Looking earlier in the video at the footage of Yu Yu Hakusho Gaiden, the cast's colors are... warped. Yusuke's garb is nearly Sonic blue, Kuwabara's has some sickly red tint to it (that fades with the screen)… So maybe it is just '90s tape degradation? I mean, the red on Sonic's shoes is giving me the same feeling of oversaturation I had when I first watched the HDR upscale of the OVA.
I think the colors are more of a result of the film development than anything else. Cel Colors =/= the intended colors of film. There is color timing and all that to deal with. Cels are generally created in a way that develop the way a director wants them to be developed on film based on what camera and film stock they're using in their workflow. If I had to guess, I imagine that the footage was designed and developed in the muted way that it is on purpose, so that when they digitized it, the colors would be very flat and easy to manipulate. If you look at the version in the original game, it's fairly obvious that they dithered the background but also completely redrew in pixel-art Sonic and other things, such as completely retime every shot as well as add things like Amy's skirt fluttering when Sonic runs away from her. That's the reason why, despite the low framerate, it still looks good and crisp and not like Sewer Shark. Someone went in there and redrew a majority of the important things pixel style. I believe that either Tanks or Quazza found a frame where a retouch artist signed one of the corners. I will say that because of how the master is, it's very hard to push the colors of the characters to be more intense. Sonic in Origins is actually more saturated than the original master, but you could only push him so far before he becomes purple or whatnot. It also doesn't help that he has a seemingly different color palette in almost every shot. Also, you're likely looking at it on a PC, but it's color balanced for a TV.
There's lots of people arguing colors but no one's arguing the calibration of the camera for the photos of the original cels either...
Yeah, the colors in the original cels and the fan remaster based on them always looked too saturated to me. I'd be surprised if they intended it to look like that.
Watching on a PC hooked up to a TV so 50:50. My screen settings may have been off earlier, I'll grant you; watching YYH again the colors are not as intense this time, but Kuwabara's shirt is still sickly af. I'd be curious to see how the whole video is when color-corrected. Edit: Nvm, I don't know what I'm talking about. I color-corrected for YYH and then skipped to Sonic CD and the sky in the opening was waaaay past toxic-swamp green!
Not just a TV, a CRT, and even back then CRTs had a myriad of different color configurations between them. It's why people can't decide whether the title screen of the one of the NES Mario titles had an orange logo or a brown one.
Niiiiiiiice. Those bluuuuuuuuuues. Wait, the ending cel of Metal Sonic... I guess we have cel colour timing for the ending cutscenes now!
Saw that yesterday and came here to post it. Glad someone is already on it. It is neat to see what the colors look like before the filming process (which as others have mentioned matters in the look as well.)
Probably just an error with the AI. I didn’t even notice it until you pointed it out so it doesn’t really matter either way
This is not a restoration. You can't restore information that wasn't there in the first place. AI upscaling adds new stuff to make low-quality footage look better. If you notice the shadows on Sonic's legs and even Sonic's eyes -- they all got outlines now. It's a result of the model training they've applied in order to restore the outlines. Since some areas that had outlines became blurry pixels, other blurry areas that didn't have outlines now got them. I don't consider it a bad result at all, though. It looks really good and it's an official version of these FMVs. But, again, it's more comparable to a redraw than a restoration.
