hissatsu

Lately amazon.co.jp has been listing some releases very late, some less than a month before the release date, long after it's listed everywhere else. Others get listed 6 months or more before the release date. There's no pattern to it.

So, ummm... maybe this is of minor interest. http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/07/28/ps3_macross_bundle/ Do I get a prize for answering a certain pesky question that seems to come up over and over again?

Sorry, but this sounds as if you're speaking entirely hypothetically without having looked at any examples. Other OVAs done on film have been released on blu-ray and look far better than their DVD counterparts. The Bubblegum Crisis blu-rays look far better than any of the DVD releases with a much higher level of detail. The Gunbuster Movie blu-ray portions taken from episodes 5-6 look far better than the DVD release, and even the portion of the movie taken from episodes 1-4 which were done on 16mm film look better than the DVD releases. Even at maxed DVD bitrates, mpeg-2 cannot handle very detailed high motion scenes without very obvious compression artifacts, whereas h.264 or VC-1 at blu-ray bitrates do a far better job. For an example, the transformation sequence in the Gunbuster movie taken from episode 5. On the DVD it's full of compression artifacts even with maxed bitrate throughout the entire scene, whereas the blu-ray is completely clean (at a bitrate close to 40 Mbps for much of the scene). Frankly, if you can't tell the difference between a DVD and well-done blu-ray of a film based anime, you're either watching on a very small screen or your eyes are going bad. There is just no comparison. Macross Plus will eventually get a blu-ray release, and unless they totally screw it up, it will look much better than the DVDs.

This is not so much mistaken as it is misleading. "Made in HD" has no meaning if it was done on film. Star Wars was done on 35mm film, like most movies (and most likely Macross Plus, as most OVAs were done on 35 mm film). 35mm film has a much higher level of detail than any HD video format. Film may need to be cleaned up, damage repaired, and a new telecine needs to be done, but no sharpening is necessary. Even movies over 50 years old are quite capable of taking full advantage of of Blu-ray as long as a good film print is available. The issue of thing not being made in HD only matters when it comes to all digital productions or edited on video. Then they're stuck at whatever resolution/level of detail they were originally made at, and no amount of sharpening or filtering can fix that. They might make it look better to some people, but in reality it only removes some of the little detail that was present. When it comes to anime, it's not older shows that can't take advantage of HD, it's shows from the late 90s - late 00s that are the problem. Most were produced digitally in SD, and they won't look any better on Blu-ray (aside from the lack of artifacting compared to DVD) without entirely re-animating the show (which has not been done for any show I know of, and probably won't be done). As for Macross, DYRL, TV, Plus, and Seven have all had HD remaster DVD boxes released in the past few years. Bandai Visual could release Blu-ray versions at any moment if they felt like it, but they need to squeeze as many DVD sales out of these shows as possible before releasing them on Blu-ray (which is pretty annoying).

I'm not talking about Youtube's HD. There are plenty of "HD" videos on Youtube that are anything but HD. If the original video isn't HD in the first place, it doesn't mean much, and this Macross Plus clip is almost surely based off the remastered DVDs, not any sort of HD source. ChronoReverse's post really shows all the detail that is blurred out of this clip compared to the remastered DVDs.

It's not HD. It look like someone ripped some video from the Japanese HD remaster DVD box released in 2007, boosted the saturation and contrast, then did some heavy filtering on it. There's no more actual detail there than on the those DVDs (actually less since the filtering has blurred away some detail and removed all the film grain) and more macroblocking/banding. Since HD masters were created for those DVDs, one can hope that Bandai Visual will get out around to releasing it on Blu-ray eventually, and it should look quite a bit better than this.

It's impossible for Macross Zero to take full advantage of Blu-ray because it was created digitally at a lower resolution. The only way for it to be truly HD would have been to completely reanimate the entire series from scratch. This is a problem for all digital animation not created in HD. Still, it will still look somewhat better on Blu-ray than DVD because Blu-ray uses much better compression codecs and much higher bitrates. Even today just about all animation is created around 720p level of detail instead of 1080P - even really big budget releases like Rebuild of Evangelion (not to mention Macross Frontier).