About a year ago, I wanted to tackle Eureka Seven and bought the US BDs in order to see what the state of ML-upscaling was. I initially tried the Topaz approach, as I had with Big-O, and was disappointed with the results. They weren't even close to acceptable. Then I found my way to a variety of open source GAN methods, and found an awesome library of models trained by others. None of them really felt effective and natural enough to use for the show though. The background details would be smoothed out, depth-of-field effects would be lost, or line art would be grossly oversharpened. Then I started training models for Gundam SEED, and fell deep into the model training rabbit hole. Upscaling 2000s digipaint is kind of a "white whale", because the SD nature of them feels like a scar on so many shows. The difficult part is finding source materials that approximate what 2000s digipaint could look like in HD. After trying to create synthetic models with modern shows (Violet Evergarden was one of my sources), I didn't feel the results were good enough. Eventually I settled on two movies: The Cat Returns and Redline. Using a digital Ghibli source is risky because the mastering quality is usually top notch, but they often slap a layer of grain over the image, which would distort the model. The Cat Returns is free of grain, is razor sharp, has complex, detailed backgrounds, AND I was able to find a DVD ISO to train the low res version against as well. For Redline, I couldn't find a DVD version, so I created my own DVD-equivalent encode to train with. The inky, high contrast outlines and intense gradient effects in that source, combined with the massacred compression in my "DVD" encode helped a lot in giving the model tons of variety, along with the ability to deblock tricky high motion sources. The results can be pretty impressive: https://imgsli.com/MjYzNjM2 https://imgsli.com/MjYzNjM2/2/3 (example of general text handling) https://imgsli.com/MjYzNjM2/4/5 https://imgsli.com/MjYzNjM2/6/7 (lots of compression in foreground cleaned up) https://imgsli.com/MjYzNjM2/8/9 (dark shot, about as extreme as the BD's compression gets) The source here is the US BDs, which admittedly aren't great. The master itself seems identical to the Japanese version based on other rips I've seen, but the encoding leaves a lot to be desired. There's a shocking amount of macro blocking in some darker shots, and the model cleans up *most* of it, but it would need scene filtering to be fully neutralized. What is well-treated is the aliasing from the poor upscaling, the chroma bleeding, and the edge enhancement. The line work is clean and in my opinion, mostly natural. Even on-screen text is impressively rendered. Most importantly, the background details are preserved with the softness of camera blur effects and glows left intact, and no excess smoothing. Specs: Video: HEVC 10bit 4:2:0 (US BD) Audio: Japanese and English 2.0 TrueHD (US BD) Subs: ASS remuxed from OZC, plus SRT subs for hardware playback.