No idea where to post this so I thought that I'd post it in here. A little write up that I did on the upcioming Evangelion Blu-ray set.
Neon Genesis Evangelion Blu-ray Box / Archives of Evangelion remastering process:
Since the Eva Blu-ray is out in days, I thought that I read up on it a bit.
The project itself took over 5 years, starting in 2010 with a year being spent on color correcting and many other little fixes, with the assistance of Anno and his instructions. The project itself was done by
Sony PCL Co, the same people who did the 2003
Renewal of Evangelion DVD set. At 5 years, the Eva Blu-ray set is probably the longest they've worked on a single project. Overall, they spent around 10x longer on Eva than any other series. Sony PCL Co received new equipment around the announcement of the Eva Blu-ray and have made use of the new equipment.
Speaking of which, the last telecine was also done back in 2003 with the release of the
Renewal of Evangelion DVD set, and even though the color and such was worked on with that release, the technology has changed a lot since then and thus more improvements were made for the move to HD. The biggest change to the 2003 DVD release was the 5.1 audio. Not only has the telecine technology improved vastly since but the television sets themselves that we use to watch our shows on have changed too so all of this had to be taken into consideration when getting the colors right. During those 5 years they cleaned up the film, removed dirt and scratches and such. They used the detailed list of changes
King Records documented with the 2003 release when working on this set.
In the end they made around 600 instances of fixing the picture where they missed the last time back on 2003, but since this was a new master, they also had to redo all of the previous fixes that they did do on the 2003 DVD set.
The show itself is 16mm while the OP and ED are 35mm. During the development of the 2003 DVD set, the original 16mm negatives for Episode 16 (including the preview segments) were lost, and so they had to remaster the episode using a 35 mm internegatives.
This time around they utilized a new up-converting technique called 'Real Scaling for HD' for Episode 16.
They also encountered many other little issues, for example in Episode 9 (
Moment, Heart, Together | Both of You, Dance Like You Want to Win!) there's a timer in the bottom corner during the final fight, however this timer wasn't included in the original film so they had to go back frame by frame and add it. Being film, a lot of the texts and such were cel overlaid.
One of the biggest problems they had was funnily enough Ritsuko's eyebrows as they couldn't get the color right, so they actually had to consult with King Records, Gainax members who worked on the series and Anno on whether or not to change or fix things. Ritsuko's hair color changes in the show but the eyebrow color stays the same. They found that when looking back, sometimes her eyebrows on the 2003 DVD would look more gold than brown so they wanted to get it right.
They also talked about how neither King Records or Tokyo TV knew which tapes were which when inquiring about the original broadcast version, however a Sony PCL member had VHS copies of the original broadcast including the commercials and bumpers and so they used them as comparison. The new DVD set includes the announcers and sponsors (commercial bumper) that appeared back on the TV airing, but not the commercials themselves.
"Then again that's what we were trying to produce. 2-3 years prior we would have given up due to technical limitation and now there's hurdles of time and cost. Yet as an engineer you don't really want to say that something's not possible, especially when you know that it can technically be done. So ultimately it was a question of spending a whole lot of time on it".
"It's a really detailed anime, so there were many things that had to be done by hand. Some parts we did five times over. Things like newspaper articles really add to the setting and they should be much more readable this time around."
