Dragon’s Heaven is a one-shot OVA released on VHS in 1988 and on DVD some years later. It will likely never get an HD release, in part because the creator has stated he feels DVD media is "good enough" and worries that HD would change the look too much. I think that's unfortunate, and I want to show that that the show is, in fact, even more beautiful in HD.

I know that upscaling anime is controversial, and this anime in particular moreso than most, but I am hoping that the result shows that, with the right workflow, this can be done tastefully and convincingly. AI upscaling is a powerful tool, but it’s not so powerful that one can simply scale any content to any resolution on default settings and have it look good, which is why most anime you see scaled from SD to 4K looks like it’s had all the detail and hand-drawn character sandblasted clean off. I’ve been experimenting with different workflows and I feel like I’ve worked out a better approach.

Dragon’s Heaven is a perfect example because it is an especially difficult film to upscale to 4K. It has only been released on standard-def DVD, it has exceptionally detailed artwork, it features scenes with heavy artificial noise/static overlaid on the scene, and even live action segments. It’s also a controversial choice, as the director Makoto Kobayashi has said that he doesn’t like HD media because he feels it changes the character of the image and the tone of the colors. So I was very careful to use a light touch with this. While I didn’t entirely avoid sharpening and color correction, I tried to use balanced settings that felt “realistic” and authentic to the artwork, and then dialed anything I did down beyond that for good measure.

One of the big "tells" of AI upscaling anime in particular is that the sharpening process that gives it that crisp look also tends to make the line work thicker, and makes the color of lines blended/lighter to compensate. Where there's a lot of fine line work or grain, sometimes you can end up with splotchy "watercolor" artifacts, which is generally a sign that you've gone too far. So keep an eye on your lines and make sure they stay black when adjusting your settings and don't be afraid to pull down the sharpening and De-blur if your lines start getting too chunky or transparent.

I used a multi-pass method to achieve this result. Scaling standard def content all the way to 4K is not a good idea, and yields a vastly different result than stepping up to it in increments. So first I did two 1080p passes using the Proteus Fine Tune model, one with a conservative amount of sharpening and de-blur – this creates a crisp, beautiful image in ideal circumstances, but also more clearly shows flaws and artifacts. I then did a second “safe” pass without the de-blur and with lower sharpening. I then blended these two in Premiere and dissolved between them at different levels to get the ideal image in each shot. Shots with obvious artifacts could be covered up, while others could be left sharper. I didn't spend a lot of time on this step, I did not feel the need to be especially precise, as a blend between both tended to look nice 90% of the time and it was just about covering up the outliers.

This gave me an optimized 1080p version to work with. I fed this back into Topaz and took it up to 4K. For this final pass, I dialed down the detail reconstruction to near zero, as I had enough detail and didn’t want to introduce new artifacts, and carefully dialed up a small amount of sharpening and deblur just to give the line work structure and make it look like a high-res scan, but not enough to add noise to the scenes with the heavy static. When it was done, I scrubbed through it and found two shots that had problematic noise artifacts, and redid those with less aggressive sharpening and edited them back in.

Obviously, the result is not perfect. It isn’t a native 4K scan. There are still some lingering artifacts. A trained eye can always tell. But I hope that it’s tasteful and preserves the incredible artwork in this anime. And that it is instructive/informative to those who wish to get a more “realistic” result out of their upscaling.

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