sephirotic wrote:Yes, I've confirmed that. I've been pixel peeping Death and the original episodes and found that Death actually has TWO LAYERS OF FILM GRAIN ARTIFACTS. If you can find a big enough film speck on one of the Tv episodes, you will likely find it again on the Death film if it is the exact same frame. Tough I'm in the suspicion not all episodes were cut from the same film source in the case of Death. I failed to find specks from the Episode 19 berserk scene on the Death cut scene. The image looks very different, Episode 19 looks more dull and Digitally denoised, ufortunately.
But on Non-DC episode 23, I could locate several dust specks on both death and the episode from disc 5.
Now, Death true may have better black detail, but it has more white clipping and in several scenes it looks slightly less sharp than Original Death. I also am not 100% convinced original Death was mastered in 35mm at all.
Also, some episodes have been severely DNR, while others retains much more grain. Notably 8 is by far the most DNR, things looks a smudgefeast. 19 is also pretty bad. Episode 26 seens like it doesn't have ANY DNR whatsoever, episode 3 and 4 also looks pretty damn noisy.
And color/exposure wise, the best episode IMO is episode 12.
As long as groups could get their hands on the 1080i master from the broadcast .ts, there may be still hope of getting a decent version of episode 16.
Speaking of episode 19, I wonder how far I can enter in details here, but I've been pretty annoyed with color inconsistencies on some episodes, specially episode 19. I spent over 12 hours color correcting it for my own personal taste.
I usually prefer accepting the color mastering choice of photography directors, I've come to accept the Yellow tint of episodes 1-2 and further inconsistencies, but episode 19 just look hideous.
If ss are allowed, I can post some original and color corrected screen caps versions of my episode 19 around here.
I managed to get translations for the Anno phone talk about Love & Pop and I was looking for translations of the making of for the LA sequences on EoE, anyone got interested in translating it?
I pointed out the layers of grain and the fact that the TV series was pretty obviously DNR'd in many places in this same thread and was told essentially that the TV series wasn't DNR'd (even though there's pretty solid evidence that it has been, I provided screenshots of it). It also looks like they added a more uniform looking "noise" back onto the TV series footage (which would help with banding in gradients and also to make it look more film-like).
The grain for a 16mm TV series on the Blu-Ray is just too fine and uniform for it's format and the year it was made. If you look at His and Her Circumstances (another 16mm produced Gainax series made not too long after Evangelion) you can see what grain in 16mm Anime normally looks like.
The TV series episodes on the Blu-ray do look pretty gorgeous and I guess they did a decent job with the DNR, but I just don't understand why they couldn't have just left the grain alone. I guess I can understand that modern tastes are different and so a lot of people don't like seeing grain like that, but to me it's part of the charm and reality of Anime production in the mid-90s. It's just a shame. I would have been overjoyed to get just a nice clean new HD telecine with dust and scratch fixes. Luckily it seems like they didn't go too crazy with the DNR on End of Evangelion, which makes sense because the movies were 35mm and therefore have finer grain.
