Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

---

I helped Mangomation with the restoration of the 2004 "Phantom Blood" Pilot that he got about 2 weeks ago.

Footage found by Mangomation: youtube.com/channel/UCKu_yLLzEVeo9CNNu5qSxIQ

The original footage was transferred to a DVD-RW from a master tape sometime around 2004 by a Super Techno Arts employee, despite DVD-RW being notorious for decaying the disk was in mint condition. So it could be easily ripped.

The file was a 9500kbps MPEG-2 File, to put that in comparison most DVDs are about 4000kbps-8000kbps. However it was most likely a high bitrate because it was the only thing on the disk. The footage had no restoration and was a raw analog to digital transfer.

The main problems with the transfer was 1. Interlacing, 2. Rainbowing (a Chroma variant of Dot Crawl and usually caused by the same issue) 3. some minor noise. and 4. Haloing caused by sharpening. I used Avisynth to fix these.

First thing I used was DFMderainbow to clean up the rainbow artifacts. This got rid of ~95% of rainbows but if you look closely you can still see them, afterwards I used QTGMC for the deinterlacing, QTGMC is perhaps the best deinterlace algorithm available. Afterwards I used Dehalo_Alpha for cleaning up the halos though they are still somewhat visible. I then used a combination of KNLMeansCL and MCTemporalDenoise to remove tape noise and MPEG-2 compression artifacts. I then used AddGrainC to readd some grain as without it the footage would look a little bit too smooth. I then used Spline64Resize for upscaling to 1080p and then I brought it into Vegas for final video editing and color correction. This helped the low quality tape footage be brought up into HD and is now some of the best quality footage from the APPP era of JoJo.

Raw DVD: mega.nz/#F!XdRCHYIC!LcTnli0MlPDi-o0UbTS5Rw
Restored: mega.nz/#!zFRmUKAA!_y83SOcy9AZc4zd9ZTncdZAXbdsg0PZhIL8VxHRH1vc