Fuck, I can't believe I'm typing this, but here is a surprise EG drop: Big O This is a completely one-off experiment that was entirely prompted by wanting to rewatch the show, only to discover that no decent copies are really floating around out there. First off, the Big O BDs that are out there are lame Q-TEC upscales that don't really do much for the image. This is a real shame for the first seasons, because Banrise didn't see it fit to properly rescan the 35mm film. Being from 1999, it should have been right up there with Turn-A Gundam as far as film stock quality is concerned. They instead decided to criminally upscale the first season. The second season of course, was an early 2000s digital production, and while it's well produced, it's a product of its time, meaning it's soft, and eternally stuck in standard definition. So why did I bother encoding it? One reason is that, shockingly, no one seems to have restored the original OP to the Blu-ray versions, which use the 2007 Animax opening instead. Even US DVDs from around that same time also stopped using the original opening, presumably for fear of dealing with Queen, meaning the only DVDs that had the original versions were the single volumes and first collection box sets. It's pretty easy to combine files like this, and the whole show was upscaled anyway, so it's not like it matters that you'd be matching DVD to BD. The second reason that ultimately made me go for it was some recent experimenting with AI upscaling software. Honestly... it can sometimes work magic if the source material is good. After trying to work with free ERSGAN tools (with models that are supposedly ideal for cel animation), I did get some interesting results, but the speed was painfully slow. Then I tried Topaz Video Enhance AI, which though not as specialized in its modeling, had drastically better performance, and more consistent results overall, not to mention an easier UI and batch processing function. Believe it or not, I started looking into these tools just a few months ago when Daft Punk announced their breakup. Naturally, I had to rewatch Interstella 5555, but that movie is literally impossible to repair. It went through several standards conversions and is frame-blended to hell. I tried my best to make a good copy for myself (lol), but the effort was wasted. While I can get decent upscaling, the frame blends are just too baked in to really fix, so I ditched the project. But those efforts were worth it in the end, because it let me know that an AI upscale could work under the right circumstances. So this past week, I downloaded the BD and DVD rips, and got to work. I could not find BDMVs, but I grabbed a rip by [Cleo] that was okay. I *downscaled* them back to SD (hoping that any compression from the rip would be averaged out), created lossless h264 files, brought those into Topaz AI, and upscaled them back to 1080p. The results, though far from perfect, are very impressive. The upscaling process is shockingly effective at times, and certainly more so than whatever process was used on the BD. These upscaled versions were exported out of Topaz to ProRes HQ mezzanines so I could combine them with the OP. Now about the opening... It's certainly unique. Not just in the style, but in the production process. It's an almost entirely interlaced opening, which is really jarring to see in 2021. On TV, this would have appeared as a really smooth 60fps-like intro, and I completely forgot that it looked that way. I managed to find DVD ISO remuxes of the original R1 DVDs, so I grabbed the clean OP. Using QTGMC in Vapoursynth, I deinterlaced it to 60fps and then brought it into Topaz for upscaling. The result isn't amazing, but it does the trick. The only problem is that, in 2021, I no longer want to deal with VFR bullshit (and I don't think the world really wants to either), so I wasn't willing to do all the manual work to combine a 60fps opening with a 24fps episode. That's when I brought everything into DaVinci Resolve. I combined the OP and episodes on a timeline, and then replaced the BD-rip audio (it was overly compressed AAC) with the DVD remux AC3, recreating the original versions. I then retimed the framerate of the OP to 24fps via Resolve's optical flow settings. The results weren't amazing, and I wish it looked better, but the OP really was meant to be seen in 60fps. The panning and zoom motions, as simple as they are, are so fast that it just feels jerky in 24fps. To compensate for this, I added just a tiny bit of motion blur to smooth things out. The black levels of the OP were brought down just a touch, and I performed a deband, spatial denoise, and film grain pass on the episodes themselves. I won't pretend that grain in this context isn't purely superficial, but I figured I might as well try to imitate a proper remaster as best I can. The episodes were then rendered to DNxHR HQX. Episodes from the second season were also AI upscaled and debanded, but there was no additional grain or denoise pass (other than inherent denoising from Topaz). Lastly, the episodes were encoded in H.264 10-bit CRF 18, with both audio tracks in VBR 10 Opus. The subs are directly remuxed from the original Cleo BD rips, so no work was done there. Don't ask for anything more on that front, it's simply not happening. Included here is the complete 26 episode run AND a 60fps version of the clean OP, to show people what it should really look like.