By "natural" I'm referring to what is natural to the eyes, not what would be natural to the product itself. The picture you get from a camera/artificial device, with the insane degree of detail and clarity it produces, does not reflect natural vision. And is therefore not ideally something I'd want to stare at for too long.
So, professional animation companies, or companies in charge of remastering shows & movies from film stock won't want the maximum clarity out of the picture, even in HD where video clarity is of the utmost importance? I doubt that in its entirety.
I mean, look at this video comparison of the Star Trek TNG remasters & the DVDs. The visual fidelity & clarity is MUCH clearer in the remasters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph0eXOV1D7I
If I am to believe what you say, I think you're only talking about dream or flashback sequences, or dreams, or something, where sometimes a director or storyboard artist will add a haze effect around the image to signify that. However, that doesn't really hold up to HD remasters of things where that wasn't the intent. You seem to have no idea of why remasters of things get the visual clarity they have from their film masters. The visual fidelity is there on the film, they just need to transfer & clean up the film stock to bring it out. I mean, the only remasters I've seen that actually make the picture worse for an animated work are the Sailor Moon Blu-Rays, where the oversaturation of the colors
really washed the picture out. Those got a TON of flack, if you're not aware, & the Blu-Ray of the R movie used a better source for Viz to base their remaster of it on, so it looks great & like what you'd expect for an older animated film.
How is a blurring tool natural to the eyes? Especially with people who don't need corrective lenses. Maybe what you'd get from a camera isn't 100% reflective of natural eyesight, but it's still closer than what you've done. HD is "high definition." The Dragon Boxes weren't remastered for HD, so they don't always have the most consistent color quality or clarity. Until Toei gives a proper HD treatment to the episodes, which probably won't happen since they can't be bothered to give Timeranger a better than VHS-quality remaster for DVD releases like the other Sentai seasons. Grain, as far as I know, helps with preserving visual quality.
Every live action thing shot on film has grain. Look at How I Met Your Mother. A
lot of the scenes shot on the bar set have a
lot more film grain than you'd expect, but the rest of the show is noticeably free of it for the most part. Film grain is a natural product of the film stock things can be shot on, so there's no way around it. Getting rid of most of it is something I can understand, but you need some amount of it present if you shoot on film & not just water color the shit out of the entirety of a TV series like what FUNi did to Z for their Blu-Rays in addition to the DVNR to try to remove the grain. Even Kai has film grain & it was largely rotoscoped so you wouldn't think there would've been.