06 Fall Catalog Book2.indb - Right Stuf

Here at Right Stuf, we pride ourselves on
being a fan-oriented company – when we
release a show, we want to present it as well
as we possibly can. But in the summer of
2004, we were given our greatest challenge
yet: To Heart.
For those new to the show, To Heart is a romance series that aired in Japan back in early 1999.
It’s based on one of the most popular Japanese dating sims of all time: Aqua Plus’ To Heart. So
as you can imagine, the series is fi lled with numerous pretty girls – but it doesn’t get up caught in
the stereotypical traps of modern-day harem anime. There is no “spineless male lead” or “abusive
female love interest” here. The characters in To Heart have realistic emotions, and as they live, love
and grow, we get to take every step with them.
THE HARD WORK
And so in 2006 work fi nally began! This is the stage we’re in now – carefully going through each episode, frame by frame,
and repairing a lot of the problems in the original print. Paying close attention to every scene change, we inspect each
frame for spots, dirt, grit, glue, or any other large debris, and through the magic of the digital world, we’re able to restore
the video to a virtually spotless condition.
We’re also working hard to reduce the aforementioned frame jitter seen in the show. This has proven to be one of the more
diffi cult aspects of restoration, because many of the cels were not only off-center vertically or horizontally, but they were
also distorted when they were captured to fi lm. To fi x this, we need to fi nd a group of clean, centered frames that look
identical to the damaged frames, and use those to replace the damaged set. It’s not an easy task!
On these pages, you’ll see a few examples of glue and dirt that have been removed. The frame jitter fi xes are a bit harder
to show in print form, but if you watch the old version and the new side-by-side, the improvement is startling.
THE RESULTS
Well, that’s up to you – the fans – to judge! This past August, we debuted the fi rst fully-restored episode of To Heart at
Otakon to much success; and we hope that when you pick up a copy next spring, you’ll be just as pleased.
We’ll be glued to our computers until this release is ready to go, so see you next spring, anime fans!
Judy DeFrieze
Assistant Producer
Unfortunately, while those in Japan already knew To Heart from the video game, our US audience
was unlikely to have ever heard of the series. In order to build an audience, we decided to release
To Heart’s sister series fi rst: Comic Party. Absolutely fi lled with references and cameos to To Heart,
Comic Party was a comedy series that mainstream fans could easily identify with, and it became very
successful in the States. Finally, we knew the time was right to bring To Heart to English-speaking
anime fans everywhere! There was just one little problem… the video quality of the masters we
received was so poor that we simply couldn’t release it.
LESSONS ON FILM
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
Although most anime today is sketched and then scanned into computers and stored digitally, To
Heart was created before the big digital revolution – it was sketched and then traced onto handpainted
cels and captured completely on fi lm. After all the capture was done, the editor stepped in
and spliced, or glued, all of the various pieces of fi lm together to create the fi nal version of the show.
It was a pretty regular process in the animation industry back then.
Unfortunately for To Heart, two things happened during this process. First, sometimes the cels
weren’t aligned properly when they were being captured to fi lm… which means that the image
seems to move or jitter slightly on-screen. Second, the adhesive used during the splicing process
seems to have been rather inexpertly applied, and thus every time a scene changes, there are giant
blobs of white along the top or bottom of the frame. This looks like damaged fi lm, but it’s actually the
glue they used to patch the fi lm back together!
AFTER
Of course, then there are also all the typical problems associated with shows produced on fi lm: over
time, the fi lm itself begins to degrade, forming visible spots, along with a build up of dust and dirt.
One of the best ways to repair all of these issues is to do a complete fi lm restoration. However, we
quickly learned that that would be impossible – the original To Heart fi lm masters were destroyed
years ago, so the materials we had now were all we were going to get. Unwilling to settle, our
search for a way to restore the video began.
THE GREAT RESTORATION SEARCH
One of the most time-consuming parts of the To Heart restoration project wasn’t the
actual restoration at all – it was fi nding a good way to restore the video in the fi rst
place! Without the original fi lm source, all the corrections were going to have to be
done digitally. There’s a lot of great video restoration software out there used by big
Hollywood studios – but unfortunately they have price tags that only a big Hollywood
studio could pay. Cheaper programs could fi x some of the issues, but would also
cause washed out color or video distortion. We didn’t want to trade one set of
problems for another.
But after a long search, the solution was found! We came across a great software
suite that would require us to do a bit more by hand, but the output was clean, which
was just what we were looking for.