Ghost in the Shell

[BronzeTitan]

Thanks for your link! (Even if I found something on YouTube, it would've been of unreliable resolution anyway.)

Hmmm. With the above YT trailer posted in 2006, your HD snapshots seem to have the same "up-rez'd to HD" look of GITS in the cels smaller details. To be expected, I guess ... from the same company, similar old time frame, and probably using similar non-HD techniques & equipment (the internal transferring from film to digital to mixing to output ... or some such).

I'll check out your other suggestions, too, to see if something looks like from photography-to-film for "film resolution", in the various release formats (DVD, HD, etc.).

[der richter]

some more comparisons for the other movies i have at hand.

Sennen Joyuu
Berserk
Evangelion 1 | 2 | 3

[BronzeTitan]

Thanks again! You make this too easy.  

Yes, you're right about Evangelion being too different. The other two are closer. All these must be older anime, too, as I'm not seeing noticeably sharper HD and wouldn't be much better as UHD either ... or I'm expecting too much.

[der richter]

i guess most similar looking anime fall into the same time frame as GitS and have similar productions values and qualities.

[BronzeTitan]

Speaking of not abusing cels details with our little computer tools   . . . it looks like those poor cels have a story of woe to tell (and it ain't pretty).

First, from that eBay auction some posts ago, I corrected the bigger individual cel and background pictures to overlay-match an HDTV screencap . .



As the originals were shot with a camera under varying lighting, it was hard to find a common setting to make things match. However, it did seem that the reddish cast of the HDTV was very difficult to force into the originals. If I had to choose, I'd say the originals, even under questionable photographic circumstances, appear more natural looking, more realistic.

But the significant reveal is the originals' details that we've never seen . .




. . and the subtle band-aide coloring is that way in the other lines, too.

[der richter]

in that auction it shows the supposedly correct line-art on the other photos, the ones without colouring and the different coloured lines. just from that i would say that either the photos of the coloured cels are bad or the cels itself weren't kept very well. i would say all the subtle brownish lines that are black in the line art itself are not supposed to be brownish. i am not sure if i can agree with you because i am not sure what you refer to as "original" in that case.

what is a bit more baffling, is that in the line art shot he is supposed to have at least two shades of hair colour. which is not the case in any of the sources, neither the cels.

[BronzeTitan]

If the band-aide wasn't uniformly brown I might agree. Yet, there it is ... entirely brown (or "not a hard line") right next to the jaw line, which is entirely black (or "a hard line"). I wish we had more original media. Nobody respects their own creations enough to save it all.

[der richter]

it's just a 'coincidence' that the whole thing is brownish. the larynx line for example is similar just that the bottom part is still black. the right chin and jaw line isn't uniform black either, same as the ear and the nose lines on the right. if the line-art on those photos are real, those lines are supposed to be hard black lines. after all those are supposed to be the colouring reference. though i guess there could be some kind of creative freedom.

since the band-aid itself had a different shade than his skin, in all the other scene it appears in, it could have bled into the line-art for whatever reason. also since in all the other scenes, with various different lighting, the line-art is always black, it would have been an impossible task to have it 'colourised' consistently afterwards (after painting) since different people usually work on different scenes in parallel. 

[BronzeTitan]

With this cel being what it is, it would be nice if we had the extra $3k to burn for an up-close-and-personal examination of it. And your screencap examples do indicate a general brown ink for skin boarders. Your earlier mention of loss of detail in the darkest areas may also indicate some black-crush somewhere along the re-releasing chain. That's as far as my speculation takes me.

Any idea of the very first wave of release(s)? TV broadcast? Theater? Retail? And most important ... can we get on hands on them, if not easily available?  

[der richter]

we need to be careful with those screens (they are not from my filtered release) and especially with those areas where we have a hard edges between differently bright tones. the source was 'sharpened' at one stage, probably unintentional a byproduct of something else, and we get some overshoot there. that overshoot leads to bright and dark edges that look like line art, which actually isn't. there most likely is a slight edge there but it is not supposed to be as prominent as it looks on those screens.

i am just going to guess here why we have brownish line-art at the places mentioned. if we take a look at this video. it explains the animation process of sailor moon. the sequence should be from ~1993 and the first season, so around the time of GitS. it most likely uses similar techniques that were also used for GitS. around the 1:18 minute mark we can see how the line-art is transferred from paper onto the front of the cel. a bit later we see how the back side of the cel is painted. a bit more guessing. since the process for the line-art is just a transfer, in contrast to actually painting, it's most likely less sturdy against any kind of external influences. furthermore, since it's at the front side of the cel it's also more likely that it was 'touched' or otherwise exposed to anything. taking into account that this cel is +20 years old it's possible that some of the line-art came off, peeled off, was scratched off etc., leaving a not completely opaque stain on the cel where the line was, which darkens the tone of the underlying paint of the backside. this would explain why the lines have a darker tone of the underlying colour.

one of the very first releases for us available is probably the Ghost in the Shell Laserdisc (BEAL-921). though i don't think i have seen a rip of it.

[edit]
here a comparison between R2J DVD, R1 DVD and BD. the R2J screens have some ghosting of the previous frames.

[edit2]
some screenshots of the US laserdisc. also not too promising.