This rework has been a long time coming; initially, it was just about re-encoding missing frames in the old specials. Unfortunately, the project had been neglected for years, and the production staff had retired, making many details hard to verify. Over time, re-encoding became a luxury, and with restoration techniques constantly evolving, we decided to go for a full rework. Compared to the previous version, this rework has optimized the handling of dirty edges, chroma planes, lines, and noise, and improved the encoding. The old version's collaborative subtitles have also fallen into disrepair, so this rework does not include subtitles. Viewers in need of subtitles can obtain them from the old version or seek them out on subtitle forums.
The quality of the source is a long story; its native resolution is 720p. The main issues are concentrated on the chroma planes, with noticeable chroma bleeding and chroma aliasing on the lines. Additionally, most scenes have dirty edges, with the worst cases affecting up to 8 pixels around the edges. Fortunately, conventional aliasing and color banding are not prominent, the lines are relatively soft, and the texture intensity is moderate, so the aforementioned issues did not pose much difficulty in processing. In terms of treatment, we performed descaling and reconstruction, anti-aliasing, de-banding, compensatory sharpening, and then used a neural network filter specifically for the chroma planes, followed by adaptive denoising. Additionally, some flashback sequences had excessive dynamic noise (especially chroma noise), for which we applied combined denoising to control the bitrate. As for the dirty edges, due to their frequent occurrence and the challenge of completely removing them, we aimed to mitigate their unsightly appearance as much as possible, resulting in a significant improvement over the old version. Unfortunately, in very few scenes, any treatment introduced flaws (such as in the bottom right corner of the fifth group of screenshots), but these were not particularly noticeable, so we decided to retain them after weighing the pros and cons.