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I never thought I'd be doing this, but 20 years later with SEED back in the mainstream, and technology in a much different place than it once was, a unique opportunity presented itself:
*Preserving the original SD version of Gundam SEED.*
It's pretty crazy to consider that the HD Remaster has now been out longer than the original version was before Sunrise revisited the show. As an early digipaint show, Gundam SEED is *ugly*, make no mistake about it, and like the vast majority of shows from that time period, it had been eternally stuck in SD-land due to the realities of digital anime production. That an HD version was released at all was something of a shock, not because of the new scenes and reanimating, but because of the technical implications of creating a proper HD master.
Most (but not all) shots were recomposed from 4x3 to 16x9, and even more surprisingly, the entire show was re-rendered in 24fps, as opposed to the original 30fps that the original version largely consisted of. This implied that Sunrise had actually maintained the original composition files for SEED, which is pretty shocking considering almost every other SD-era show that comes to BD is just upscaled. You're lucky if it's a straight progressive transfer.
Still, even with Sunrise's efforts on the HD Remaster, the image is flawed at times. Despite the re-rendering needed for the new frame rate, some shots in the remaster are disgustingly upscaled from SD, instead of properly rendering them out at a higher resolution, using what looks like a really aggressive form of Q-TEC. It's not *too* common, but it comes up from time to time and it's bafflingly inconsistent. Second, and really the more important thing here, is simply preservation of the original version. No retcons of character deaths, no Perfect Strike, no ultra Hirai-face on the early episodes, all presented in that unmistakably cheap 30fps frame rate that it originally aired in (Technically, it's hybrid, but 24fps shots are VERY rare).
So what's going on here? I've been playing around with ERSGAN models for a while now, and have also released a few things using Topaz's upscaling, but the results are often spotty. I knew that you could train your own custom models, and I had actually been playing around with some freely available models on a slew of shows out of curiosity, but nothing could really handle these early digipaint shows in a decent way. In order to create a custom model, you need a high resolution reference that the model can train against, to understand what the end result of the upscaling should be. Needless to say, how many HD sources do you know of for a circa-2002 anime? Gundam SEED HD Remaster was right there.
Now certainly there are differences between both versions so a 1:1 training wasn't possible, but there are many shots that are largely identical between both versions. The HD version is still quite soft, but it's definitely sharper than a straight upscale, and there are even a handful of shots that are truly 1080p (or close), giving the model incredibly useful references to train against. The result is a model that is specifically trained to upscale SEED SD to SEED HD. Thanks to hchcsen's remuxes of both the HD Remaster *and* the fresh SD-BD versions of the original version, I had super clean sources to work from, and I think the results really paid off here. I won't pretend it's perfect, but it's damn impressive to me, and as a bonus, there are shots here that are superior to the disastrous Q-TEC shots in the HD Remaster. Most of the worst interlacing artifacts are minimized here, but it's kinda interesting how the model really emphasizes some of shoddy production work in the OG. For example, there are poorly cross converted shots in here that are have hideous aliasing only masked by the blurriness of the original production, one of which appears in OP3. I never even noticed that the background layer of the animation disappears briefly during a quick portion of OP2.
#### Some Examples: (SD zoomed 200%)
**[HD](https://i.imgur.com/cxLB3zM.png) | [SD](https://i.imgur.com/uR2Y6ac.png) | [Upscale](https://i.imgur.com/3teEVIW.png)**
**[HD](https://i.imgur.com/1fWon7I.png) | [SD](https://i.imgur.com/Y3DgfU6.png) | [Upscale](https://i.imgur.com/T7tWkfy.png)**
**[HD](https://i.imgur.com/WwIMPVM.png) | [SD](https://i.imgur.com/g92VHdb.png) | [Upscale](https://i.imgur.com/apWizi3.png)**
**[HD, rare sharp shot](https://i.imgur.com/eOa2yh1.png) | [SD](https://i.imgur.com/5Nwc70a.png) | [Upscale](https://i.imgur.com/rR2FcT4.png)**
**[HD, ugly Q-TEC shot](https://i.imgur.com/v5v6Nko.png) | [SD](https://i.imgur.com/yaDRDiO.png)| [Upscale](https://i.imgur.com/pyXwO44.png)**
Anyway, this release contains freshly OCR'd subs from SD-BD remuxes, both in styled ASS and basic SRT forms (to help with h/w playback). Video is 10-bit HEVC, and audio is a straight AC3 remux. First up for now are episodes 1-25, with the second batch coming sometime next week!
![[EG]Mobile_Suit_Gundam_SEED_BD_01-25_[DualAudio_AI-Upscale]](https://f.0c.mom/no-cover.webp)
