Piyo Piyo Productions presents: Eternal Filena 1-6 8/13/17 https://www.otakubell.com/ https://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=5943 Project notes: I had never heard of this series until Collectr from Orpahn asked me about it – seems they had some older raws they planned to sub. As fate would have it, a few weeks later a European contact showed up with the set of disks, so I purchased them, and I’m glad I did, because this looks pretty good (once you get through the Tokuma logo, which made me thought I was booting up an old PC game off a floppy disk). In terms of quality, these might be one of the highest-quality anime laserdiscs I have ever come accross. The picture is exceptionally sharp. This turned out to be a problem, but I didn’t realize it immediately, and it delayed the whole project. If I had to guess, and I do, I would guess that Tokuma cranked the sharpness knob up real high but didn’t pay too much attention afterwards, because the disk has two fairly unique problems: Ringing, and dotcrawl. “Ringing” is cause by over-sharpening, and I don’t think I have ever seen it on a laserdisc before. It is sometimes also called “haloing”, as it appears that light or dark haloes are just to the left or right of lines. There are filters out there to handle these, but I have never used them before – never had to. So I had to experiment around. In the end, I was able to reduce the ringing, but not eliminate it, so you’ll still be able to find examples if you look for them. “Dotcrawl” looks kinda like a dancing checkerboard at the edges of lines – in this case, I noticed it along red badge borders. Red is a problematic color for NTSC signals anyhow, but again, I’ve never seen this particular issue with red edges before. I took a little time to perform a few other experiments – for example, I wanted to see if I could make IVTC pans a little smother. But these experiments didn’t yield any better results than my current method, and were mostly worse. As always, if anyone out there wants to take a better crack at these issues than I could, I have included unfiltered high-bitrate DVD conversions in addition to the filtered x264 versions.