Dream Tropes Wiki/Digital Destruction

Ah, digital restoration and remastering — a wonderful thing, really. It cleans up the picture quality, restores faded colors, gets the hisses and pops out of the soundtrack, oversaturates the colors, erases or thins out lines...

Wait, what?! Digital restoration tampering with the original footage?

Well, yeah, no, it's actually pretty true. Digital restoration is an expensive, time-consuming process. It's expensive, takes a long time, requires careful attention and care... and did we mention it was expensive?

Digital destruction is often the result of people in general having the tendency to want to just get the stuff out as quickly as possible, all with a "digitally restored/digitally remastered" label stamped on it to maximize profits. Or worse, they didn't even know what harm they were doing to begin with; often the available tech is deceptively difficult to get good results from (as anyone who actually understands digital image processing will tell you, things like noise reduction are actually really hard to do without some subtle loss of detail).

Digital Destruction comes in several forms and can vary-from oversharpening to flat-out erasing lines of artwork in cartoons, removing whole sounds or dialogue, oversaturating the colors, patterns (fuzzy electrical patterns scattering around an image or drawing), increasing the contrast, overzealous grain-smoothing that unintentionally gives the picture a synthetic looking appearance, etc.

## Film

* The version of *Help! I'm a Fish* used on the 2016 bargain-bin DVD multi-pack from Echo Bridge appears to be a raw transfer from a PAL print used for television airings in the United Kingdom, so there's tape distortion and blurriness in some spots.

## Live Action TV

* The Polygon prints of the early *Schweetzman* episodes seem to be ripped directly from tape, instead of the later episodes which were ripped from the 25th anniversary DVD release. As such, tape distortion and oversaturated colors are common.

## Western Animation

* The HD remastered version of *Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat* was mostly spared from this, the remastered version is mostly just the image cropped into 16:9 with the audio redone for digital audio systems. Given VidTrax Ltd., the company behind the restoration, is El Kadsreian, and *Sagwa* is very popular in El Kadsre, this is a given. And like with the other shows, the remaster also involved cleaning up animation errors (such as reanimating the Three Daughters on a bench whilst watching Tai-Tai put on makeup in "Tung the Singing Cricket" to correct them inexplicably switching places a couple frames later and adding Baba Miao's collar to a frame where it was suddenly missing in "Sister Act").
	+ However "Sheegwa and the Blizzard" appears to use alternate takes for some dialogue.
* The remastered version of the *Redwall* cartoon had this happen to "Sparra's Kingdom" due to Nelvana using an alternate version of the episode for the audio track. Notably, some lines use different takes or entire lines are different, and Basil Stag Hare is voiced by Martin Berger using a Brooklyn accent instead of Richard Binsley using a "WWII fighter pilot" accent. (Berger was the original choice for the character and recorded some episodes as Basil but Binsley took over due to Brian Jacques not approving of Berger's choice of accent).
	+ Other issues with the remaster (aside from the usual complaining about the change of the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 by opening up the sides of the frame and cropping the top and bottom) include occasional animation errors (the result of Nelvana using rough, uncorrected versions of some of the animation data), but thankfully no DVNR.
* When the *PB&J Otter* episode "Tub O' Butter / El Dorado, Seat of Gold" is aired on Range, the episode is broadcast sped up a little more than normal. Compare this to the Disney Junior airings and on Range On Demand where it is just fine (due to using a different master).