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Here's another surprise project for you: AI-Upscaled Sailor Moon! I wanted to watch the series over the winter, but as I'm sure everyone knows, the BDs (both JP and US), are fucking terrible. The Italian Dynit DVDs seem to be the standard as far as quality is concerned, and wouldn't you know it, someone uploaded DVDISO remuxes not long ago (https://nyaa.si/view/1433812), providing me the best quality possible to start with. Originally, I was going to use the encodes provided in (https://nyaa.si/view/1402438), and I actually got up to about episode 20 or so before seeing the remuxed versions available. After grabbing the remuxes, I started over and batch processed the first TV series (46 episodes) through Topaz Video Enhance AI. Their AI models have changed since the Big-O encode I did earlier this year, and the new Proteus model is magical. Since it now has adjustable parameters, I was able to dial in the exact kind of processing I want - dehaloing, sharpening, compression reversal, denoising, detail preservation, and sharpening.
I kept noise reduction to a minimum, and did not apply any sharpening at all, though Topaz removes quite a bit of grain inherently. Topaz's "deblur" as they call it, attempts to sharpen the source, but is *not* the same as the sharpening function, which appears to be a simple post process edge enhancement. Aesthetically, my goal here was to emulate a typical 16mm Blu-ray source to the best of my ability, though I didn't add any additional grain to this, since I found Topaz's grain function to be really artificial-looking. No point in adding it if it looks completely fake. As far quality itself is concerned, what I wanted to avoid at all costs was severely fucking up the lineart, smudging background paintings, or oversharpening it to a ridiculous degree. Obviously, I can't pretend everyone is going to approve of this, and I DEFINITELY can't say this is a substitute for a genuine remaster (Honestly, it's insane that a property as big as this doesn't have one).
The second change here is the color. The color of the episodes is all over the place, especially once stock footage is involved, which is pretty frequent. This meant I couldn't really change things too liberally, as the settings would be different scene to scene and episode to episode. What I've settled on is a mild contrast bump along with a slight reduction in the red shift that covers almost every scene. I tried referencing the color in pictures of Sailor Moon cels online, along with a Blu-ray reference of the Make Up! special, which has a properly restored scan. While I didn't want to outright strip the red tint from the show, the reference (http://sailormoonnews.com/2017/07/03/the-new-japanese-sailor-moon-blu-ray-sets-look-good-but-not-great-in-hd/) does show that there is less red in the remastered shot.
Some examples:
https://i.imgur.com/jFWAbAP.png DVD
https://i.imgur.com/rOC4HG7.png Upscale
https://i.imgur.com/bTxzS06.png DVD
https://i.imgur.com/f6dRcDp.png Upscale
https://i.imgur.com/JADPE6p.png DVD
https://i.imgur.com/RId683E.png Upscale (this is probably the worst shot)
https://i.imgur.com/tYf9NWJ.png DVD
https://i.imgur.com/qyWpdZ8.png Upscale (Busy shots like this seem to benefit the most)
So again, this is far from perfect, and I totally understand if this offends some people, but as with anything you get from me these days, it's all just so I can experiment around and see what these tools can do. I do ask that you give it a try, as I personally find the results look pretty impressive in motion.
Full Specs:
Video: 1080p H.264 10-bit 4:2:2 (Dynit DVD AI Upscale)
Audio: Opus 256k Japanese and English Viz Dub (Re-encoded from Hark0n's FLAC tracks. Sorry, the Italian Dub has been excluded)
Subs: English Remuxed from Hark0n
![[EG] Sailor Moon (1080p AI-Upscale)](https://f.t0r.site/no-cover.webp)
