Starship Troopers (1988) Opening 1 "Believe" [4K Ultra HD] [English Captions]
2The first opening to Starship Troopers upscaled to 4K Ultra HD, this is also probably one of my favourite openings in all of anime!
Credit's:
4K Upscale - Fatcatofalltime
Subtitles - Orphan / Yoroshiku Fansub (https://nyaa.si/view/1027048)
Source Video - Piyo Piyo Productions (https://nyaa.si/view/991086)
Upscale Software - Topaz Video Enhance (https://topazlabs.com/)
Source video:
For comparison purposes I uploaded the raw footage here: https://youtu.be/4RR_94-9BsI
Download link:
https://archive.org/details/starship-troopers-1988
Release notes:
This is a 4K Upscale I made of the Starship Troopers OVA from 1988, the source video is a decent quality 480p rip of a LaserDisc, I put the source video through Topaz Video Enhance in order to improve the video quality.
This also a new version of the upscale, the original version was upscaled to 1080p with the Gaia-HQ algorithm, this new version has been upscaled to 4K using the Gaia-CG algorithm which works a lot better with animation.
Some issues that were fixed with this new version as is follows:
-Low video bitrate: I used a very old version of the program to do my original upscale and it did not let me choose what bitrate I wanted the video to upscale to which has lead to really ugly compression artifacting on the original upscale.
-Messed up audio: on the old version you can hear very noticeable compression noise due to the fact I used Topaz's default audio which is very dodgy for some reason.
-Wrong algorithm: The old upscale used the Gaia-HQ algorithm which is mainly for live action footage and not anime.
- Bad video codec: since the original video was in 1080p the original upscale was stuck with YouTube's default AVC-1 codec which has a very low bitrate limit which compressed the video even more.
The actual improvments:
-High video bitrate: The slightly newer version of Topaz allows me to specifically pick what bitrate I want the video to be upscaled to which has allowed me to max out the bitrate in order to ensure maximum quality and as little compression artifacting as possible! (The bitrate is literally 189106)
-Fixed audio: The audio in this new version is the original AC-3 audio included on the rip at 224kbps which admittedly is not great but it's a massive improvement over the old audio.
-Better algorithm: I used the Gaia-CG algorithm which works a lot better with anime than the other one, this algorithm has a lot less weird upscale artifacts than the old one but still has it's issues so don't expect it to look perfect.
-Best video codec: Since I have upscaled the video to 4K Ultra HD, when it is put on YouTube it will automatically be given the VP9 video encoder which allows for a much higher bitrate than the standard AVC-1 so even if you watch this new version in 1080p it will look way better than it would if the video was just upscaled to 1080p!
Please note that this is not a perfect restoration / remaster of the series, despite the fact this video has considerably more detail and less video noise than the source video, unfortunately since it is up-scaled from an old CLV LaserDisc there are some strange quirks to the video such as strong colour bleed around most objects.
P.S.
I am just gonna write "FUCK" here so that the algorithm does not mark this video as "for kids" (meaning that comments and sharing would be disabled), and for good measure "CUNT" "SHITE" "SUCK MY DICK!" "BITCH!"... Dear YouTube Algorithm: FUCK OFF!