The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? (English Subtitles) 4K Remastered Set [4K ULTRA HD & Blu-ray / Limited Release] Customer Reviews

SDF Macross is one of the first Anime series I became Very involved with when I was a teenager, years after anime like "Mach GoGo" and "Gatchaman" when I was much younger. I did not get to view this "Macross The Movie" story when it was first released, although I understand this is a movie version of the story from the entire original series... but drawn 'updated'! I am thrilled that I am finally able to own this Classic, "Macross: Do You Remember Love" 4K Remastered film, from CDJapan! Stunning and beautiful anime!!

I've been a macross fan since I was 4 years old and dreamed of finally owning an official release of DYRL with english subs for most of my life. A landmark release due to the english subs and as many people as possible need to buy this release, Vote with your wallet fellow macross fans. Shoji Kawamori once said when asked about robotech, "please support the original authors work", but I literally could not do that and now I can, so keep the english subs on the SDF macross releases coming. Just take my damn money!! I was shocked to see a 1 star review comparing this 4k remaster to botch jobs that use AI to automatically clean the image with zero supervision or any kind of human oversight, the western dragon ball fans know all too well what botched looks like. Akira 4k was a smeary mess, the Ghost in the Shell 4k was great, so it's kind of hit and miss as to how this turns out. With what is known about the remaster process for this movie, AI was used sparingly, and due to having human oversight, every frame would've been checked and rechecked as this movie is considered precious. It used a 5K scan of the original negative, up from the 2k scan of the original blu ray (which made the blurry scenes more pronounced even then), this massive a resolution comes with drawbacks, everything you aren't supposed to be able to see such as genuine imperfections that wouldn't be visible on a film projector, not just the expected film grain, will show up and with amazing clarity. That wouldn't be a product to release to the public as the image would appear dirty/marked in ways that is not visible to the human eye but would be visible after a 5k scan. That said this movie is a true 4k scan and not an AI upscale, however it was downscaled to 4k from 5k. The detail on Minmays light up dress for example, that couldn't be seen as well until this release, a whole 40 years later. I have seen the DVD nearly 20 years ago, seen the compressed footage on a PlayStation 1 game, seen the 2016 blu ray and can say, without a shadow of doubt, this movie never looked better. Certain things are to be expected such as certain scenes having the sharpness increased so much makes the out of focus scenes that cannot be improved up as it's in the original film, seem more obviously blurry than before, this is due to contrast in increased sharpness and not a decrease in quality.

In my humble opinion this is the best 'Macross: Do You Remember Love?' has ever looked! The 2016 BD looked good for its day but this is ten times better. The amount of clarity and line detail are off the charts here! So what if Mister Kawamori judiciously utilized a bit of AI for this restoration. Despite some inherently softer scenes that stem from the original negative, I would say it still retains the look of a hand-drawn film. The character designs and animation are flawless to my eyes. It also looks like most of the film grain was still left intact! I ordered this beautiful disc from CDJapan and it was worth every bit of the purchase price and then some. If you want to see a timeless anime classic looking its absolute best, then don't hesitate to press the order button! You'll thank yourself for buying this after observing this masterful restoration with your own eyes!

I don't understand why they went through the effort of scanning the original 32 mm footage at 5k, when they planned on ruining the image with a crappy algorithm. Apparently the goal was to remove the grain. Why would one want to do such a thing? What we percieve as filmgrain are in reality thousands of metallic particles that contain the actual image information on the celluloid. Why would you EVER want to remove that? When you remove the grain with a bad AI algorithm, which doesn't understand what it's even looking at, you remove the information that makes up the image itself! Everything looks like a picasso now! Why did the product description not mention the use of AI in this so called remaster? This is so sad. I really wanted own this beautiful movie with the best possible picture quality.