Macross Zero Blu-Ray Box Premium Remaster Edition v2 [1080p mkv]

I think uploading the comparison video would be a good idea. I’d probably be interesting on its own, anyway, just for curiosity’s sake.

surely this one won’t stall at 99% as well
surely

P.S. OP please make sure your client is connected to the nyaa tracker(s) properly, otherwise even if it would work properly it won’t seed anyway. I’ve had issues lately with reannounces not working unless I remove the Nyaa tracker and then merge trackers from the magnet link

I started making a quick comparison with THORA’s old release and I immediately ran into what I feared considering the AI upscaling for this new BluRay.
https://slow.pics/c/QzrTSR7T
It’s not a completely 1:1 comparison because I know THORA applied a small amount of dithering to their encode, but that shouldn’t make much of a difference here.
Look at the absolute hit-job on the surface inside the helicopter in the background and the straps above and behind Shin’s head. What a bloody joke.

Would be curious to see comps with other encodes of the older blu ray, too

Well yeah herkz, did you not see the trailer for this release? The trailer video said the same thing. We all knew this would be an AI upscale, nobody was hiding that information.

For OP, your new torrent is just as broken as the old one. Go go gadget DDL.

For everyone else, here were some quick and dirty comparison screenshots I did from episode 1: https://slow.pics/c/5zQiMG4m

I don’t mind how it handled the people in the second comparison. But the cockpit gauges are overly sharp, the color correction to try to reduce the blue on the F-14s made the sky green (is this Dragon Ball??), and the sharpness enhancement accidentally sharpened the intentionally blurry elder in the last comparison. So in short, while this does sharpen up details and is nice in certain places, I’m shocked that Kawamori signed off on it as a whole.

I wish companies would just release the masters as they are and let fans do what they will with it because lord knows some encoders are insane enough to try fixing anything

About as unrealistic as wanting Nintendo to open source their games, of course, but would be nice…

As far as image upscaling goes, “AI” is just a tool. How well a tool is used depends on the people using it. When you use a tool well, the result can look amazing (AB Video’s release of Dragon Ball, for example). When you use it poorly, it can look like absolute shit (avex’s upscales of Initial D come to mind here). There are lots of examples of people using new “AI” tools to upscale shitty old content like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and getting good results, but those good results are because of painstaking effort on the part of the people using the tools to make sure it’s actually doing what they intend it to do.

The issue I take is that the trailer for this release of Macross Zero suggested that a lot of manual work went into this to make sure that the AI tool was not doing things it shouldn’t, and that Kawamori himself viewed the final result and put his stamp of approval on it. One would think that something as basic as not turning a blue sky green would be caught by something like that, which begs the question of why it (and all the other aberrations) was not.