The first time I encoded Gundam 0083 was from the Region 1 US DVDs back in 2006. Twenty years ago... Coincidentally, Sunrise had just released a new 5.1ch DVD-BOX that year, based on a new HD transfer that was a few years newer than the R1 versions (which themselves supposedly dated to around 2000). I never bothered with this version because it wasn't, in my opinion, a substantial visual upgrade. But the HD transfer did remain in Sunrise's vault until they eventually released a Blu-ray version *ten years later* in 2016. Despite being one of their earliest HD remasters, they didn't bother creating a new master, even though "lesser" properties of theirs - notably Outlaw Star - received HD remasters around the same time that 0083, but still saw *even newer* transfers done in 2014 for the Blu-ray release. That particular restoration remains one of the best, in my opinion. So here we are in 2026, twenty years after the HD remaster was made. Needless to say, it's age shows. 0083 (and 08th MS Team) - for some reason - suffers from awful black crush and lift in the transfer. The color is probably the single worst part about it, though it's clearly not transferred from the negative either (not many shows are, to be fair). There's ample gate weave that a modern transfer could help to mitigate, ugly edge enhancement, inconsistent grain, and an overall "digital" feel to the image that just doesn't hold up as well as it could. Having seen the 4K Endless Waltz screening, the sharpness and temporal stability of that transfer is pretty astounding, so it would be fantastic to see that treatment given to 0083 one day. But we're not there yet, so for now, I decided to revisit the BDs once again. I made a custom upscaling model that was trained on a few different cel shows, the big one being 0080's DVD and Blu-ray releases. *That* remaster is FAR superior to 0083's, as it was done much later, but the similarity in source material helped a lot. To be clear, this release is still 1080p, but the filtering is done higher res before being downscaled. This cleaned up lines and chroma, and was then temporally stabilized. The original BD image was then masked and blended back in to restore background detail and grain, and the video was exported out to DaVinci Resolve for a color grading pass. I had made an effort to color correct the last release, and I think I did *okay* with it. The shadow detail is never going to recovered, but at least perceptual contrast can be improved by correcting the black and white levels. This time, however, I had far more control over color separation, handling luma separately, and am much more experienced in color correction in general. I think the result, overall, is far more natural than the previous version, but obviously it's not going to be perfect. Black levels are less aggressively separated this time, as it created some harsh posterization artifacts on occasion in the previous release. Highlights are also more gently elevated, avoiding most of the white clipping that came before. Saturation is much more balanced this time around, avoiding oversaturation in some darker regions, but also restoring saturation to the brighter regions that was lost due to the increased contrast last time. This time, the source is hchcsen's BD remux batch, so the subtitles and audio are directly remuxed from that release. Those subs are from the UC Library series, so they're heavily revised over the original subs that were in my past version. I created a quick SRT version of the subs for hardware compatibility that's also in here. Sadly, that torrent doesn't include the clean OP/ED, Cima Special, or the BD Picture Drama, so I have ported them directly over from the previous EG release. #### Specs: **Video:** HEVC 10-bit 4:2:0 **Audio:** FLAC Japanese 2.0 (Original), Japanese 5.1 (2006 Remix), English 2.0 (1998 Dub) **Subs:** English Full (ASS), English Signs (ASS), English (SRT) ##### Some Comparisons: https://i.slow.pics/72VouMWh.webp (Remux) | https://i.slow.pics/PcgzaCtX.webp (Old) | https://i.slow.pics/D0d0uMzu.webp (New) - Black levels are contaminated in old release. https://i.slow.pics/k17WuBGO.webp (Remux) | https://i.slow.pics/yzVpzCSS.webp (Old) | https://i.slow.pics/NlbZxJqA.webp (New) - Dark regions are oversaturated in old release. https://i.slow.pics/sr6KZuoT.webp (Remux) | https://i.slow.pics/JdJvwQH3.webp (Old) | https://i.slow.pics/exg17qOK.webp (New) - Highlights clipped in old release. **All Pics:** https://slow.pics/c/oW8mcHjx