Serial Experiments Lain DVD vs Blu-ray Comparison - Intro

It’s commonly known that for the Blu-ray release of Serial Experiments Lain, virtually all the digital effects were edited or completely remade. Not only that, but even cel film based scenes received extensive visual treatment, as opposed to the original release where film-based scenes remained largely untouched. This here is part of a series of videos where I showcase the differences between the Blu-ray and DVD versions side-by-side. I’m limited to roughly 30 second clips or else the c0py41ght f1lt3r will restrict the video worldwide. Here is a playlist of all my SEL comparison videos, so you can watch them all in one go: Most of the time, I vastly prefer blu-ray remasters over DVD anime. However, there are a few cases in which the blu-ray can be worse. One example is if the blu-ray is simply an upscale of the old version, or heavily cropped to adapt 4:3 resolutions to modern 16:9 screens. The PROPER way to remaster anime, is to produce a new digital telecine from the original production film reel. This is what most studios do, and to great results. In the case of SEL though, the studio opted for a hybrid of rescanning film elements while adding more digital effects on top; and other scenes that were 100% digital are either heavily edited are remade altogether. While the results are not bad, in my opinion it sort of takes away from the 90s spirit of SEL to try to modernize it so much. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I’ll leave it to you to decide which one you prefer. Note: for the DVD version, I am using the PAL DVD as a source. This provides greater resolution (576p) than NTSC DVDs (480p). The PAL version also happens to be sped-up in order to obtain the 25 fps requirement of PAL encoding. Meaning I can simply remux the DVD stream to a fps container in order to get it in-sync with the blu-ray, without requiring any re-encoding or inverse-telecining of any sort. (Release groups, take note: PAL DVDs are better sources than NTSC in this case) The only downside I’ve noticed, is that at some points the DVD skips ahead of the blu-ray by a single frame. But the blu-ray always catches up, which leads me to believe it’s most likely an oversight from how it was originally encoded to PAL and nothing particularly worth fixing.