# Urusei Yatsura - Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer LaserDisc Project ### 480p No-AI version You might be wondering to yourself: Is there a need for this? Yes - Yes there is. If you're curious about the details, read the history below. It's been an interesting journey. This release is brought to you by Nyard and Darkonius with helpful assistance online. **Tl;dr: This LaserDisc release is the currently best way to watch Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer in open matte 4:3.** A direct comparison between Bluray, DVD and our LD (Titled Median2 here - Not the final picture quality) which highlights the difference in matte: https://imgsli.com/NjAzMjk/0/2 ## The History The Urusei Yatsura movies were originally produced in 4:3, and though Oshii himself favors the widescreen version of Beautiful Dreamer which eventually made it onto Bluray releases, me and Darkonius wanted to have a better way of enjoying this movie than the ones that were available. Let's go through the easily available options. We have the BluRay version, which is a clean scan but maybe looks a little dark and is cropped: https://i.imgur.com/e1C7kmQ.jpeg And we had [LRE], with a full 4:3 ratio DVD Rip but judge the quality for yourself: https://i.imgur.com/2vWiJbG.jpg So as you can see most people here would certainly choose the Bluray even with the tremendous amount of picture that is lost to the crop. A little bit of digging revealed, that all of the other Urusei Yatsura Movies happen to have good 4:3 DVD releases. Find them here: https://nyaa.iss.one/view/972837 Notice how this batch torrent went with the widescreen version of Beautiful Dreamer. Why is that? Feeling smart, me and Darkonius decide to just buy some different DVD Releases hoping that at least one of them turns out to look better than what we had so far and that we could do a better encode. First up: No japanese DVD releases in 4:3! The movie has been in widescreen in Japan since the 1996 LD set, and the JP DVD and BDs simply followed. Only foreign DVD releases feature Beautiful Dreamer in a full 4:3 scan. So we got those and... They're genuinely awful! We acquired a 1998 USMC DVD and a later digitally remastered 2004 US DVD, both feature heavy frameblending ( https://i.imgur.com/h75a1ZA.png ) and the image quality remained so sub par that it was clear that these were operating off of poor masters. The producer of the Bluray release for Beautiful Dreamer had this to say on the old 4:3 masters: https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=14774189&postcount=75 Reading the line "The best 4:3 version out there commercially, I believe, is the Japanese laserdisc." meant that the mission going forward was clear. Time to get some Japanese LaserDiscs from the time before the 1996 Set. The first LaserDisc we got our hands on was TLL-2189 with digital audio. The image quality was a lot better, but we noticed quickly that it was likely using the same frameblended masters as USMC's American releases. This was the huge blow for our motivation because the image quality was very nice compared to the DVD: https://imgsli.com/NDc4MTE So we went and acquired a TLL-2001 LaserDisc, one with analog audio. We were surprised to find that this release had even more of the frame! Turns out this release is open matte, whereas the other 4:3 releases were all slightly zoomed in. Restoring EVEN MORE of the original picture made us quite excited. A direct comparison between Bluray, DVD and our LD (Titled Median2 here - Not the final picture quality) which highlights the difference in matte: https://imgsli.com/NjAzMjk/0/2 And well what do you know: Finally we don't have frameblending anymore either! But a new villain has entered the frame: DISCROT. LaserDiscs age and they deteriorate. This manifests in funny flakes all over your perfectly fine and not frameblended Urusei Yatsura movie: https://i.imgur.com/DdSgPLv.png There's ways to reverse some of the damage done to a LaserDisc by discrot and that requires owning at least 3 of the same LD master and filtering them with vapoursynth-median stacking. This plugin basically compares any given pixel between the 3 sources and if one has rot on it and 2 are fine then it will choose the undamaged color for that pixel. This way the rot is removed almost completely. So, yeah. We went and got 2 more TLL-2001 LDs. It worked beautifully. And here our 3 different versions come into play. The biggest issue with TLL-2001 really is intense ringing artifacts. No Vapoursynth filter chain I could come up with was able to tame it, so we ended up using an AI upscaler trained on removing ringing to restore as much detail from this picture as is possible. This is perhaps the part where some purists will fall out of their chairs, but I think the improvement speaks for itself - Ringing is not eliminated completely, but in key scenes it is tamed. But don't worry, we will provide 3 versions: 480p without any AI, 480p which is downscaled from AI (just cleans it up nicely) and 960p AI Upscaled. Let's look at a few comparisons between the 3 versions so you can make a decision: https://imgsli.com/NjI1NTI ## What issues remain? The TLL-2001 LaserDisc doesn't have perfect colors, overall its rather dark and sometimes darker colors will be crushed to almost black. This isn't due to the processing, but already present in the source. Because I can't for the life of me figure out color correction I left it as is. If any brave color correctors want to try their hand at it, we can talk about getting you a lossless version to work on. Because it is open matte we also sometimes have frames that are just smaller, so black bars may appear on top and bottom occasionally. We opted to not crop any further because the open matte really was the point of this whole enterprise. Other than that we're still having a definitive ringing problem, the AI version addresses this quite a bit, but even there some artifacts remain. And lastly: Jitter. You will notice this release to be quite jittery. We didn't want to go for invasive stabilization methods here, because they can at times really mess with the video. Also in the AI versions there is the occasional artifact where the AI got confused with the grain and decided the grain is actually a kind of texture. For the most egregious scenes we spliced in the no-AI version. With that we believe that the AI versions have such a significant improvement in visual quality, that the negative effects are far outweighed. ## Tl;Dr: I didn't read the history, so why are there 3 Versions of this torrent? We release this movie in two different 480p versions and in 960p. The regular 480p version only has the basic processing done to it, so purists can enjoy the experience. The other 480p version (AI) is simply a downscaled version from the 960p version (also AI). This way the AI Upscaler serves the function of a high-effort de-noising, de-ringing and sharpening filter, which beats out most alternatives we've investigated. But because of the current promising state of AI upscaling a genuine case can be made for 960p as following comparison illustrates: https://imgsli.com/NjI1NTI ~~Find the 960p AI Version here: https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1413852~~ (edit 10/23/22: As of recently this version was removed from nyaa, find it here https://mega.nz/file/g35UEZ4Q#keeR-lE7WM68hFDDzT98DyKL7Zef12pUEoZ4Miwgy4M ) Find the 480p AI Version here: https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1413854 ## What is included in this release: Audio Tracks: - Japanese LD Digital Audio from TLL-2189 Stereo (AAC 212kpbs) - Japanese LD Analog Audio from TLL-2001 Stereo (AAC 293kpbs) - Japanese Bluray 5.1 (AAC 461kpbs) - English Dub Bluray Stereo (AAC 173kpbs) - Commentary Track with Mamoru Oshii Stereo (AAC 162kpbs) Sub Tracks: - English Subs adapted from DVD subs with some things copied frome Live-eviL (such as Karaoke and translations to some signs) - English Subs for the commentary track straight from the 2004 DVD (Ugly yellow!)