The main feature and OVA were produced using JPBD and ITBD sources, while all special features are sourced from JPBD.
J.C.STAFF's second season visuals pale in comparison to MADHOUSE's first season. Though maintaining the first season's strong line style (RGB Shift) and heavy base grain, the second season suffers from blurred lines, reduced motion detail, and grain with an unpleasant gritty texture, resulting in mediocre viewing quality – an attempt to replicate the original style that ended up looking like a poor imitation.
Regarding the sources: neither JPBD nor ITBD excels in quality. JPBD offers better overall quality, while ITBD exhibits four-pixel-wide damage on left and right edges and severe banding in certain scenes. JPBD remains serviceable without major flaws. Chroma quality is comparable, with ITBD performing better in extreme color scenarios but occasionally underperforming in regular scenes compared to JPBD.
During production, we employed neural network filters to fuse and reconstruct the chroma planes (UV), then performed subsequent processing based on JPBD. Considering the show's heavily stylized art direction, excessive processing would do more harm than good. We only applied mild anti-aliasing to lines, reconstructed the noise layer to mitigate the unsightly gritty texture, and addressed insufficient bitrate for heavy grain, followed by baseline de-banding as a safeguard.