Postby FreakyFilmFan4ever » Sun Dec 23, 2018 11:00 pm
Hm....
I mean, if the upscale is really good, a manually upscaled video for Blu-ray is still better than an automatic upscale of DVD content. And for standard definition shows that were fully digitally produced, I actually prefer the upscale to the original DVD when playing them on a flat panel television. (The upscale of Samurai Champloo is pretty great, for example.)
BUT Kare Kano wasn't fully produced in a digital workflow, so they could theoretically go back to the original film stock if it isn't lost.
BUT so much of Kare Kano's animated titles were rendered digitally in an interlaced SD format that much of those elements would have to be reconstructed from the ground for an authentic HD release. (And there were a lot of them.) And I do remember that, along with the animated on-screen titles, much of the episode recaps were "fast-forwarded" in a way that fully utilized 60 fields-per-second interlaced video, which wouldn't be a part of the 24 frames-per-second workflow for a conventional HD release. So ultimately so much of Kare Kano's editing workflow seemed to fully utilize interlaced digital formats that rescanning into a proper 24 fps format would be difficult.
BUT wouldn't an upscale simply do the same thing anyway? Modern flat-panel televisions were never in interlaced formats, only the CRT television were. Adjusting any of that stuff for a progressive-based format (such as a flat panel HD screen) in an upscale would simply a lazy way of negating the uniqueness of the interlaced video in Kare Kano as rescanning the film would.
Hm.... I don't like this too much. Like, it's better than nothing, but it's not the best that they could feasible and reasonably do. It's not like they need to re-animate or re-photograph the cels for an authentic HD experience, they just gotta scan the original film in HD. (Unless they lost it, which is entirely likely given how Gainax also lost the film reels for Episode 16 of NGE.)
Whatever. Actually, I have a home theater system that uses both an LED flat panel and a CRT television. I pick whichever screen is best suited to whatever format I'm watching. (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, etc., in fact, just today I watched Jurassic Park on both VHS and Blu-ray simultaneously.) Technically, I can still watch Kare Kano in all its interlaced glory on my old CRT. I'm just confused as to why they aren't providing an authentic HD release with their Blu-rays. I mean, if the animation was originally photographed on film, then why not?