Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Nine 1-3 1/18/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ Project notes: I have zero interest in IRL baseball, but I seem to like baseball anime. So far I’ve seen both Touch and Princess Nine, and I liked them a lot. Enough so that I actually tried to watch real baseball on TV after watching Touch. Oh my God, it was so boring. I don’t get it. Nine (not of the “Princess” variety”) was an early work of Adachi Mitsuru (of the “Touch” variety). It was never made into a full TV series like Touch was, though. Instead, it was made into three TV specials. The first special was patched up and re-released as a movie. And what an oddly bleak-looking movie it is. Nine has an oddly limited color palatte and has no background artwork whatsoever - the skies in the universe of Nine are always overcast. Not a blade of grass graces the detailless ground. It just looks... unfinished. And yet they made three of them in the same stlye, so I guess either they didn't have any money, or they were going for something. I honestly can't tell which. What Nine DOES have is chainlink fences. Lots of them. Panning and scrolling fences. This was a problem, because with a dark repeating pattern on a light background you get a lot of cross-chroma noise ("rainbows"). Unfortunately, the most common and effective derainbowing filters don't work on moving patterns. So, I had to turn to Doom9 to get help, and I got turned on to SMDegrain. The problem with that is, its slow. How slow? It takes an hour to process one MINUTE of footage. In all, then, I spent, at a minimum, 300 hours on filtereing and encoding. Realistically its probably more. I've been at this for at least two months.