Digital Destruction

This is what really happens if you stay out past midnight.

"For many years, Cinderella was not the right colors. Her hair [is] dusty blonde, and her dress is silver. And over the years, we've seen her hair look the color of Cheez Whiz. We've seen her dress be bright blue. We've seen all sorts of stuff."

— Eric Goldberg, explaining why Cinderella's 2005 restoration was deemed unsuitable for 4K releases.

Ah, the Remaster—a wonderful thing, really. Take a piece of older media and clean up the picture quality, restore faded colors, get the hisses and pops out of the soundtrack, and offer three different screen sizes and two different surround sound mixes. However, it's a time-consuming process that's expensive and requires careful attention to the master records of the original. If possible you may even coordinate with the original creators to preserve every important detail.

Digital Destruction is when attempting to update the viewing format of a work results in dramatically altered images or sound mixing that results in a loss of detail. Among possible issues include:

• Alterations to the Aspect Ratio that loses visual information.
• Skewed color timing creating a persistent tint to the overall footage.
• Excessive use of restoration tools or widgets that muddles skin tones and black levels.
• Attempts to update the work with modern styles and maximize use of modern viewing formats that result in details being lost even though the image format is bigger.

This often comes about because of the tendency to want to just get the stuff out as quickly as possible, all with a "digitally restored/digitally remastered" label stamped on it. Or worse, they didn't even know what harm they were doing to begin with; often the available tech is deceptively difficult to get good results from. As anyone who actually understands digital image processing will tell you, things like noise reduction and grain removal are actually really hard to do without at least some loss of detail (which can range from subtle to distractingly obvious), to the extent where preserving film grain is almost universally considered the better option among videophiles.^note At least in the west; in Japan, audiences tend to prefer removing the grain to "modernize" the visuals, to the extent where preserving it is bound to result in massive backlash over there, thus resulting in grain removal being a very common move in anime remasters.

Digital Destruction comes in several forms and can vary-from over-sharpening to flat-out erasing lines of artwork in cartoons, removing whole sounds or dialogue, oversaturating the colors, patterns (fuzzy electrical patterns scattering around an image or drawing), increasing the contrast, overzealous grain-smoothing that unintentionally gives the picture a smudgy, synthetic appearance, cropping 4:3 content to 16:9 and losing important parts of the image, etc. Animation tends to be a particularly big victim of this when it does happen, largely because the reliance on fine details in both lineart and backgrounds lends to automatic processes very frequently mistaking these details for dirt and wiping them off.

This happens with digital remasters of music as well. The most commonly known phenomenon is mastering at the volume levels of modern music, creating excess limiting and distortion that sacrifice the cleanliness, clarity and overall dynamics of the sound, but there are plenty of other destructive practices used as well. These include drastic alterations of the frequency equalization^note (you know, stuff like bass, treble, mid-range and all those things you change with a graphic EQ) that don't suit the source material, excessive noise reduction that sucks much of the detail and life out of the recording (basically the audio equivalent of excess grain removal), and overuse of synthesized harmonics^note (used primarily to emulate low and high frequency reproduction that wasn't possible with the original equipment) which replace the organic feel of the original recording with a cold, mechanical one.

Naturally, this is a great source of contempt for collectors, purists, and even the common customer alike (the ones that are savvy enough to be aware of it, anyways). It's the total opposite of a "great" restoration, in a nutshell.

The Trope Namer is this article from John Kricfalusi's blog, in which he feels the restorations of old cartoons are actually ruining them, rather than making them better. The specific issues he complains about result from over-zealous application of certain adjustments, namely color saturation and sharpening. Ed, Edd n Eddy creator Danny Antonucci has also commented on the issue (even though his works are more recent).

Note that in some cases reported issues may not be because the remaster was botched, but because the wide variety of viewing formats may not be compatible with what is considered the optimal viewing experience. Expecting something to look the same on an IMAX Projector, a smart phone and a CRT TV is a lost cause.

Compare Remaster. For the video game equivalent of this trope, see Porting Disaster. For the musical equivalent, see Loudness War. May also tie into Bad Export for You. In particularly bad instances of this, to preserve the way the footage originally looked you gotta Keep Circulating the Tapes. Also see Visual Compression, George Lucas Altered Version.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• The official upload of the Carly Cardinal Public Service Announcement not only has white noise during the commercial, but visible tape damage before the boy's line about people damaging trees.

Anime

• When Anpanman was remastered onto DVD, those episodes would have some tweaks with the knockout effect if someone or something gets punched. In the pre-1998 episodes, the show would use two stills of different color knockout stars and flash them for a millisecond and use lightning strobe effects for lightning. However, due to the "Electric Soldier Porygon" incident at the time, the knockout effect was changed to make the still images to be 2-3 seconds each and some scenes involving lightning and electric sparks would be slowed down. The show would make a new technique where the stars would be animated flying all over by the time Creampanda was introduced. However, this was changed for home video releases for 518a to 587b (the last couple episodes of the cel animated era), a few selected episodes from 1998 and 1999 for the Favorites Series and a few double length episodes where they simplified it by just showing the two stills for 3-5 seconds each for unknown reasons.
• Funimation and Toei Animation are notorious in the anime home video domain for being repeat offenders with the Dragon Ball franchise:
  • North America
  • The first uncut Dragon Ball Z DVDs were sourced from videotape transfers with film damage and color bleeding. They were also very poorly encoded by modern standards and were cancelled before the series could be completed.
  • This was followed by the infamous "orange brick" season sets, which were "restored" with cropping, over-saturated colors, and excessive Digital Video Noise Reduction (DVNR) which removed line art while failing to deal with numerous appearances of dust and scratches. Funimation's marketing of these sets presented misleading side-by-side comparisons^note  the 'original footage' was evidently just the remastered version with artificial grain added and gave the impression that viewers were seeing extra footage with the new framing^note  while the remastered framing did have 10% 'new' footage beyond the sides of the original, it removed 25% from the top and bottom that were intended to be seen. Fans were outraged because not only were Japanese DVDs remastered frame by frame from the original film negatives,^note  Mostly 16mm, but 35mm in the case of the movies and a few episodes of the Frieza saga that were produced that way but this was the first complete release by Funimation. FUNi had actually cancelled the single-disc releases to make way for the remastered sets, and for years anyone who wanted the uncut version was forced to buy the cropped remaster.
    • Dragon Ball Z Abridged uses the Orange Brick sets for the first season, which combined with the consumer-level 2008 video production and compression causes the whole season to look very ugly. Season 2 onward uses the Japanese remaster and the show looks much better as a result.
  • "Remastered" Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball GT sets followed, which did not use new film scans like DBZ did. Instead, these were simply the broadcast transfers with DVNR, extra color saturation, and (for Dragon Ball) a significantly zoomed-in picture. These were seen as inferior to the untouched transfers, but were at least in the original aspect ratio.
  • Somehow Funimation halved the frame rate of the Dragon Ball: Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle remaster, resulting in an incredibly jumpy picture.
  • Less than a year after the Orange Bricks, DBZ was released again, this time using the remaster from the Japanese "Dragon Box" sets. Frustratingly, these were limited edition and soon became impossible to find at their original asking price.
  • Two months after the Dragon Boxes, Funimation began releasing the series on Blu-ray with "Level 1.1". While the film prints used were not ideal, this remaster was uncropped and did not use the excessive tampering seen on the Orange Bricks. However, these were cancelled after just two volumes because, according to FUNi, "the cost incurred to restore these shows has outweighed the suggested retail price we were able to pass along to our fans."
  • A couple of years after Level 1.2, Funimation returned to the Season Set model, including the cropped video, over-saturated colors and noise reduction. The filtering on these sets was excessive to the point where they barely had more detail than the original DVDs from the 2000s.◊ This remaster particularly struggled with the the background paintings, as can be seen in this comparison with DBZ Kai◊ where the detail on the cliff face has been smoothed over and the tree trunks have been nearly completely erased. Even the infamous "Orange Brick" DVDs (left) didn't have this problem compared to the Blu-ray seasons (right).◊
  • Tellingly, the main selling point for the 30th anniversary Blu-rays was the 4:3 aspect ratio. Unfortunately, this is just an uncropped version of the previous Blu-ray Seasons, with all of the digital tampering carried over and a layer of fake grain added on top of the grain removal. Infuriatingly, there is evidence ^note primarily the way all the dirt, scratches, and most of all, tape marks were removed that they completed the work necessary for a "Level"-style release, but applied this filtering anyway. FUNi didn't help themselves by posting a blog that compared the raw◊ images◊ to their "remastered"◊ version◊. The set's detractors were quick to point out how much more detail could be seen in the raw scan.
  • Japan and Worldwide
  • Toei's HD remasters for some of the Dragon Ball Z movies have sparked some controversy for being censored on the Blu-ray release. Additionally, the Blu-ray releases suffer from some very heavy DVNR, with Dragon Ball Z: The Return of Cooler in particular being comparable to Funimation's work on the Z series. Thankfully, pre-DVNR, uncensored versions of all of these appeared on Amazon Prime and Netflix in Japan prior to the Blu-ray releases, and have remained there ever since.
  • While the quality of the remasters for Dragon Ball Z Kai are largely up to debate,^note even though Q Tec was working off of the original camera negatives for the series, they scanned all the film out of focus to reduce grain, resulting in an image so blurry it's barely better than the standard-definition DVDs from 2003. Despite the blurry picture however, the colour correction is wonderful, and the picture was very well cleaned up, making it a definite upgrade over standard-def DBZ... Just not the true "HD refreshed version" that the marketing had got people hoping for. opinions on Toei's in-house remaster of The Final Chapters are much more unanimous, with many criticizing how the remaster seems to take a lot of cues from Funimation in terms of being aggressively degrained and cropped to 16:9 widescreen with poor framing.
  • For some reason, many of the Dragon Ball releases have been given a green color cast, including all versions of DBZ Kai's Buu arc, the Japanese HD movie remasters, and several international releases of Dragon Ball Super: Broly. The North American Broly release had the green tint, but the UK one did not. The Japanese Blu-Ray release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero has the same issue; this master will also be used for the American release.
• Some early BD upscales of newer digitally animated anime suffered from loss of detail due to heavy-handed DVNR. The poster child for this is Samurai Champloo, which FUNimation tacitly admitted to when it was re-mastered for a later re-release (this new version was good enough that is was also used on the Japanese BDs).
• The 25th anniversary of AKIRA overall is pretty good, but the blacks in the movie can be pretty inconsistent in color, also showing electrical distortion in some of them, giving some scenes a compressed look.
• When Funimation rereleased Tenchi Muyo! in Love as part of a box set with the other two Tenchi films on Blu-ray and DVD, they ended up releasing a version of the film that has horrific color-correction issues. All of the blues have been turned green (which also affects Sasami and Kiyone's hair colors; Lord knows how Funimation overlooked that), the sepia-toned scene near the start of the film has been turned bright yellow, and somebody seems to have punched up the color quite a considerable amount, making the whole film eye-gougingly bright. Pioneer Entertainment's original 1996 THX LaserDisc and 1997 DVD release, however, had none of these issues, being a direct transfer from the original film negatives. For those interested, here◊ are◊ some◊ comparisons.◊
• In 2014, Viz Media announced that they would become the first studio worldwide to release Sailor Moon on Blu-ray. Since multiple seasons' worth of 16mm film elements no longer exist, their sets for the first three had to work with the same masters used for Toei's 2009 Japanese DVDs. Unfortunately, comparisons between the first set of Blu-ray Discs and these DVDs reveal the former to have more DVNR and ghosting. Additionally, Viz's DVDs encoded the 4:3 picture into 16:9 with black bars on the left and right sides, making it appear low-quality by even DVD standards. Toei eventually upscaled the show to HD themselves, ensuring improved picture quality for the last two seasons, and for the "Complete Season" series of Blu-ray re-releases for the whole show.
• Most season 1 videos of Corrector Yui circulating today are unfortunately derived from rebroadcast prints that are cropped to 16:9 from the original 4:3.
• 8 Man After had added 5.1 sound effects and "restored" picture when the English dub was released on DVD.
• Speed Racer:
  • The Speed Racer Enterprises home video releases render many of the episodes in 50Hz format, causing the audio itself to be slightly faster and sound pitch-shifted in places. The only episodes that don't have this issue are the ones included in the 1993 Speed Racer: The Movie. ^note "The Car Hater" and the two parts of "The Mammoth Car". The US Laserdiscs are sourced from 16mm TV prints, and don't have this problem.
  • The framerate was fixed when Funimation released the series under their belt, but their release has very noticeable audio glitches. "The Great Plan" in particular has the first part obviously time-compressed with a noticeably higher pitched audio from Speed Racer Enterprises, and part 2 has a noticeable drop in the audio during the recap. Episode 5 ("The Secret Engine, Part 1") also suffers a noticeable audio blip in the first minute and a half of the episode. And the audio for the majority of the episodes is still pitch-shifted.
• While visual remastering for Studio Ghibli's back-catalog has always produced gorgeous results (up to and including preserving film grain), Kiki's Delivery Service seemed to get the short end of the stick on the audio department in 2010. Specifically, it had its 1998 dub tweaked for its North American DVD re-release that year, reverting the music to match the Japanese version, and removing some dialogue that were Filling the Silence^note namely, a lot of Phil Hartman's lines as Jiji, which many felt was disrespectful as this was his last movie role before his death. Unfortunately, what dialogue does remain now sounds as hard-to-hear as if the characters spoke through a fan. The fact that the edit is the only version of the English dub included on home media releases since 2010, including the more recent DVD and Blu-ray releases by GKIDS, only worsens the situation. Consequently, the 2003 Disney DVD, the only official home media release of the uncut 1998 dub from the post-VHS era, has become highly coveted.
  • Almost every Blu-ray release of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has had heavy noise reduction, lowered bass and clipping on the Japanese audio track. Earlier releases on DVD and LaserDisc had unfiltered audio tracks that better preserved the dynamics of the audio, and were much more natural and crisper than the later Blu-ray Remaster, at the cost of having more analogue noise (which is natural to the film).2011 US Disney Blu-ray release preserved the audio characteristics of the LaserDisc audio track while being in a superior 24-bit lossless format like the Blu-ray. Unfortunately, Disney's release has been made out-of-print in favour of a new rerelease from GKIDS, which has the same denoised audio track from the Japanese release.
  • The Blu-ray Remaster Castle in the Sky has had botched Japanese audio mixes on the various Blu-ray releases as well. The Japanese and UK audio releases have a narrower soundstage (sounding less stereo-y) and some amplification edits compared to earlier releases on DVD and LaserDisc, which also have their own issues while still being closer to the original theatrical mix. The 2012 US Disney Blu-ray, however, has a superior audio track that does stay faithful to the original theatrical mix and preserves the original wider soundstage, while having none of the issues from the LaserDisc and DVD versions, and being in a superior 24-bit lossless format, which something the Japanese release didn't even have. Unfortunately, the subtitles are inaccurate dubtitles based on the Disney dub, and it too has been made out-of-print with GKIDS rerelease, which has the worst audio track of the film, having the amplification edits from the Japanese release AND some new audio glitches not present on any other version. The dialogue is panned hard to the left two-thirds into the film, and the ending song ends abruptly. At least the wider soundstage from the Disney Blu-ray has been preserved in GKIDS' rerelease.
• The Blu-ray release of the early pre-Ghibli Isao Takahata film Horus: Prince of the Sun's has suffered such extreme amounts of smoothing and DNR courtesy of Q Tec. The destruction applied to the film has lead many people to mistake the native HD remaster for a LaserDisc upscale. And the saddest part is that the older DVD and LaserDisc versions looked even worse.
• On the first episode of Digimon Adventure 02 (at least on the Netflix prints), if you look closely at the first few seconds of the episode in the top left corner, you can see a TV-Y7 screen bug obviously blurred out. The opening intro is also cut out as well.
  • Most of the Adventure episodes have tons of DVD artifacts on the Netflix versions of them. At least two of them (both the second part of two-parter episodes, including the Grand Finale) cut the intro.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995) has been released on Blu-ray twice in North America, both times with issues. The first release primarily showcases the heavily altered 2009 cut of the film with the original version included as a bonus feature, but in very poor quality, seemingly sourced from an outdated master. The more recent "25th anniversary edition" features a fresh HD transfer of the original cut, but suffers from a botched sound mix full of missing effects and inaudible dialogue, as well as new subtitles which are awkwardly written and full of typos. In 2020, a new 4K Ultra HD Blu-Ray was released, which fixed the previous version's sound mix and subtitles, only to add a new audio flub by using the English release's end credits theme by U2 (under the pseudonym Passengers) on both the English and Japanese audio tracks, whereas past releases only had the Passengers theme on the English audio track and the original credits music on the Japanese audio.
• Inuyasha:
  • The first two volumes of the 2020 North American Blu-ray sets feature an odd frame-skipping issue that makes some panning shots look jittery.
  • Inuyasha The Movie 2: The Castle Beyond The Looking Glass: The English 5.1 track on the Blu-ray accidentally uses an unpolished earlier cut of the dub instead of the finalized version from all previous physical and digital releases. The English Stereo 2.0 track contains the correct version of the dub.
• The American, British and French Blu-ray releases of Re:Zero were criticized by several reviewers for having visible color banding and compression, which is quite egregious for a release of a 2016 anime.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Pokémon: The First Movie got a 1999 remaster in Japan^note (Often referred to as the Kanzenban, or Complete Version. This is also the version most are familiar with in the West, since it was the one used for the dub) that expands on Mewtwo's origin, redraws many of the visuals in CG and desaturates the color balance in order to give the movie a much darker and menacing tone. While the question whether the CG visuals look better or not is a hot debate within the fandom, few agree that the color change was a good thing.
  • Pokémon Heroes suffers from an intense blue tint, which made all the colors darker. Averted with non-4Kids versions (eg. the original Japanese) which have accurate colors instead.
  • The US Blu-Ray release of Indigo League has a filter applied to it to make it "look HD", and very few fans noticed. The Australian/UK releases are worse.
  • After "Electric Soldier Porygon," the preceding 37 episodes were heavily edited to reduce strobing (particularly during Pikachu's electric attacks.) While the effect has been slightly redone over time and looks much closer to original airing on current Japanese prints (only throwing away major 'problem' frames like black/white flashes,) most international prints (including the Season 1 Blu-Ray) have looked generally the same since 1998, as in somebody mashed the freeze-frame button on their TV remote and hoped for the best.
• The French Blu-Ray release of Children of the Sea has a heavy case of color banding on par with the aforementionned Re:Zero releases. In an anime film produced in 2019.
• Robo Tech Part 1: The Macross Saga: For the Blu-ray, they added noise to sharpen the picture, but it ended up being unbearably grainy. Also, they didn't even clean the picture. There are black spots and white spots popping up on the film constantly. Reviewers have compared this release to looking at a VHS under a microscope.

Comics

• A related phenomenon in the comic book industry was Theakstonization. To do reprints of pre-computer comics, you needed the original monochrome lineart so you can recolor using modern techniques. For many old comics, that art no longer exists — the only thing available is the actual comics. Therefore, you have to copy one of the comics and remove the color. Prior to the 1990s, the only economic way of doing this was to cut the pages out of an original comic, and bleach the color out, thus producing monochrome art. This process actually destroyed the originals, and could apparently reduce grown men to tears. In many cases, though, the cheap paper the books were printed on was crumbling away due to age, and it was a rock and a hard place situation; destroy the physical book or risk the content being lost forever.
• Another way of digitally destroying old comics is to scan them at an inadequate resolution - that way lines will become pixellated and jagged when printed. Ironically, the problem becomes worse the better paper you print on, as a hard, high quality paper soaks up the ink less than a pulpy one. Some of this occurred in the Finnish completed works of Carl Barks.
• EC Comics: Some of the color reprints of the horror comics tended to completely alter the original colors and add elements that clearly weren't in the original comic art, such as photoshop gradients. They wised up and started using the original colors in later reprints.
• The 1990's reprint of the old Felix the Cat comics, Felix Keeps on Walkin, deliberately altered the original artwork, redoing all of the colors digitally and adding gradients that weren't in the original art, and its linernotes even blatantly snark about how they removed bits of the original artwork, such as the expressive cartoon spark lines that pop up around Felix's head.
• The various Mad Bathroom Companions all suffer from this, being novel-sized reprints of magazines that were more than twice their height and width when they were originally issued. Not only did they shrink them down but also cropped off the edges of some of the comics to make them fit, and some of them are so close to the spine that as much as an inch of the page is completely unreadable unless you're willing to tear the page out.

Film — Animated

Non-Disney Examples

• The Yellow Submarine "Director's Cut" restoration by MGM attempts to lighten, brighten or saturate colors. After all, if you're trying to clean up a color cartoon, you don't want dingy colors. This would be a minor problem, except that it was done everywhere — including scenes in Meanie-occupied Pepperland. Yes, "faded color = grey" is starting to become a film convention, but it wasn't one back then, and the hints of medium pastel are somewhat distracting to anyone who doesn't yet accept the convention. The 2012 Blu-ray release amended this by painstakingly cleaning up every frame individually.
• The 70th anniversary DVD and Blu-ray releases of Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels was "restored" by not only cropping the footage into widescreen,^note The film was made in a 4:3 scale, and this widescreen altering was a result of Executive Meddling, who would not simply allow a widescreen option to be included but also using a muddy, blurry, badly DVNRed transfer. The 60th anniversary Winstar DVD release uses a far better transfer, but that version suffers from digital interlacing.
  • The Winstar DVD also had a "restored" version that was aurally altered, with a new stereophonic soundtrack. The sound effects were redone, and the results were not seamless, such that one can painfully tell the difference between the mono and stereo versions without comparison!
  • Averted with Thunderbean's 2014 Blu-ray release, which is restored from a 35mm print to faithfully resemble its original theatrical release, such as keeping dust prints in shots, keeping the colors bright and retaining rounded corners on the edge of the frame. See for yourself.
• The "Bugville" DVD release of Mr. Bug Goes to Town was apparently a raw transfer from an old LaserDisc of the film, and it shows; marred by atrocious digital compression that makes it painful to even look at—you would think you were watching a bootleg of it, and it's supposed to be a official release! Fortunately, there is no interlacing and DVNR issues otherwise.
• The DVD release of An American Tail was horribly tampered with. Background music and sound effects were changed or added, new voice-overs were inserted (which wasn't the bad part, since they seem to have come from the original recording sessions), and the orphans who bully Fievel near the end had their voices re-dubbed for unknown reasons.
• All North American releases of The Brave Little Toaster, from the original VHS releases all the way to DVD, were taken from a worn-out copy of the film used for festival screenings rather than the original negative, resulting in the picture appearing to wiggle at the beginning. There is also some noticeable flicker in the image and a heavy amount of film grain. This particular print was also used for Japanese releases of the movie, as well as the 2009 Brazilian DVD. Astonishingly, the European and Australian releases are taken from a much cleaner print with none of these issues, which makes it incredibly baffling that this is still the case.
• Jetlag Productions' version of "Snow White" is blurry and has tape distortion on the multi-pack DVD set, but oddly is fine on the single release by itself.
• Olive Films' 2017 DVD and Blu-ray release of Rock-A-Doodle is noticeably higher pitched, due to MGM choosing to remaster the film from a 50Hz print.
• DVD and streaming releases of The Care Bears Movie feature the credits on a black background instead of blue.
• A common occurrence with early computer-animated films (whether they be entirely made with computers or hand-drawn digitally) is that, whether the original data exists or not, the video transfers are always taken from film stock (most of the transfers were made back in the days of Laserdisc and early DVD, and were riddled with telecine wobble, dirt, and other artifacts). Examples of this include Toy Story^note VHS and Laserdisc editions only, Antz, The Prince of Egypt, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Anastasia, Titan A.E., and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. Once Pixar released A Bug's Life and the first two Toy Story films on DVD using digital masters, other studios began following suit as well. Even Evangelion: 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone. was sourced from a 35mm printout despite being a 2007 movie and the DVD version having slight animation upgrades compared to the theatrical release, resulting in darker and muddier colors, as well as color bleed. The later remastered 1.11 on Blu-ray, however, would be taken directly from the digital source and be much clearer and vibrant as a result.
  • YMMV on this, however, as some people prefer the grittier and more vintage look of digital films on 35mm than the pure digital transfer, which can be seen as too artificial to some people. This is the reason why Studio Ghibli and Studio Ponoc prefer to add artificial filters on their digital films to simulate 35mm film grain, smoothing and gate weave, even for their most recent films (one of them even being an All-CGI Cartoon). Another example is the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy; despite the latter two entries being fully digital and receiving high-quality DVD transfers, some fans prefer to search for scans of the 35mm prints, because they appear closer to how the Original Trilogy looks. Films like Dune (2021), Dune: Part Two and The Batman (2022) have also been sourced from 35mm printouts despite being shot digitally, specifically to enhance the gritty feeling of 35mm film.
• In the European Spanish HBO Max release of We Bare Bears: The Movie, the last ten minutes of the movie were accidentally cut, resulting in the movie ending with Trout successfully capturing the bears with a last shot of Grizzly trapped in a cage in the reserve alone without his brothers, with the following scene being the credits scene featuring other bears celebrating happily with happy music.
• Son of the White Horse was first restored for a DVD release in 2005. The result was an eyesore, with excessively over-saturated pink and blue colors that muted out all the browns and greys (making the grey Three-Headed Dragon purple) and faded out intricate details like the White Mare's fine pinkish shading. To a movie in which the change and contrast of colors play crucial roles in visual symbolism, this was a huge downgrade. There were also numerous glitches like blank or misaligned frames. This was the only common version of the movie until it finally received a good 4K remaster in 2019 that restored the original, more earthly colors and missing details. However, even this updated restoration contained one barely noticeable glitch where a few frames would repeat.
• The Curse of the Were-Rabbit has extreme amounts of DNR in the long-awaited Blu-ray release in North America. However, the non-US Blu-ray releases have no DNR and beautifully preserve the film grain and integrity of the image.
• The Allied Artists Classics DVD of Shinbone Alley used a poor transfer from a videotape master, resulting in washed-out colors, a blurry picture and even visible tape distortion; while the cut used has the opening slightly changed.

Disney Examples:

• DVD and Blu-ray releases of the 1937-1989 entries in the Disney Animated Canon suffer from an odd variation of this. Rather than being direct re-scans of the master negatives, these releases are instead rotoscoped and recomposited frame-by-frame, color-corrected, and DVNR'd to remove any semblance of age — right down to the film grain. While this ambition is impressive in and of itself, the result is that each movie looks as if it's imitating the "look" of a digitally-animated film, and said imitation is a poor one at that, with finer details and entire pieces of linework being scrubbed away in the process of this visual pseudo-modernization. This Twitter thread by Stephen Duignan goes into more detail about the process and its repercussions. Say what you will about the current restorations of Alice in Wonderland, Bambi, and Sleeping Beauty, but as aggressive as they were they still came out beautifully and relatively faithful to the originals. Others didn't have quite so much luck, however...
• Pinocchio:
  • Curiously, in the 2009 DVD, Jiminy's lines "Right!" (just after the "If your whistle's weak" line) and "Look out, Pinoc!" from the end of the "Give A Little Whistle" song have been edited out—apparently this was the result of a sound mixing error, as the line can still be heard in the film's mono soundtrack, but not the remastered stereo soundtrack. Not an atrocity by any means, but anyone who has seen earlier prints of the film will take notice of this. Fortunately, as of April 2011, Disney started allowing owners of the Blu-ray to exchange their discs for copies with the line restored. Owners of the DVD, however, were outta-luck until 2017, when Disney accompanied Pinocchio's Digital HD debut with DVD/BD re-releases of the corrected print.
  • Additionally, the team restoring Pinocchio for its 1992 theatrical re-release used a print generations removed from the original camera negative. This resulted in the movie having an earthy color scheme, which carried on to all the home video releases of The '90s. When scanning the original negative for later DVD and Blu-ray releases, Disney reportedly found the picture to have a pastel appearance, which those releases more faithfully portrayed, but have the usual DVNR problems.
• While most Disney films avoid using the DVNR process, the Most Wanted Edition DVD release of Robin Hood (1973) was an exception to the rule. While Disney is usually careful even when using the infamous process, the issue was that the film was made when Disney was using Xeroxing in place of hand-inked cels, and the itchy, hairy lines combined with a restoration process that is specifically designed to remove things it detects as scratches and dirt was a recipe for trouble. There are many obvious instances of linework and art erasing throughout this release. It's most noticeable in the opening when Robin is chatting with Little John and during the archery scenes, where the artwork of the arrows is frequently eaten away into nothing due to DVNR art erasing.
• The Blu-ray and Digital HD versions of Aladdin: The Return of Jafar and Aladdin and the King of Thieves both have their original 1.33:1 aspect ratios cropped to 1.78:1. The latter was also cropped when it was released on DVD back in 2005, while the former thankfully wasn't.
• The Lion King (1994)
  • When the movie was re-released in IMAX theaters, several scenes were altered and/or reanimated by the original animators who felt they didn't get it right the first time, most noticeably the somewhat odd-looking crocodiles in "I Just Can't Wait to be King" to be more on-model and the waterfalls in "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?", but also a host of more minor (and therefore less complained-about) changes like Mufasa's face being redrawn as he sees Rafiki approach during "Circle of Life" or Scar turning slightly to watch Mufasa and Simba leave the elephant graveyard. Later DVD releases advertised a remastered version that would feature the reanimated scenes as well as a new song ("The Morning Report", originally from the film's Broadway adaptation) alongside the original 1994 theatrical version; unfortunately for purists, however, the so-called "original version" keeps the tweaked scenes from the IMAX revamp. It may not be that big a deal, but if you're an advocate for preservation...
  • For the 3D re-release and accompanying Blu-ray, not only did they retain the reanimated scenes, but at the end of the scene where Simba speaks to Mufasa's ghost (as Simba begs Mufasa not to leave), the giant cloud formation is completely missing. Records claim this flaw also existed in the IMAX version, but Disney corrected it for the original DVD. The cloud was ultimately reinstated in 2017, with updated re-releases of the Blu-ray and Digital HD editions. The DVD, sadly, still doesn't have the cloud.
• As pictured atop this page, in the original Cinderella, the titular character had orange hair and a silver dress. The 2005-2019 DVD and Blu-Ray versions, however, have blatantly altered the colors to look a little closer to the Disney Princess merchandise (blonde hair and blue dress). The fairy dust and some fabric creases have disappeared◊ from her gown, and some backgrounds were completely altered. As the other examples in this category indicate, this isn't the only Disney animated classic to have suffered from something like this, but thanks to how pervasive and vain the changes were and how long they have persisted since, the film has become the face of the problem of overaggressive restoration of classic animation. The movie finally had its original colors and missing details restored for a 4K screening at the 2023 Berlindale International Film Festival, and subsequent Ultra HD Blu-ray and Digital releases (accompanied by corrected Blu-ray and DVD re-releases).
• In the Blu-ray release of Fantasia, many colors look drastically different from the original DVD, often using Orange/Blue Contrast. Compare the DVD version of "Night On Bald Mountain" with the Blu-ray version and you'll see that, among other things, Chernabog has been changed from black all over to purplish-blue and faint orange. These comparisons suggest that for at least one segment, the DVD's color scheme deviates farther away from that used in 1940.
• Beauty and the Beast
  • The Blu-ray has an unusual glitch altering the ending of the "There's Something There" number. Originally, it ended with the objects watching Belle and the Beast read by the fireplace. Since the extended version follows this song with a scene of the objects cleaning the castle, it now closed with the objects in the hallway, closing the doors to give Belle and the Beast some alone time. Selecting the "Original Theatrical Version" on the Blu-ray changes the ending of the song to the objects about to close the doors, but abruptly cuts to a different scene before they shut. Frustratingly, the corrected transition currently appears only on the 3-D Blu-ray.
  • The Platinum Edition DVD and the Diamond Edition 2-D Blu-ray and DVD all have different color schemes than the Walt Disney Classics VHS and LaserDisc before them, making fans fear that Disney tampered with the picture. The tones of the 3-D Blu-ray hew most closely to the Classics releases.
  • The restoration for the Platinum Edition removed a credit before the prologue for Silver Screen Partners IV, and some stuttering from the scene where Beast asks Belle, "You wan-you wanna stay in the tower?" The restoration for the Diamond Edition put both of these back in.
  • For some reason, the Blu-ray restoration also edits out Cogsworth's shocked gasps, when he, Lumiere, and Mrs. Potts rush to the scene when the Beast has been stabbed (after Gaston falls to his death).
• The Little Mermaid (1989):
  • On early pressings of the Diamond Edition Blu-ray, the ending of the "Part of Your World" sequence plays differently than it originally did. Originally, after cutting from Ariel reaching her hand out towards the surface, it cut to her floating back down onto a rock, to Flounder looking sad. The early D.E. releases switch the latter two scenes' positions, resulting in an audio sync issue. Also, the scene transition when Ariel and Flounder go to visit Scuttle has changed from a dissolve to a cut. When Disney fixed these mistakes, they only did so on the Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download copies, not the 3-D Blu-ray Discs. A disc replacement program was also offered for Blu-ray and DVD copies of the film.
  • The Diamond Edition also makes some intentional but ill-advised changes, such as changing the opening credits with drastically different timing, a new font, and the card reading, "In Association With Silver Screen Partners IV" absent. Like the Platinum Edition DVD before it, it also censors the minister's knee, due to some viewers of older prints thinking it looked like a Raging Stiffie.
  • The 2006 Platinum Edition DVD has a few unique instances of Digital Destruction: The clamshells the sisters came out of were changed to green interiors, and Grimsby's hand at the start of the tour of the kingdom was removed. Both were undone on the Diamond Edition, but the 30th Anniversary Edition removed Grimsby's hand once again.
  • The end credits have undergone several changes over the years, notably when the 1997 re-release — which remixed the Dolby Stereo audio to Dolby Digital, DTS, and SDDS — replaced the "Part of Your World" instrumental with the normal version of the song. Prints from 2006 onwards switched it back with the instrumental.
• The Sword in the Stone
  • The 2013 Blu-ray release snuffs out all the detail with the film looking like it has been rendered under a Photoshop Blur tool, completely killing the look of the drawings and line quality.
  • The Swedish dub of said film has, since the 2002 DVD release, only been available in a flawed 5.1 mix that causes the voices to sound enclosed, "canned" and with a lack of treble. The reason is because it was created out of the existing mono mix, as separate audio tapes for the dialogue had not been preserved (as with the case for many 1930-60's dubs in the country). Disney likely didn't want to spend money on or anger fans with a re-dub just for DVD and therefore went the emergency route with the release.
  • In 2019, Disney released a remastered edition of the film on Disney+ and various PVOD services that was sourced from a 4K scan, which averted this trope by fixing many of the flaws that plagued the 2013 Blu-ray release.
• The Jungle Book
  • For the 1990 re-release audio mix (used on home video releases before 2007), three scenes are affected:
    • After Mowgli saves Bagheera from Kaa by kicking the latter out of the tree, there was originally music playing from when Mowgli snaps Bagheera out of the trance to when Kaa says "Just you wait 'til I get you in my coils!" The music was not only removed for some reason for the 1990 re-release audio, but somehow also not heard for the post-2007 editions. However, it can still be heard on some foreign-language dubs, particularly the ones made around the film's original release (or at least before 1990) including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish, and Hebrew. Interestingly though, two of those dubs, Latin Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese 1968, ended up using the 1990 re-release audio mix for their home video releases (probably because the original speech recordings for those dubs were preserved).
    • When Baloo gets pelted with fruit by the monkeys, he yells "Now, just try that again, you—-!" but is interrupted with a pumpkin splatting in his face. Here, there is a piece of "reaction" music that plays when this happens. Oddly, this was heard not on the original theatrical version, but was used on the 1990 re-release audio mix instead. It is unknown if the music was originally intended to be included, but it's also not heard on the post-2007 DVD and Blu-ray editions either.
    • During "I Wanna Be Like You" while Baloo and Bagheera are talking, there is a trumpet solo that plays in the background. This was somehow not heard in the 1990 re-release audio mix (possibly due to editing problems), but can be heard on the soundtrack (and can still be heard on the many foreign-language dubs made before the 1990 theatrical re-release as well) and was also brought back for the post-2007 DVD and Blu-ray releases.
    • In terms of quality, the 1990 re-release audio version is clearly a stereo mix and sounds very clean and crispy compared to the other versions. The post-2007 audio mix used for the Platinum Edition and Diamond Edition Blu-ray uses some elements from the 1990 version, albeit slightly "mono-ized". Unfortunately, the 2007 audio mix also has a few continuity problems, particularly with "I Wanna Be Like You". During the first part of the song while Louie tells Mowgli he can help him stay in the jungle, the 1990 audio edit is used. However, when Louie begins singing "Now I'm the king of the swingers..." the rest of the instrumental is used from the original theatrical audio (since the 1990 version is missing the trumpet solo) and you can clearly notice the quality change.
• For almost all home video releases of Lady and the Tramp (except for the 1998 VHS and laserdisc release of the Academy Ratio version), the music that plays during the chorus verse of "Bella Notte" (the version of the song after the spaghetti scene) is erroneously edited out. This error is not present in most foreign language dubs of the movie, barring the 1989 French dub and the Cantonese dub.
• In Oliver & Company, there is a Coca-Cola sign on Louie's hotdog cart. Despite all the deliberate Product Placement seen throughout the film, this sign is somewhat blurred out depending on the version of the film. In the 1996 VHS release, the text is blurred out in every shot it appears in, rendering the sign as little more than a red rectangle. On DVD, Blu-ray and digital releases, the text is intact, except in the closeup where Dodger steals sausages from the cart. This is rather peculiar edit, as unedited Coca-Cola signs can be seen at other points during the film. One of the only places where you can see the original closeup of the Coca-Cola sign is in the trailer of the film from the 1988 Cinderella VHS.
• The Roger Rabbit short Trail Mix-Up has its colour grading changed on the Who Framed Roger Rabbit Blu-ray when compared to the film's 2003 DVD release. Stuff like Roger's gloves and Jessica Rabbit's hair are washed out while the backgrounds have a yellow tint to them. Also for some reason the beaver is changed from purple to grey.
• The Direct to Video film A Very Merry Pooh Year features a remastered version of Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too edited into the film, but a couple changes were added during restoration. For starters, Rabbit's fur was changed from a green-ish tint, which is how he was depicted in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, to his normal yellow color, and Christopher Robin's voice was re-dubbed by the voice actor who portrayed him in the film's bridging sequences. Unfortunately, this is the only way to watch the Christmas Too special on DVD. The original special still airs during the Christmas season on Freeform, but as of 2018, the re-dubbed lines of Christopher Robin have been added into the special.

Film — Live-Action

• Dog Soldiers: The 2015 collector's edition Blu-ray by Scream Factory, while praised for its expansive supplementary material, was widely criticized for a near colorless, and very grainy picture transfer. Justified as director Neil Marshall (who worked alongside Shout! Factory on the Blu-ray), confirmed that they were unable to locate the original negatives at the time and had to use the best available sources for the new HD transfer. In 2019, the original negative was finally located, allowing for a full 4K restoration from German company Koch Media.
• Star Wars:
  • The 2004 DVDs, despite being billed as digitally restored, received a poor color correction job, de-saturating the soft colors of the original films into darker, more realistic lighting, and much of the clarity and detail of the original prints is lost in the process. A comparison on YouTube that is no longer available claims this was the result of Lucasfilm ordering the color correction of the films to be done at a breakneck pace of 30 days. Darth Vader's lightsaber becoming pink and Luke's alternating between blue and green are particular standouts for ridicule.
  • To make matters worse, the only official DVD release of the original theatrical cuts (released as limited edition extras) reused the Definitive Collection LaserDisc master, which had a pink tint in A New Hope, DVNR and lacks the extras from that set.
  • Also, the Blu-rays releases for the original films are sourced from the same digital masters as the DVDs several years earlier, which are considered very dated by modern standards, as the scanning was performed in 1080p whereas most Blu-rays are sourced from much more detailed 4K, 6K, or even 8K masters. After excessive DVNR, those 1080p scans end up with decreased quality closer to 720p, making them well below standard for such high-profile releases.
  • The Blu-ray release of The Phantom Menace uses DVNR, destroying much of the picture and resulting in a more pink-tinged presentation.
  • The 4K restorations of the movies on Disney+ and the 2020 "Ultimate Collector's Edition" UHD sets zigzag this, fixing many of the color correction issues that plagued the previous sets, but still have severe DVNR (as the transfer was made for the 2011 3D release) and are the Special Editions with the same changes as the Blu-Ray release.
• Citizen Kane got an accidental taste of this. In one scene, outside the window there was supposed to be rain; the person in charge of the film's restoration thought it was excessive film grain, so it was digitally edited out of the restored print. Later, the Blu-ray boasted a new restoration, which brought back such details as the aforementioned rain.
• The original Bela Lugosi Dracula film has an odd one — at one point when Dracula throws Renfield from the stairs, in the original he's supposed to scream. On some VHS copies (or LaserDisc?), the scream is either intact or removed, but on the 75th Anniversary DVD release the scream was once again cut out.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the mock-Scandinavian subtitle for the movie's title was missing in some DVD releases. (Thankfully, the rest of the subtitles during the opening were still there.)
• A Hard Day's Night has gone through at least two of these:
  • The first was more Analog Destruction as it happened in 1982, back when film restoration was a new idea. Universal wanted to spruce the film up for a U.S. theatrical re-release that year, and those handling the transfer elected to convert the entire soundtrack to stereo on the theory that stereo is better than mono. (Modern fans of The Beatles strongly disagree, but the fandom was still redeveloping back then.) To cap it off, the restorers then threw out the original soundtrack, making a legit restoration impossible.
  • There were then two further attempts to restore the film, in 1996 and 2001. The 2001 restoration by Miramax deliberately tried to "improve" on the theatrical release. While the use of a modern theatrical aspect is understandable (the film did briefly air in modern theaters), they could've made the original aspect available on the DVD. It used the controversial 5.1 speech/mono song soundtrack (by this time, stereo would've been the best quality possible due to the 1982 restoration). And while we can't be sure that 2001's picture is less faithful than 1996's (if we could, then we wouldn't need film restoration as much), it's clear that they're using different greyscale keys. The 1996 edition frequently has what looks like light reflecting off smoke in the air (which may or may not have been in the original); the 2001 edition removes that and deliberately goes for chiaroscuro.
  • Thankfully, The Criterion Collection came to the rescue in 2014, releasing a 4K restoration approved by director Richard Lester on both DVD and Blu-ray. Not only did the release restore the film's original aspect ratio, it also contained a mono soundtrack.
• The Criterion release of Nightmare Alley (1947) has tons of DVNR, resulting in a waxy image with less detail than the Masters of Cinema release.
• The second Blu-ray release of the original Predator (from around the time Predators came out in theaters) relied so heavily on DNR, the movie boasts no grain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger has a strange wax look at points. The premiere of The Predator saw the original debut in 4K Ultra HD, with a transfer that restored the missing textures and grain.
• West Side Story (1961) suffered this a few times. The first DVD from 1998 changed one of the color shifts in the overture from red to blue, to red to green to blue, and also lost the whistles that played after the Quintet. The latter change made the part where the screen changed from intense shades of red and black, to normal colors, in time with the whistling, look even stranger than it originally did. The 2003 single disc edition is a Pan and Scan version of this master. On the Special Edition DVD, the whistles returned, but the "Tonight" sequence plays with the audio out of sync. The 50th Anniversary Blu-ray featured a restoration which corrected the syncing, but also has a flaw in which the screen briefly turns black during the red-to-blue color shift of the overture. The distributors of the Blu-ray announced that they would fix this flaw in the near future, but their "fix" also leaves some people unsatisfied; the color change doesn't look as smooth as those that occurred during the rest of the overture. This video shows how smoothly the colors changed on the CBS/FOX LaserDisc, while this showcases the transitions featured on the successive DVD and Blu-ray versions.
• Mary Poppins
  • The 2004 40th Anniversary Edition DVD featured an "Enhanced Home Theater Mix" audio track,^note the DVD also included the original soundtrack which tampered the audio quite a bit, with nearly all of the sound effects replaced, and a few bits of new music added where there originally wasn't any. (Obvious examples include the wind when Mary Poppins is sitting on a cloud, the "poof!" noise when Mary, Jane, Michael and Bert jump into the chalk drawing, the thunder and lightning before it starts raining on the chalk drawing, and the fireworks following the "Step in Time" number.) This version was also used whenever ABC Family aired the film between 2006 and 2012. Disney released a new DVD in 2009, the 45th Anniversary Edition, with the Enhanced Home Theater Mix gone, and ABC Family's subsequent airings also use the original sound track. Additionally, the 2013 50th Anniversary Edition has an "Enhanced Home Theater Mix" that resembles the original soundtrack.
  • The 50th Anniversary Edition had DVNR and line smoothing applied to the animated sequences, although the live-action scenes retain the grain.
• Vertigo fell victim to something similar for its 1996 restoration. Universal had the audio remixed into six-channel DTS by dubbing new sound effects into the original music and dialogue.^note For example, the policeman chasing a criminal in the opening originally fired his gun three times, but this version has four audible gunshots. However, by the time Universal decided to restore the movie again, for its 2012 re-release and Blu-ray debut, technology had evolved to a point where they could remix the soundtrack while keeping the original sound effects.
• Back to the Future:
  • The Trilogy had scenes that did not require special effects filmed in 1.37:1, and matted to 1.85:1 for theatrical and LaserDisc release. Unfortunately, the initial batch of widescreen DVDs for Back to the Future Part II and Part III matted some of these scenes in a manner that cropped out important details (such as the size-adjustment button and retractable sleeves on Marty's 2015 jacket). Thankfully, Universal began a disc replacement program that addressed the framing errors, and later pressings used the fixed prints. (The 2002-2003 discs with full-color art can be identified by "V2" in the text around the edge on mail-in replacement copies, although reprints of the full set only placed the "V2" on Part II. 2009 black-label reprints and beyond used the corrected transfers.)
  • The 2010 DVD rerelease and Blu-ray debut (and 2015 reprints) had bad end credits on the original Back to the Future, with the text tilted, off-center, and squished by 25%. This was never fixed in that release cycle, but 2020 Blu-ray and 4K discs have the correct credits (standalone DVD rereleases may use the 2010 master).
  • All versions since 2010 have included a shortened version of the blackout in Back to the Future Part II after Marty is hit by Biff's goons in 1985A. Previous releases kept the screen blank for over 5 seconds as the sound died away and the next scene's music began; now it's only a few seconds, and it also cuts out some of the music. Justified as back when the film was originally released, cinema operators had to partially or fully skip the scene as it happened to be at the end of a reel forming part of the film. Comparison here.
• A mild example with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Blu-ray that exposes some Special Effects Failure. The movie looks great but in some wide shots, like when Elliot introduces E.T. to Michael, you can tell it's a guy in a costume. It's apparent because in the next shot it's the expressive E.T. puppet, and the costume has a mask with a blank stare.
• The Little Shop of Horrors Director's Cut DVD lacks audio of the Greek Chorus singing the word, "Da-doo!" during Seymour's radio interview, as well as Orin wheezing before he dies. Plus, a dissolve after Seymour feeds Orin to Audrey II plays faster than before. None of these alterations occur on the Blu-ray.
• Shock Treatment has soundtrack issues on its DVD. In the original cut, the end credits are underscored by a reprise of the overture, and once they've rolled the screen goes to black for several additional minutes while the single version of "Shock Treatment" plays (inspiring a stretch of jokes about the void in Audience Participation showings). This was preserved for the original VHS release through Key Video (a sub-division of Fox's video arm in the 80s that mainly released cult films like this one, as well as newer titles, 40's films, drive-in movies, etc.), though they stuck in the standard FBI warning image before going to black, while Fox Movie Channel airings just cut the music-only stretch. The DVD release's soundtrack jumps ahead to the second half of the overture when the credits start, so the single version of the song starts up midway through them and fades out as they end, meaning that neither is heard at their original length. Making matters worse, the end credits — particularly the photos of the actors — are clearly timed to the overture in the original cut, so an amusing touch is lost on the DVD.
  • Synching/transferring issues with the original music causes a very noticeable audio drop towards the end of "Denton U.S.A." on the DVD.
• The Extended Cut Blu-ray of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring ended up having a slight green tint added to the film. There's been massive debates over whether this it was Peter Jackson's intent or not, or if the tint was actually even noticeable. For what it's worth, neither Jackson nor Warner Bros. have actually addressed the topic other than WB stating that the green tint was supposedly intentional in the official Blu-ray website review, presumably only for the ones behind the restoration to do a bad job at it considering all the stray masks and ruined contrast in the finished product. The 4K debut of the film saw the green tint removed.
• The King and I
  • The 2014 Blu-ray has a bluer tint compared to previous home video releases.
  • The 1981 LaserDisc of the same film not only loses major details to Pan and Scan, but also uses an overly yellowed print.
• The 2008 release of Patton on Blu-ray had a smudgy look to the picture, caused by overuse of DVNR. A remastered version appeared in 2012, which fixed the problem.
  • The Longest Day was released on Blu-Ray the same year and has similar problems with DVNR. Unlike Patton, there hasn't been a corrected version.
• Gladiator's original Blu-ray release was overly sharpened, with very inaccurate colors. A remastered version was released in 2010, which managed to fix these problems.
• When the Police Academy film series was prepared for Blu-ray, it proved to be a huge challenge to improve the picture quality, which up to then had been horrendous. They actually did manage to make huge improvements by accessing the original negatives and the movies do look a lot better. However, the BIG exception is the third part. Even though it originally didn't look worse than the third, the movie was put through a horrible DVNR orgy. The end result is as disastrous as it is amazing; everything now looks like a huge watercolor painting with next to no detail left.
• The 2010 Blu-ray release of The Never Ending Story featured a noticeably different colour timing from previous home video releases of the film. Many scenes in Fantasia have a distinct orange tint to them, and the whole thing in general looks much darker. This change was subject to several multi-page forum debates over which version had the correct colour timing.
  • The film later received a remastered German Blu-ray release of the original German cut in 2012. Though the release featured the previously unavailable English audio track for the German version, the picture was turned up way too bright, and ruined by overzealous DVNR, resulting in waxy skin textures.
  • A couple of years later, Warner Bros. released a new "30th Anniversary Edition" Blu-ray of the film. Though it was advertised as "newly restored", it uses the exact same transfer as the aforementioned 2010 release. Fans were not happy.
• The Godzilla films have gotten hit with this at times:
  • Classic Media's 2002 DVDs of some of the older films featured "5.1 surround sound'' audio tracks in addition to the original mono versions. The 5.1 tracks turned out to just be the mono tracks blasted out of all five speakers at slightly different times, created a headache-inducing echo as though the movies were recorded inside a garbage can. The company's later releases of those films wisely just included the mono tracks.
  • The TriStar-issued DVDs feature new, digitally-created title cards for some of the older films. They generally have digital reconstructions of the English title cards with trademark icons added to the monsters' names, while others keep the original English title card but add the icons, or feature entirely new titles (Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster). The Heisei films usually retain the Japanese title cards with digitally-added English subtitles, but the newer films have new, very dull English title cards awkwardly plastered directly over the Japanese titles, which are often much more elaborate and beautiful (though this is the work of either Toho's export department or the Hong Kong company that dubs the films). This one takes the cake. Sadly, with the release of the Blu-rays, this tendency now also applies to Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah.
  • The transfer of Godzilla (2014) used for the DVD and standard Blu-ray is, for reasons that remain unclear, much darker and murkier than the way the film looked in theaters, rendering many of the nighttime scenes nearly indecipherable. The most infuriating thing about it is that the ads for the DVD and the clips shown in the special features showcase an ungraded version of the film, while the transfer used for the 3D Blu-ray which is closer to the theatrical release, yet Warner Bros is doing nothing to fix the problem. The 4K Blu-ray release in 2021 averts this, utilizing a new transfer that brings the color grading about 1:1 to the theatrical release, which would later be carried over to all digital releases as well.
  • King Kong vs. Godzilla's Japanese version was re-released multiple times in the 60's and 70's to the Champion Festival - a children's film festival in Japan. Toho edited the film's run time down to make it more tolerable for the younger audience, slicing up the original negatives in the process. The film's first Japanese home video release sourced those formerly lost scenes with a 16mm print, but a 35mm print was located in the early 90's only to be lost as well. Future releases sourced the LaserDisc release with the lost scenes being located once more for the Blu-Ray release. Most recently, Toho commissioned a 4K restoration in 2014 with the initial missing footage finally recovered from the first reel. The restoration was broadcast on TV and in theaters in the summer of 2016. The Japanese cut's US debut on the Criterion box set would only use the earlier 2008 Blu-Ray restoration.
  • The British Film Institute's DVD of Godzilla (1954) doesn't make things worse by trying to fix them. Instead, it just doesn't fix anything. The disc seems to have been scanned from a very tired print, with many scratches and cue dots. ^note "Cue dots" are marks in the top right of the screen which alert the projectionist to the end of a film reel. They have no place on a home video release, especially in the 21st century. However, they were rather prevalent on videocassettes and Laserdiscs in the early days.
• The 1998 20th anniversary DVD release of Halloween featured a transfer approved by cinematographer Dean Cundey, with the daytime scenes graded with a strong brownish-orange tint to suggest an autumnal atmosphere and the night scenes bathed in deep blues. When the film received an HD telecine for the 2003 25th anniversary edition DVD, it was done without Cundey's involvement and the color timing was completely changed to a much more neutral appearance, removing both the orange and blue tints for an image that was technically more realistic but not in line with the film's artistic intent. This was just the first in a series of issues and debates regarding transfers of the film...
  • The 2007 Blu-ray release was sourced from the same telecine as the 2003 DVD, but the color timing was tweaked in an attempt to address some of the criticism — again without the filmmakers' involvement. A slight brownish tint was added back to some of the daylight scenes, and a bit of the blue was restored to at least some of the night sequences, creating an overall look somewhere in between the two DVD transfers.
  • For the 35th anniversary Blu-ray in 2013, the movie was given a brand-new scan with the transfer supervised and approved by Cundey. You'd think this was a slam dunk, but as it turned out, this transfer — while much sharper than any prior home video release — featured completely different color timing than any of the prior DVD or Blu-ray editions, including the Cundey-approved 1998 transfer. The entire film has a stark, desaturated appearance, completely removing the "autumnal" tint from the daylight scenes while also featuring less vibrant colors in general than even the 2003 DVD. The night scenes are bluer than they were in the 2003 and 2007 transfers, but still not as heavily-tinted as the 1998 DVD. This led to many impassioned debates about which version people believed looked most like the original theatrical prints, based on 35-year-old memories. There was enough controversy that the Deluxe Edition Complete Collection Blu-ray set of the franchise includes both the 2007 and 2013 transfers.
  • Another new scan was done for the film's 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release in 2018, but the color timing was kept nearly identical to the 2013 transfer.
• Criterion's first print release of the Dressed to Kill Blu-ray/DVD in August 2015 was met with scathing criticism. De Palma asked the film restorers to fix what he thought were some minor distortion issues and in the process the frame became vertically stretched. Criterion apologized for the error, sent replacement copies to those with the first edition, and eventually released a second printing in October 2015.
• The DVDs and Blu-rays for the films of Stanley Kubrick are the subject of a very long debate regarding what aspect ratios the films should be seen in.
  • Barry Lyndon was expressly meant to be projected in the 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which was common in Europe but not in America. Kubrick even had notes packed with prints of the film urging American projectionists to make sure they got the 1.66:1 ratio right, or as close to it as they could. Tellingly, even the earlier television broadcasts and videocassette releases were letterboxed, a rarity at the time. The Warner Brothers Blu-ray is cropped to a 1.78:1 ratio instead, removing a noticeable amount of picture at the top and bottom of the image for the sake of filling a widescreen television (1.66:1 would produce small black bars at the sides of the screen). Luckily The Criterion Collection got a hold of this title and released a Blu-ray that uses the correct 1.66:1 ratio in 2017.
  • Kubrick's later films, such as The Shining and Full Metal Jacket, were shown in theaters in 1.66:1 in Europe and 1.85:1 in America, but "protected" for 1.33:1, meaning the frame could be expanded vertically to fill a television screen without introducing any glaring issues like boom mics or camera tracks. Shortly before his death, Kubrick approved 1.33:1 DVDs of these films, and some fans have taken that to mean that the 1.33:1 versions are the definitive versions which reflect Kubrick's vision most accurately. However, in reality Kubrick simply felt that viewers would prefer seeing the 1.33:1 versions than having to watch either letterboxed widescreen editions (given that letterboxing can look painfully low-res on a standard definition CRT) or badly cropped Pan and Scan editions. Now that high-definition widescreen televisions are the norm, the movies have been reissued in 1.78:1...which, of course, is somewhere between 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 and thus not actually a ratio the movies were ever intended for. Downplayed considering that Kubrick himself released the films in 1.33:1 back then also because he didn't want black bars in his releases when they came to TVs in and out his time.
  • The 2007 Widescreen DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray versions of The Shining feature a color grade that infamously turns the yellow tennis ball pink. This was eventually corrected in the 2019 remaster, screened at the Cannes Film Festival and later released as a 2-disc Blu-ray set, one a regular Blu-ray and the other a UHD one.
• The Blu-ray release of Selma came under fire by Blu-ray.com over its "pale and fatigued" color. Some shots have smudges on the edges and the color in most scenes is a poor blend of light sepia and pale blacks, all flat. Many were baffled that a 2014 film shot and finished digitally be released with such mediocre video quality.
• Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger the Movie: Full Blast Action had an issue on its DVD release: in the music video playing during the end credits, the blue was desaturated. This turns Hoji from Deka Blue to "Deka Gray" (and did not do Tetsu/Deka Break any favors as well, as his suit is mostly white but has a huge section of blue.) Fortunately, the HD copy released on the Super Sentai V-Cinema & Blu-ray Box 1996-2005 fixes this. (Pictures◊ from the◊ [[TV-Nihon wiki.)◊
• Anchor Bay's DVD of Suspiria (1977) looks quite fantastic but suffers from a very badly remixed soundtrack. The sinister musical score deliberately overpowered the sound effects and dialogue in the original mix, but now it has been turned down considerably, often to the point of being difficult to hear. Some music tracks are also flat-out missing, as are several lines of dialogue and sound effects. Perhaps the most glaring omission of all is the screaming heard over the entire end credits, which largely robs the iconic ending of its visceral punch.
• Shout! Factory released several Jackie Chan films as double packs on DVD and Blu-ray. One Blu-ray bundle in particular, for Crime Story (1993) and The Protector (1985), features not only the panned US version of the latter film, but the superior Hong Kong version as well. The problem though is that the Hong Kong version did NOT get the treatment it deserved (especially since the US version is considered an Old Shame of Jackie's, making him re-shoot and re-cut the film in the first place) as it had little to no attempts at digital restoration whatsoever. No attempts at cleaned up video quality with sights of film scratches, no sign of improved colors, and still looked pretty blurry. As well as no improved audio as it still sounded like it was running on an old video medium. It also doesn't help that it's treated as an extra feature rather than another film.
• When the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) was re-released in a George Lucas Altered Version for its 30th anniversary, one of the many complaints was that the restoration team had actually done too good a job, erasing the atmosphere provided by the murky public domain prints and making the film look cheap and shoddy as a result. In actuality this was because the producers of the newer cut altered the contrast levels of the original film so that it would be a better match for the new footage they shot; subsequent releases have generally averted this trope by seeking to maintain the look of the older prints, even when creating new high-definition versions. Though with the film in the public domain and available for anyone to make their own release of, some of them have naturally gone overboard with DVNR, with predictable results.
• Downplayed with the Kino DVD of the 1970's Bolshoi video production of The Nutcracker. While the picture does look fairly beautiful compared to the original television broadcast, the DVD release does suffer from the postage stamp effect when played on 4:3 screens and is also subjected to the inverse of PAL speedup, i.e. slowed down from the original 25 FPS framerate of the SECAM source material to 24 FPS.
• The Apartment looked overly dark and vertically compressed on its Collector's Edition DVD and Blu-ray, released in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The 2017 restoration corrected these issues.
• Grease
  • The audio became remixed for the 1998 20th Anniversary theatrical/home video re-releases, with new sound effects and vocals added to some sequences. Unfortunately, the music sounded less clear afterwards, and some vocals disappeared altogether. For the 2018 40th Anniversary re-releases, Paramount managed to correct almost all of these issues.
  • Early pressings of the 40th Anniversary Edition Ultra HD disc, Blu-Ray and DVD had a red flash overlap Danny's face during a closeup of him and Sandy dancing through the funhouse. Paramount eventually removed the flash, and allowed owners of discs with the flash to receive fixed replacements. Unfortunately, the "fixed" UHD disc now has distracting brightness fluctuations during the carnival.
• Rififi: The Blu-ray transfer is very grainy in places. The counter-intuitively named Unsharp Mask increases perceived sharpness by increasing edge contrast. If you push it too far, the process finds edges in areas of flat colour, causing grain. There are also a few brief scenes which haven't been processed, and which look very soft in comparison.
• Ghostbusters (1984) had several color-inaccurate versions, with the 2005 DVD being the most off.
• The Dish's 2017 Australian Blu-Ray release was upconverted rather than "remastered" as advised. At first it was conversional thanks to users at a Blu-Ray forum until Roadshow replied and planned on making a proper restoration, which they released in January 2018.
• From the start of the home video revolution, Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy has been put through the wringer. At first, it was simply the standard pan-and-scan treatment accorded to most every other film put out on video in the '80s; however, as letterboxing became popular, especially on videodiscs, the destruction started to become more creative:
  • The 1988 MGM/UA print of A Fistful of Dollars, issued on VHS and Betamax in 1988 and on laser videodisc in 1990, marked the first uncut English-language release of the film, but the colors ended up looking rather muddy, far from the yellowish look Leone intended for his films. The 2005 restoration released Stateside on DVD in 2007 and on Blu-ray in 2010 also looks quite cropped.
  • The Dutch DVD of A Fistful of Dollars claims to contain the UK theatrical cut, but it manages to misrepresent that; the true UK theatrical cut is only slightly shorter than what the Dutch DVD would have you believe, and several shots and cuts are different. The Dutch DVD closer resembles the US theatrical cut in its length, if not in the arrangement of its shots.
  • Most current releases of the trilogy as a whole don't even have the original mono; exceptions include a repressing of the 2014 release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the original pressing accidentally omitted it) and the 2018 release of A Fistful of Dollars.
  • Just like the Dutch DVD release of Fistful, the 1998 release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly managed to screw up the simple task of assembling the International Theatrical Cut, losing several seconds of footage which have yet to resurface commercially to this day and also inserting footage that wasn't meant to be included.
  • The 2014 release of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the first release in a while of any film in the trilogy to look yellow; however, it looks more yellow than Leone intended.
  • From 2017 to 2019, Kino Lorber released the complete trilogy, with mixed results. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was the first out from them, and while it purports to be the high definition debut of the International Theatrical Cut, it's actually the same cut released by MGM/UA in 1998, plus it uses the same restoration as the previous release, only with the yellows toned down too severely yet again. Fistful, released in 2018, also uses an overly-yellow print; however, it at least appears to be a step in the right direction, as the original mono track is included for the first time ever, on any home video release (other English mono tracks for the film are folddowns from a 5.1 track and/or somewhat edited).
• Iron Man and Iron Man 2 had their film grain either removed or frozen on Ultra HD Blu-ray, to match the movies that Marvel Studios recorded digitally (including all of Iron Man's post-IM2 appearances).
• Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2's Blu-ray release looks much darker and more muted than it did on its original DVD run, due to the former being scanned from a print of the movie that was in much worse condition, as the original negatives are missing.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day saw a 4K release that, despite approval from director James Cameron, boasted a much greener tint and excessive DVNR. Additionally, the newly authored Blu-ray included now had the added scenes in the extended cut play in standard definition instead of being remastered as they were in the previous Blu-ray releases.
• The 2003 Region 1 DVD release of Super Mario Bros. (1993) from Disney, in addition to having zero extras, is a phoned-in transfer of the Laserdisc master, which, among other things, suffers from massive DVNR, poor color correction, and constant motion smearing. And because the transfer is in non-anamorphic widescreen, high-definition/widescreen televisions read it as a full screen image, resulting in black bars on all four sides of the screen. Its only saving grace is the surprisingly impressive 5.1 surround sound mix. Compare this to Second Sight's 2014 Blu-ray release, TC Entertainment's 2017 Blu-ray release and Umbrella Entertainment's 4K release, which boasts a 4K restoration with much crisper picture and properly formatted for widescreen televisions. Too bad it's only available in Region B and not playable elsewhere, meaning fans in North America have to import the Umbrella 4K for a premium price or stick with Disney's shoddy DVD (Disney also hasn't bothered to release it digitally there, either).
• Mill Creek's Blu-ray release of Battlefield Earth scrubs it of any film grain, resulting in over-saturated colors and awful textures. Whether or not it was to deliberately give one of the worst movies of all time a bad name is up to you.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory:
  • The restoration used for the 2009 Blu-ray does not match theatrical framing, in large part incorporating image information from the left side of the film, which was exposed on the negatives but always meant to be replaced by the optical soundtrack, and the bottom of the film, since the additional width means additional height but it averages very low in frame. WB never resolved this problem until the 2021 4K restoration (regular Blu-ray copies still use the "incorrect" framing). Comparison examples and explanation here.
  • All stereo and 5.1 remixes have some problems compared to the original mono soundtrack. In particular, Mrs. Bucket's line after "I've Got a Golden Ticket" is supposed to be "Wait! Stop!" but "Wait!" is lost; audio quality of the music tends to be subpar as well.
• While the 2018 restoration of The War of the Worlds (1953) is otherwise an aversion of this trope, the aerial shot of Mars at the beginning is inexplicably colored blue instead of red as shown in all prior home video releases. Thankfully, Criterion's Blu-ray and DVD releases of the film from 2020^note the restoration was first released by Paramount on PVOD services in 2018 before being released on Blu-ray in Australia and the US two years later corrected this error.
• The 2009 (25th anniversary) DVD and Blu-ray editions of The Last Starfighter are missing a dramatic-sting music cue about half an hour in, when Beta Alex is shown with goopy skin under his blankets. Strangely, this omission doesn't seem to be the fault of the conversion to 5.1, as the 1999 (Collector's Edition) DVD is in 5.1 and has the cue. 1999's also had the rarely-included Universal Studios and tour banners at the end, but not 2009's.
  • Although most of the 1999 DVD's extras are brought over to the 2009 edition, they are of considerably worse image quality, with lots of interlacing artifacts and dot-crawl (and a cropped trailer). In fact, everything on the disc, including the feature, takes up less space on the 2009 DVD, and even with a new 20-minute retrospective the entire disc is smaller. The only thing keeping the 1999 DVD from being superior, apart from a slightly dirtier film transfer and one new extra, is the replacement of the original Universal and Lorimar logos with the 1997 Universal logo.
• Streaming services sometimes crop films shot in extra-wide aspect ratios to 1.85:1. This was common enough at Netflix that a Tumblr blog called it out in 2013; notably one of the affected films, Man on the Moon (shot for 2.35:1), was never corrected even after the service premiered a retrospective making-of documentary about its production in 2017. When it became available on other streaming services in 2022 (perhaps not coincidentally in the wake of Kino Lorber's 2K-mastered Blu-Ray, which even included a post-credits card for the Universal Studios Hollywood tour at the tail end), the proper aspect ratio was used.
• The Big Lebowski: Universal's Blu-Ray release of the film has been subject to quite a bit of criticism due to its overuse of edge-enhancement and DNR (digital noise removal), which, while removing a lot of film grain, also removes much of the texture and detail from the movie. This was later fixed with the Ultra HD release of the film.
• American Graffiti's panned 4K UHD release features heavily DNRed picture with flat, waxxy surfaces, and a remixed soundtrack with new sound effects and less audible music soundtrack. This in spite of the fact that the film was shot in 2-perf 35mm because it gave the film a more grainy appearance of a documentary. Apparently Universal is not to blame for this; director George Lucas supervised the remaster himself.
• 2024 finally saw the debut of a trio of James Cameron films on 4K, being Aliens and the long awaited The Abyss and True Lies. Unfortunately, they all suffered from excess usage of DVNR and sharpening that caused the films to gain an artificial appearance, not helped by reports that AI upscaling technology was used. In addition, Aliens and Titanic (1997) were not the true 4K remasters, but the upscaled versions of the 2K intermediate used for the Blu-Ray releases.

Live-Action TV

• The mid-'90s "Re-Mastered" versions of the first three (late-'80s) seasons of Red Dwarf suffered from horrific picture quality, due to a combination of low-quality source material, widescreen cropping, and a nascent "filmizing" process being applied to footage that wasn't shot with filmization in mind. For good measure, the restoration artists also wildly oversaturated the colour levels. The "Re-Mastered" project was initially done to sell the earlier seasons overseas, as the originals allegedly looked too low-budget.
  • To a much-lesser extent, the initial Blu-Ray release of the first eight seasons had the (as-broadcast) third season and half of the fifth accidentally mastered in the wrong framerate, causing a grainy, blurry picture that was later corrected in a reissue of the affected discs.
• Some BBC DVD releases of the Classic era of Doctor Who have been criticized for this. Among the things that have been missed out during the restoration process on various stories are sound cues, music cues, certain special effects shots, and major hiccups with colour regrading. The team that does the restoration, when asked about these various mistakes, commented that because of the grueling release schedule set for them by the BBC they simply don't have the time to make sure everything is 100% okay, and so the mistakes simply have to be accepted by the buying public. Aside from genuine mistakes made by the restoration team, the classic Doctor Who restorations are generally considered excellent. What's more, the most notable restoration errors have now been re-released with the errors corrected.
  • A fault in the conversion process from PAL to NTSC caused the second disc of Patrick Troughton's "The Invasion" to look jittery and soft on the Region 1 DVDs; As far as it is known this has never been corrected. The North American DVD release of the TV Movie also had an odd error whereby the original NTSC master was converted to PAL (which involved speeding it up slightly due to the frame-rate difference), restored for the UK release, then converted back to NTSC for the American release; this caused problems with ghosting and motion judder.
  • For some odd reason, the initial release of "The Seeds of Death" had the VidFIRE process — which is used to restore serials to the proper Video Inside, Film Outside look they had on first broadcast — applied to the entire story instead of just the segments shot in-studio. This was most likely a mistake that the team just didn't have time to fix, and corrected in the subsequent re-release of the story.
• The revived Doctor Who Blu-rays have frequently been encoded in a worldwide-friendly format that compromises the quality of the UK version: 'The Complete Specials' and Torchwood series 1-3 were converted from 25 FPS to 60Hz, while Series 1-4 were slowed down to 24FPS. In a bizarre twist, the American co-production Torchwood: Miracle Day was sped up from 24FPS to 25FPS for the UK BD, while America received the correct 24FPS version. Series 5 onward and The Sarah Jane Adventures are presented correctly at 1080i25.
  • Strangely, the 2020 UK Series 5 Steelbook release contains the US 24FPS discs instead of the original UK 1080i25 discs. While no official reason has been given by the BBC, it was noted that UK fans complained about the UK discs editing out the On the Next trailers from the original broadcasts, which the US discs did have...
• Classic World War II documentary series The World at War was reissued on DVD and Blu-ray in an "Ultimate Restored Edition". On the plus side, most of the archival war footage is remastered from the surviving 35mm or 16mm originals, descratched, stabilised and re-graded. What kills it for some viewers is that the image is cropped and scanned into widescreen. This restored version was rather controversial due to being in widescreen and not allowed to be shown due to this, so the unrestored fullscreen edition with Thames triangle logos from the 1990s (before they lost their franchise to Carlton) is shown instead for reruns. Fortunately the remastering was carried out on the full-frame pictures before cropping, and the most recent DVD and Blu-ray edition from Network restores the original aspect ratios, in line with Network's usual policy..
• Another documentary by Jeremy Issacs focusing on the Cold War was aired on CNN in 1998. It was cropped to 16:9 aspect ratio for its 2012 DVD release and its broadcast on CNN International in 2013.
• The Ultraseven DVD set by Shout! Factory has a redone soundtrack, with reverb added to most explosions, new sound effects created in some cases and the BGM volume screwed with.
• Babylon 5 was filmed in a 16:9 Aspect Ratio, at a time when most shows were filmed in 4:3, with an eye towards future home video release on the newer wide-screen HDTVs that were beginning to become popular. However, the CGI could be expensive and time-consuming to produce, so it was decided to render it in 4:3 and crop the live-action footage to match for broadcast (especially given that much of the scenes in the show were Chroma Key composited shots with CGI backgrounds). The intent was to re-render all of the CGI for the eventual widescreen release, but for various reasons, by the time the DVD sets were eventually released, it was instead decided to crop the CGI scenes from 4:3 to 16:9, effectively a reverse-Pan and Scan, reducing their resolution and making the CGI look pixelated, particularly in the Chroma Key shots where the actors were shown in native 16:9.
• The high definition remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was widely disparaged by both fans and its creators alike. The aspect ratio was changed to 16:9 from the original 4:3, usually by opening up the sides of the frame and cropping the top and bottom, sometimes creating a host of problems like making film equipment and, occasionally, crew members visible. Joss Whedon even stated, "Buffy was shot 4x3 [because] TVs were shaped that way. Widescreen Buffy is nonsense." The restoration team also removed many color filters applied to the original versions, thereby inadvertently changing night scenes to day, and viewers pointed out that due to heavy noise reduction the HD version actually had less fine detail and much flatter lighting than the SD version.
• Despite the fact that Poirot (series 1-8) and Jeeves and Wooster have excellent restorations, they have been tampered with on their recent DVDs. Because ITV Studios Home Entertainment released them through themselves instead of Network Distributing, the 2011 restoration of Jeeves and Wooster suffers slight cropping (even though it is in its original aspect ratio), an edit to the final episode and the end caps changed (a copyright change and the ITV Studios logo plastered over the Granada ones), while Poirot had two Granada logos plastered over the original LWT logos and the use of the original intro and closing credits in The ABC Murders, Death in the Clouds and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (they originally had no intro and different credits which was retained through the early DVD prints from VCI). Taken to extreme for the JCA TV restorations of Poirot (Series 1-Series 8) where the copyright has been changed. Averted for many Network Distributing DVD releases of Granada and LWT shows which retain the respective endboard and copyright.
• Sharpe (the episodes from 1993—97) had a bit of this for its recent DVD and Blu-Ray releases. It has a copyright change, a logo plastered on the 1st episode, becomes widescreen (though this is an aversion because it was filmed in widescreen, although it was shown in fullscreen for earlier TV transmissions and was presented that way for early DVD releases), and gains ITV Studios logos, though it retains the Central endboards for episode 2 to episode 13. However, it's still a beautiful restoration, unlike Poirot and Jeeves and Wooster.
• It seems that during the restoring of the Jeremy Brett version of Sherlock Holmes for their reruns on the BBC during 2003 to 2005 and their 2005 Region 2 complete collection DVD boxset, had resulted in the loss of the old Granada logos (even the ones at the beginning) and ended up getting plastered over by the same Granada logo that plastered the LWT logo on the Series 1-Series 6 of Poirot, even the JCA restoration of Granada Holmes changes the copyright and ITV Studios logos. Averted by the Region 1 DVD release of that series due to being sourced from older prints before the series was restored for their BBC reruns.
• Shout Factory yet again has a tokusatsu release issue — Gekisou Sentai Carranger features noticeable artifacting in scenes where significant usage of video editing is made such as the eyecatches, chroma key and character cards. However, this can mainly be blamed on Toei's usage of subpar sources like with the Orange Box example.
• This clip on the official YouTube channel for Mr. Bean retains the old ITV "black and white stripes box" in the top right corner that was a cue for the broadcast staff to cue commercials (it pops up at 5:15 in the video)
• The 2015 ABC Family (now Freeform) airing of the Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas special runs at 24 frames per second instead of the original 60, and adds film grain in an attempt to make the movie look "timeless" (which of course backfired among Muppet fans). Yes, they purposefully added digital destruction because they thought it'd make the film look better. Additionally, the special was cropped to 16:9, and the cropping cut out a lot of the background (which a number of fans considered to be one of the more beautiful and elaborate model sets to be made by the Jim Henson workshop), and apparently the producer of this release did not know that pan-and-scan can also be applied to 16:9 conversions, causing characters to have part of their heads go off-screen in certain scenes. On the plus side, the Kermit the Frog framing device was restored, but only his appearances at the start and the end were restored and not the narration throughout the special^note It's worth noting that the narration wasn't present in the original CBC and HBO airings of the special in the late 1970s, and was only added in when ABC got the rights to air it in 1980. Subsequent home video releases did away with the film noise effect, but still present the special in 24fps^note There is another possible reason why the video is in 24fps - in its original 60fps form, the video is interlaced. When converting to progressive scan, both fields are usually melded together and then interpolated, causing frame rate to half. The other side effect of this is the picture will blur. This appears to be the case of the ABC Family and later DVD and Blu-Ray releases; when the media is paused, there is no telltale sign of interlacing but there is blurring, indicating that processing has been done to convert the video to progressive scan and in 16:9, although the 2018 Blu-Ray release has the option to play it in the original 4:3 aspect ratio.
• The first season of the 1997 TLC documentary series Earth's Fury (also known as Anatomy of Disaster internationally) was cropped to a 16:9 aspect ratio for digital (Tubi TV and YouTube) releases.
• The remastering job for the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was criticized for being a considerable downgrade to the one seen in the first season. In part due to CBS Digital, the studio responsible for that set and most of the later seasons, not being involved with the season and outside firm HTV-Illuminate being utilized instead. While the live-action scenes were praised for exposing details not seen in the original SD broadcasts, the haphazard restoration of the show's visual effects and uneven efforts to recreate other shots were criticised as being a step down from the consistent high quality of the first season. The rest of the remaster averts this, and is considered to be top notch by fans and Season 4's remastering by Modern Video Film was likewise far better received due to closer involvement with the main CBS remaster team.
• The complete series Blu-ray release of Fraggle Rock appears to have been upscaled from interlaced DVD sources without any sort of de-interlacing first. The result is that any sort of rapidly-moving object looks absolutely horrible.
• When The Muppet Show hit Disney+, Disney decided to upscale the series in HD even though the show was shot on videotape. Because of de-interlacing, the original 60 fps has been halved to 24 fps, resulting in a more film-like presentation.
• HBO Max upscales pre-HD shows that were shot on videotape (like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), resulting in reduced frame rates due to de-interlacing.
• Hulu prints of Full House suffer from this. Although though the picture does look sharper, the frame rate has been reduced from 60 fps to 24 fps, and seasons 1 and 2 use sped-up intros from a 50Hz print.
• On Game Show Network airings of Wheel of Fortune, any episodes that were once available on Netflix use those prints, resulting in those episodes being de-interlaced, while episodes that were not offered on the services are broadcast in the original 60 fps. Several of their other shows are like this as well. Most of their prints of The $100,000 Pyramid from Seasons 2 onward are de-interlaced while most of Season 1 is not.
• Fellow classic game show network BUZZR began airing all of their programming de-interlaced starting sometime in the early 2020's.
• Some international DVD companies were given unfinished 16:9 masters of Dark Angel (the show was finalized in 4:3) leading to many shots that just linger without cutting to a close up. There is at least one particularly egregious example where you can watch an entire stunt from a single POV, which includes seeing Jessica Alba standing on the sideline as she jumps in to replace her double.
• Tubi prints of the third season of Blue Water High remove the end credits for unknown reasons, resulting in a good portion of the cast being left unidentified by the show's fanbase. This is possibly the fault of the company who supplied the show to Tubi, as the first two series retain their original end credits.

Literature

• The original 1981 printing of The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation was printed on high quality paper and the illustrations were more crisp looking. When the book was reprinted later in the 80's and 90's, Disney found out that the original photographic plates for the book were lost or destroyed, so they were forced to scan pages from the original book in high quality and use them as the source materials for the reprints so they wouldn't have to go to the painstaking effort of reconstructing the entire book from scratch. On top of that, the reprints used much cheaper paper than the original. While the reprints aren't anywhere near bad, a side by side comparison of the original run and its reprints reveals a noticeable drop in printing quality.
• Computer scientist Donald Knuth was so annoyed by the poor quality of digital typesetting used in his famous The Art of Computer Programming series of books that he invented the TeX typesetting language, which is widely used in academic publishing for the high quality of its output and ability to typeset mathematical equations, something very important in scientific books and journals.

Music

• The music video for Bryan Adams' "This Time" has some bad aural tape distortion at the very start of its YouTube upload, which was released on November 2, 2010. An identically-titled upload from October 31, 2008, doesn't have the distortion, but it has a URL in the bottom-right corner for the entirety of the video.
• David Bowie's backlog hasn't had the best luck with CD releases over the years, from RCA Records sourcing their releases from multi-generation cassette masters to contested equalization choices on subsequent remasters. In terms of specific albums, some prominent issues are as follows:
  • Space Oddity: Parlophone Records' 2015 remaster of the album was a noticeably rushed job and— by their own admission— not cross-examined with the original 1969 LP, resulting in a number of audio transfer issues such as a tape buzz during the line "someone else to hear" in "Cygnet Committee". Because of this, the Conversation Piece Boxed Set in 2019 went for the earlier 2009 remaster, which was made to match the original release, in addition to including a new remix by producer Tony Visconti that's been mostly praised as an improvement upon the '69 mix.
  • Hunky Dory: The initial US CD release by RCA Records featured tape damage on "Changes", while the same track and "Oh! You Pretty Things" are noticeably compressed on the concurrent European CD. The US CD additionally suffers from a volume and equalization imbalance, with the tracks from Side Two being louder and brighter than the tracks from Side One.
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The 30th anniversary expanded edition of the album in 2002 reverses the stereo channels.
  • Aladdin Sane: The album was an unusual victim of RCA Records' self-admittedly rushed CD releases of the Bowie catalog in The '80s. Unlike other albums in the series, Aladdin Sane was pressed solely in Japan regardless of region (other albums had European copies made by PolyGram in West Germany), but used two different plants with different masters: CSR and Denon. The Denon master, featured on European copies and later American ones, is considered overly-muddy compared to the CSR master (used solely for early American copies) and the original LP, featuring a lower volume, reduced treble, and increased bass.
  • Diamond Dogs: The original European CD release by RCA Records is unusually and noticeably bass-boosted compared to all other versions of the album, resulting in a sound often described as dark and muddy. Of note is that this is the only instance where a European RCA Bowie CD has more issues than its American counterpart; other Bowie albums in the series either have more issues on American discs, have more issues with one manufacturer than another in the same region, or are negligible in difference.
  • Young Americans: The original US CD release by RCA Records cuts off the first two opening drumbeats in the Title Track due to a mastering error. Meanwhile, the 1991 Rykodisc reissue erroneously uses earlier mixes of "Win", "Fascination", and "Right" (most prominently distinguished by their heavy reverb), which staff member Jeff Rougvie claimed was the result of them simply seeking out the best-sounding tapes from Bowie's vaults without cross-referencing them with the original 1975 release (the 1989 Boxed Set Sound + Vision also uses the earlier version of "Fascination" due to the same error, which was fixed on the expanded 2003 reissue). The 1999 and 2016 remasters reinstate the original mixes.
  • Station to Station: The original US CD release by RCA Records is mastered at an abnormally low volume compared to the label's other Bowie CDs, and turning the dial up reveals that the sound is extremely thin compared to the original LP; the latter can also be said of the Japanese RCA CD, which is simply a volume-boosted version of the US CD. Both discs also lop off the very start of "Word on a Wing". The European RCA CD doesn't have any of these problems; consequently, a repressing of it was included in the 2010 deluxe edition as a bonus disc.
  • Low: The original CD releases by RCA Records have their own sets of issues depending on the region. American CDs feature an imbalanced equalization, with the left channel being noticeably brighter than the right. European CDs lack the equalization problem, but add fade-ins to almost every song (the exceptions being "Breaking Glass", "What in the World", "Be My Wife", and "Subterraneans"), despite many of them being written with cold-opens in mind.
  • "Heroes":
    • Due to a mastering error, the initial US CD release by RCA Records lops off the first 1.8 seconds of "Beauty and the Beast". The European RCA CD, meanwhile, features an audibly congested low end, a trait not present on other releases.
    • The initial version of the 2017 remaster, included in the Boxed Set A New Career in a New Town [1977–1982], featured an audible volume drop partway through the Title Track. Parlophone Records claimed that it was to obscure irreversible damage on the master tape, but eventually relented after further complaints and included a revised version of the remaster on replacement discs for affected buyers. This fixed version was also incorporated on the standalone CD, LP, and digital releases.
  • The Greatest Hits Album Fame and Fashion erroneously reverses the stereo channels on side two. Not only is this carried over to the CD release, but the US version of the latter additionally features narrower mastering on the tracks corresponding with side one.
• Electric Light Orchestra: Due to a mastering error, initial CD releases of Time include a pause between "21st Century Man" and "Hold on Tight", disrupting the intended use of Fading into the Next Song. The 2001 remaster fixes the error, restoring the segue.
• The first CD copies of Donald Fagen's The Nightfly in 1983 were noticeably thin and muted compared to the original LP, despite the album being fully digital. After getting a letter from Stevie Wonder complaining that his CD sounded "funny," engineer Roger Nichols discovered that copies on the format were in such high demand that Warner (Bros.) Records had resorted to using analog safety tapes generations removed from the master, leading him to publicly criticize the myriad of record labels that were partaking in this practice. Warner would rectify the issue shortly after: since 1984, all later CD copies of The Nightfly have been sourced directly from the digital master.
• Peter Gabriel: Later Geffen Records CD releases of Security prior to the 2002 remaster are sourced from analog safety tapes, resulting in a more muffled sound compared to both Geffen's earlier "target" CDs and Virgin Records' discs for European markets.
• Genesis:
  • Due to an indexing error, almost all CD releases of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway prior to the 2007 remaster sequence most of "Broadway Melody of 1974" as part of "Fly on a Windshield", save for the 33-second instrumental outro. Only two pre-2007 CDs properly preserve the intended starting point of the song: one American, one Canadian.
  • Due to a mastering error, the original North American CD release of Duke swaps the stereo channels around. Additionally, streaming releases of the original mix disrupt the segue from "Behind the Lines" to "Duchess" by having the latter song start at a point in the transition considerably before where the former song ends.
• 2018 saw the digital/physical release of Vince Guaraldi's soundtrack to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Unfortunately, this release contained very low-quality recordings of the tracks, all having a tinny/overly-digital sound to them and leaving in some of the sound effects from the original special. Thankfully, it was later re-released in 2022 with much higher quality recordings of the tracks, after the soundtrack's original master tapes were found.
• Jean-Michel Jarre: The 1997 remaster of Chronology was botched in a number of ways from reversed panning to leaving audible time-code clicks.
• King Crimson: All CD releases of In the Court of the Crimson King prior to 2004 were sourced from multigeneration tapes as a result of the masters being lost, resulting in them having audibly strong tape hiss and requiring various equalization tricks to work around the quality loss. The master tapes were eventually recovered from Virgin Records' archives in 2004, allowing for all reissues from the aptly-titled Original Master Edition onward to use the first-generation audio. While these in turn were criticized as overly bright, they ended up being favored over pre-2004 CDs in blind listening tests.
• Yuzo Koshiro: The Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack album, released shortly after the game's Japanese release, noticeably suffers from the notorious difficulty with replicating the sound of the Genesis' YM2612 FM synthesizer, resulting in tinny audio and radically different mixing.
• The 2015 vinyl reissue of Ken Laszlo's Self-Titled Album was based on the 2004 German CD edition rather than the original Italian pressing, leading to subpar mastering compared to the original release.
• The Alan Parsons Project: CD releases of The Turn of a Friendly Card were mastered with the master tape played at the wrong speed by mistake, resulting in the entire album being slower and lower-pitched than the original LP release. This was eventually corrected for the 2015 deluxe edition.
• Pink Floyd: The original US CD release of The Wall by Columbia Records notoriously contains a prominent click at the start of "Comfortably Numb" due to a mastering error. Subsequent remasters fix the mistake.
• The Police: The 1993 remaster of Zenyattà Mondatta adds a prominent click to the start of "Don't Stand So Close to Me" due to a mastering error.
• The 2004 remasters of the four EMI albums by Red Hot Chili Peppers were a disaster. The sound quality being brickwalled to be in line with their later albums is somewhat inevitable.
  • A number of songs that originally faded out, such as "Fight Like A Brave" and "American Ghost Dance", have been remixed to come to an abrupt stop, since the clean endings were completely cut off the songs in the fade. In addition, the Mother's Milk remaster replaces "Pretty Little Ditty" with the previously unreleased long version of the song, but fails to include the short version as a bonus track.
  • Six songs from the band's first demo tape were included as bonus tracks on the first two remasters, having previously appeared on Out In LA. However, they are all from a much worse source with very audible hiss and hum compared to the previous issues. Also, "What It Is" reappears here from "Out In LA".
  • The cover art for The Uplift Mofo Party Plan is noticeably cropped. In addition all four albums have Parental Advisory warnings digitally added to the artwork, rather than using stickers.
  • The Uplift Mofo Party Plan only includes two bonus instrumentals when there are many more circulating outtakes from the album that would have made it more interesting. An outtake complete with lyrics, "Blues For Meister", had previously appeared on the outtakes compilation "Out In LA".
  • The Mother's Milk remaster is the only one of the four which has any previously unreleased songs on it (sans alternate mixes), these being "Salute To Kareem" and "Song That Made Us What We Are Today". However, the latter track is widely believed to have been a By The Way outtake (previously known as "Strumming In D On J"), finding its way onto the album in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, a relevant track from this period, "Show Me Your Soul", does not appear here or as part of the remastered series at all (thus, you can find it in print on the compilation "What Hits!?). Also omitted was "Politician (Mini Rap)", which admittedly is only a small snatch of vocal later heard in "The Power Of Equality", but would have fit.
  • None of the remixes included on singles released during the band's EMI period (of which there were several) were included here, meaning a number of them are only on vinyl. This is particularly egregious with "Fight Like A Brave", as EMI commissioned two different 12"s worth of remixes yet didn't include a single one on either "Out In LA" or the "Uplift Mofo" remaster.
• R.E.M.: When the rarities compilation Dead Letter Office was released on CD, the entirety of the band's debut EP, Chronic Town, was appended to the end as bonus material. However, due to a mastering error, the stereo channels for the EP's songs are swapped. This was later corrected for the international Boxed Set The Originals and the standalone CD release of Chronic Town in 2022.
• Rush: Initial CD copies of Moving Pictures in 1983 feature a mastering error that cuts off the first beat in "Tom Sawyer". This issue was fixed on later CD releases.
• Skinny Puppy:
  • The first CD edition of Rabies was accidentally mastered with Dolby Noise Reduction, resulting in a weak and muffled sound. The 1993 remaster fixed this.
  • Nettwerk's reissues of the group's vinyl back catalog were apparently slapdash-remastered to cash in on the format's revival, as they are widely considered inferior to the original pressings.
• When Sparks' second album "A Woofer In Tweeter's Clothing" was first issued on CD in the late '80s, it was bundled with their debut self-titled album on the same disc. This meant "Woofer"'s entire second side had to be sped up to fit on the disc. All subsequent digital re-issues of the album, including standalone CDs and streaming prints, continue to use the sped-up version.
• Due to an indexing error, David Sylvian's Greatest Hits Album A Victim of Stars 1982-2012 sees the first split-second of "Forbidden Colours (Version)" play at the end of "Bamboo Music".
• Talking Heads:
  • Initial European CD releases of Remain in Light master side one much louder than side two; CDs since the mid-'90s use a new mastering of the album that fixes the volume imbalance, but inexplicably swaps the stereo channels and cuts off high frequencies.
  • The original CD release of Speaking in Tongues was audibly sourced from a multigeneration copy tape used for the LP release. Consequently, not only does it feature the shortened versions of "Making Flippy Floppy", "Girlfriend is Better", "Slippery People", "I Get Wild/Wild Gravity", and "Moon Rocks", but it also features conspicuous tape hiss and transfer errors. North American CD releases from 1990 onward and the 2005 remaster worldwide would remedy this by switching to an earlier-generation master with the full versions of each song.
• Tears for Fears: The original LP release of Songs from the Big Chair erroneously swaps the stereo channels around. This error is not present on the concurrent CD or cassette releases, but it is carried over to the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab remaster.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • The DVD release of "Weird Al" Yankovic: The Videos has a chapter indexing error that starts "You Don't Love Me Anymore" at the guitar intro, implying that the video's true opening at the drum set is a coda to "Smells Like Nirvana". Since most other video compilations don't put these two together in this order, this is not a problem on them, and Al confirmed "The folks that mastered the DVD messed up the chapter stops."
  • The Boxed Set Permanent Record: Al in the Box has had its share of problems. Original printings accidentally contained the album version of "My Bologna" while saying it was the promised older Capitol version (this was corrected). Loss of some physical artwork for the set after the move to Volcano Records made it go out of print. Later printings (Volcano only?) left out the first 27 seconds of "Hooked on Polkas"!
• Yellow Magic Orchestra: The 1992 Restless Records CD reissues of the band's catalog feature noticeably poor print work with oversaturated colors, thanks to the label using cheap Xerox printers to make the CD inserts. This is most prominently illustrated by Solid State Survivor, where most of the detail is lost.

Video Games

• Halo: Combat Evolved received an Anniversary Edition in 2011 (and included in the Master Chief Collection Compilation Re-release) that offered updated graphics and the option to toggle back to the graphics of the original release. When it came to displaying the original game it used Gearbox Software's flawed 2003 PC port of the game as the foundation, but contained small coding errors. These made it look even more dated than it was, specifically with bump map textures and the quality of various translucent visuals like the windows, Jackal shields and energy constructs, all of which made the game feel flatter and less vibrant than it originally was. These flaws weren't corrected in the initial release of the Master Chief Collection, but were finally fixed by an update to the MCC in 2021, allowing people to finally play Halo as originally intended without having to dig out their old Xboxes.
• While the game itself is perfectly playable, the cutscenes in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars release of Super Mario Sunshine have been upscaled and smoothed out, resulting in a loss of detail. Furthermore, F.L.U.D.D's lines were awkwardly edited to remove mentions of the Nintendo GameCube buttons, which results in a noticeable jump in the audio.
• High quality versions of the FMVs from Sonic the Hedgehog CD were included in Sonic Mega Collection, but they were given new audio and sped up to coincide with it, resulting in insidious frame blending and ghosting, especially during the ending cutscenes. The developers of later Sonic CD ports didn't have access to the original FMVs (if they still existed at all), and previous versions of the game used low-quality, low-res video, so they had to use the edited versions — edited again to match the original slower speed, making the frame blending even worse. In addition, the 2011 remaster cropped the top and bottom of the frame from its original 4:3 to 16:9, and the cropped versions are used even if you're running the game in 4:3. A fan remaster of the opening animation corrects the frame blending issues, along with a color correction pass based on stills of the original production cels, but using the same process on the ending animations proved fruitless due to a far greater amount of damage. Thankfully, Sonic Origins gave the cutscenes a proper remaster using a combination of AI and manual cleanup, presented in the original 4:3.
• The Playstation version of Mortal Kombat Trilogy, despite being otherwise superior to the Nintendo 64 version, had the glaring problem of its music being pitched down a semitone.
• In Kingdom Hearts 1.5 (and the later 1.5+2.5), due to a lack of anti-aliasing and proper upscaling to 1080p, the cutscenes in Re:Chain of Memories have dithering artifacts due to being sourced from pre-rendered 480i video files from the PS2 original and not in-engine cutscenes like the other games (it's also why the lip movements are still synced to the Japanese audio rather than being re-animated to the English dub like the other games, even for the HD version). The 358/2 Days and Re:Coded cutscene movies also suffer from this, though it's zig-zagged with the former as there are several cutscenes ripped right out of Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix HD from after they properly upscaled and anti-aliased that game's cutscenes to 1080p and a later PS4 free DLC cutscene depicting the Roxas VS Xion fight that was also properly rendered the same way, leaving a slightly jarring viewing experience. Kingdom Hearts Final Mix has things left off the sides of the frames during cutscenes that expanding the picture out to 16:9 from its original 4:3 framing let people accidentally see sometimes, though on PS3 you could at least convert the games in 1.5 back to 4:3 if you wanted to. There are also sound glitches in 1 and 2 Final Mix that cause sound effects to not properly play and voice clips from some bosses to either inconsistently play, or not play at all despite being in the games' codes still that Square have yet to patch. This is odd since KH2FM was released with its English dub in Japan in 2007 with no such sound glitches present, though with the additional cutscenes and new boss characters not being dubbed until 2014 when the HD version was being put together (even the Japanese actors weren't brought back in until that point), making it odd that the sound mix for the voices would be glitched since all they had to do was add in the new voice lines and grunts for the new cutscenes and characters. Plus, Roxas' battle grunts at the beginning of 2 are replaced with Ventus' from Birth By Sleep despite the original sound files also still being in the game as well, though this seems to be a deliberate choice on behalf of the devs rather than an audio glitch (Roxas and Ventus both look and sound alike, leading them to be voiced by the same actors in both English and Japanese, so replacing Roxas' original battle grunts with the others isn't too jarring a switch unless you played the original PS2 version of the game and know what they used to sound like).
  • Another anomaly comes in the form of models they used for the HD version of the first game. Due to losing the source code for it, the devs behind the remaster had to go back and recreate the game as best they could from a mix of digging out an ISO/ROM of it from a PS2 disc, rerecorded music at Yoko Shimommura's request, and character models from later games (which, though made on the same engine, had changed enough over time that it's noticeable). The results can be a bit jarring when going between games that used the newer and older models when going in order in the HD collections.
• The remastered versions of Final Fantasy IX and later Final Fantasy VIII upgraded only the character models. The original low-resolution models fit in well with the low-resolution backgrounds, but the upgrade now makes it appear as though they're running around in a diorama. This is especially true for VIII due to its more realistic art style. Although the issue isn't as pronounced in IX, it does make it very clear who the plot-important characters are because only they got remastered models—every other NPC retains their original look. Some fans took it upon themselves to create mods to fix the visual issues.
• The remastered editions of the PlayStation 2-era Grand Theft Auto games suffered from this, to the point where Rockstar apologized and gave the original version for free to anyone who had purchased the digital version of the remaster. The issues, which seem to have stemmed from using AI to upscale textures, ranged from glitched cutscenes to bizarrely wrong textures to restored text on surfaces that both looked terrible and was glaringly inaccurate.

Web Animation

• Even Homestar Runner wasn't immune to this.
  • Most of the home video releases suffer from this due to how the footage was rendered. Unlike the original flash files, the image quality of the toons suffers from having less color. The only upside is that the audio is clearer and the live-action segments are rendered in higher quality.
  • Thanks to Adobe Flash ending support in 2021, the site had to switch to Ruffle to run the original flash files. However, due to it being an early build (for now), the files are downsized as both image and audio quality are worse than when they were running through Flash natively. It is recommended that people use Greasemonkey's All-in-One player (which is only on Mozilla Firefox) if they continue using the site or go to the old site (old.homestrrunner.com).
• Due to the creators having to remove a copyrighted song, the audio of Episode 11 of Inanimate Insanity is heavily offkey.

Western Animation

It bears noting that DVNR (Digital Video Noise Reduction) line damage is a very common problem among cartoon DVD releases. The reason for this is because the program was designed to remove scratches and dirt from older films by comparing adjacent frames and taking elements from another frame to remove damage. While this usually works fine for a live-action film (although it likewise can cause motion smearing and picture damage if used carelessly), in animation (especially animation shot on ones, or one new drawing per frame) the DVNR process can easily mistake details or linework as dirt or scratches, and can accidentally delete whole details from the drawings as a result if the process isn't properly used. Grain Smoothing is also considered to be a serious liability to use in restoring old cartoons, since it can likewise snuff out details or linework if used carelessly. Another reason DVNR is so often (ab)used is because its an automated process, and is much cheaper and quicker to use than DRS (Digital Restoration Services), which require going through the film frame by frame to clean them up at great expense and time.

• Happy about your Looney Tunes Golden Collection sets and Walt Disney Treasures stuff, as well as Disney's restorations of their films? If you're a hardcore animation fan, you probably aren't. The short collections by both studios frequently abuse the infamous DVNR process, which either thins out or erases lines of artwork. And while Disney's films don't use the DVNR process, they do have many noticeable problems— Bambi in particular has had the dark pumped up considerably, which destroys much of the original color contrasts. The Blu-ray release also has some bizarre color alterations, and some shots have obvious grain-smoothing problems.
  • The Looney Tunes Golden Collection sets have a lot of issues with DVNR on the first 2 volumes. While most of the DVNR'd cartoons on volume 1 have outlines blurred for a few frames, some have outlines and art disappearing (Elmer's Candid Camera on vol. 1 has some particularly glaring art erasure that you don't even need to still frame to notice). Vol. 2 also used digital interlacing for a handful of shorts on disc 4, resulting in very flickery picture. Fortunately, a replacement program was issued for that particular disc. Fortunately, the Blu-ray Platinum Collection sets tried to rectify the DVNR on the last volume but still had some hiccups. Almost all the cartoons on volume 1 scanned in HD that had outlines blurred as a result of DVNR, seem to have worse cases of DVNR as outlines and cel work disappear (Bugs Bunny's fist in the scene in "Tortoise Wins by a Hare" where he's getting ready for the race is a prime example). Additionally, "Fast and Furry-ous" is DVNR'd like crazy on Platinum Collection, despite not having any on Golden Collection. Another issue on volumes 2 and 3 is that the cartoons with severe DVNR on GC or ones that weren't scanned in HD, were given new scans but had a much darker hue resulting in some of the cartoon's contrast being messed up. Also all of the cartoons on the vol. 2 Platinum Collection DVD have issues with digital interlacing.
  • The first two of the single-disc "Looney Tunes Super Stars" DVDs include cropped 2:35:1 versions of shorts originally animated in the squarish aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The cropping job was rather lazy-looking. However, Warner Bros. got word of this and promised that later Super Stars releases would now contain an option to switch between full-screen and widescreen.
  • Some Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, Tex Avery MGM Cartoons, and Tom and Jerry shorts were restored for HBO Max, but these new restorations have some faults. The grain and colors have been flattened to make for easier digital cleanup (you know, DVNR) in the case of the Looney Tunes shorts, most of the cartoons have titles recreated with Adobe Photoshop and digital editing.
    • The Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 2 Blu-ray disc was done by the HBO Max team since the Warner Archive team behind the first set were unable to work at their facilities thanks to the COVID-19 Pandemic wreaking havoc at the time. As a result, it has a lot of issues and is very disappointing compared to the stellar Volume 1. Most of the cartoons have DVNR issues (some varying from cartoon to cartoon). Additionally, "Magical Maestro", "One Cabs Family" and "Doggone Tired" have redone titles made in Photoshop (despite this, all three look amazing). Also, all of the cartoons on the set (with the exception of "Droopy's Double Trouble") reuse their Turner audio tracks. "Ventriloquist Cat" seems to be sourced from a poor transfer and "Homesteader Droopy" has very poor color correction, ruining the opening scene. With that said however, "Drag-a-long Droopy", "Field and Scream", "The First Bad Man", "Dixieland Droopy" and "The Farm of Tomorrow" have no issues and look amazing and despite the issues, the set is still worth getting for "Magical Maestro" alone.
  • Prototype versions of "Falling Hare" had DVNR (as seen in special features.) This was fortunately fixed for GC Vol.3.
  • The early Merrie Melodies short "I Wish I Had Wings" has its audio on HBO Max taken from the 1995 Turner dubbed version instead of the original English track, and as such, most of the voices are muted.
• The Disney Oswald the Lucky Rabbit DVD set has fine restorations for the most part, but DVNR issues pop up in "Oh, What A Knight!", and "Bright Lights" had a missing part of its transfer found and spliced into the collection at the 11th hour, which resulted in a shaky, jumpy picture with interlacing during part of it. The pencil test for the lost film "Sagebrush Sadie" that was included as an extra was also shot at the wrong framerate (30 FPS as opposed to 24 FPS) which resulted in the tests being played at way too fast of a speed, and whole drawings were revealed to have been dropped from the video when the pencil tests are still framed, all due to this framerate blunder.
• While the HD remastered versions of Classic Disney Shorts on Disney+ are rather nice looking overall, The Skeleton Dance for some reason has its title and ending cards muted and frozen in place, meaning that the natural film jitter is gone.
• The Woody Woodpecker DVD collections (the two official sets) got a very nasty case of DVNR treatment, terrible color correction and blatant digital compression issues — the ones that get hit the hardest are the shorts directed by Shamus Culhane and Dick Lundy. Curiously, the earlier, sloppier shorts were considerably less ravaged. The unofficial Columbia House mail-order DVD sets use the unaltered prints, however. The B&W bonus cartoons got hit with this too; while the Oswald Rabbit shorts "Hells Heels" and "Spooks" only has it in only minor form, "Grandma's Pet" has some really bad line and art erasing issues.
• A stunning aversion of this trope would be the first official Popeye DVD set, almost completely averting this Trope. Yes, almost — if one looks very carefully in certain bits of the shorts, there is some very mild line thinning and/or erasing that you would usually need to purposely look for in order to spot. The only short that seemed to suffer obvious DVNR problems was "I Like Babies and Infinks", where problems with artwork erasing pop up very frequently. And as John K. pointed out in his blog, the color specials have had some bizarre altering — "Popeye Meets Sindbad" has had the pink, purple and turquoise turned up considerably, and while "Popeye Meets Ali Baba" is very close to actual 1930s colors, the purple bits in the cave have been pulled up into a bluish look. Also, when the Vol. 2 DVD set was released, they goofed up on recreating some of the title cards, and some of the shorts suffered from digital interlacing. This seems to have been rectified by a disc replacement program, thankfully.
• One particularly notorious example of Digital Destruction would be the infamous Betty Boop: The Definitive Collection series of VHS tapes and LaserDiscs. In every single short there is blatantly obvious, horrendous line thinning and erasing. Fortunately, Olive Films came to the rescue in late 2013 by re-releasing Betty Boop shorts with exquisite restorations that are completely devoid of DVNR—the only downside being that some of the pre-1933 shorts have their aspect ratio slightly cropped, most notably Snow White, which has a good chunk of the top of the screen cropped for no good reason.
• Another infamous case of DVNR would be the Eastern-only DVD release of "The Complete Tex Avery" — almost all of the shorts have been ravaged with horrible line thinning and erasing, almost making one wonder if the price of this import-only set is worth it, especially when it costs more than just getting a LaserDisc player and a LaserDisc copy of the released-in-America, un-DVNRed "Complete Tex Avery" set.
  • On a side note, the Tex Avery's Droopy DVD set has a lot of nasty DVNR damage in four shorts ("Wags to Riches", "Daredevil Droopy", "Droopy's Good Deed" and "The Three Little Pups"). Shorts like "Wags" get hit with it so badly all over the film, that it's borderline unwatchable as a result. Fortunately, "Wags to Riches" and "Daredevil Droopy" both had the DVNR fixed on the Tex Avery Screwball Classics Vol. 1 Blu-ray, although their soundtracks are slightly distorted.
• Tex Avery Screwball Classics Volume 3 was able to done by the standard restoration team at Warners and not transfers commissioned by HBO Max and is mostly a return to form but some problems still are present. Most egregious is in "Northwest Hounded Police" where in the shot of the map, the dot that represents the wolf convict is missing for two seconds (which is 48 frames/3 feet of film). Additionally, "Little Johnny Jet" has some awful clean up errors at the start of the cartoon during the "all they want now in days is jets!" scene. Not to mention, the transfers reuse audio from the Laserdisc release which causes Rock-a-bye Bear's titles to have PAL sped-up audio and "Billy Boy" incorrectly has "Cock-A-Doodle Dog"'s title music.
• The TV Turner prints for most of the Happy Harmonies and MGM Oneshot Cartoons as well as some of the Tom and Jerry's have blatant DVNR damage at several points in the films with a number of them appearing on the French Tex Avery set, Droopy DVD and Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collections.
• While most of the MGM/UA cartoon LaserDisc releases in the late 80's-early 90's tend to be DVNR free for the most part, the same cannot be said about the Art of Tom & Jerry: Volume III: The Chuck Jones Cartoons and the Happy Harmonies boxed sets, which were severely mauled with DVNR, to the point where moving backgrounds are affected as well. Here is a comparison of such damage◊ done to 1967's Surf-Bored Cat^note The leftmost image is the LaserDisc master, the middle being the PAL Turner print, and the rightmost being the DVNR-free 2009 restoration..
• Even John Kricfalusi apparently couldn't avoid DVNR completely with Paramount's DVD release of The Ren & Stimpy Show, as there's some noticeable line thinning and art erasing in bits of the episodes. This may have been why John K. got on this soapbox in the first place.
  • That doesn't beat the butchering of dozens of episodes as per John K.'s request. Now, some scenes missing from the Paramount DVDs are only available in poor quality.
• The Beany and Cecil DVD sets had issues with DVNR as well, mainly in the few scenes where characters are moving on ones (i.e. one new drawing per frame).
• In the late 1980s, all of the classic Gumby episodes had their sound tracks completely redone, with new synthesizer music, Stock Sound Effects and voices to match up with the 1988 Gumby Adventures revival series. When the shorts were initially released to DVD in 2002 by Rhino, these late 1980s masters were used, to the disappointment of many fans. More recent DVD releases by Classic Media retain the original soundtracks, however.
• The 2008 UK Blu-ray release of Thunderbirds cropped the episodes into widescreen. This only serves to exaggerate gate weave and grain, which are very noticeable in the VFX shots.
  • Averted in the 50th Anniversary US Blu-ray by Shout! Factory, which not only uses fullscreen masters, but the original mono audio instead of the lazily remastered stereo track with added sounds done in the 1990's (though it still is an option on the discs).
• The Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Blu-ray set suffered from a rather egregious case of this. Not only were the usual DVNR problems present, but they were applied to HD masters dating back to 2004, and the discs being BD-25s as opposed to BD-50s resulted in the video suffering heavy compression, especially compared to the iTunes release which wasn't bound by physical discs and had much better picture quality. Adding further insult to injury is the fact that just a week after the Scooby-Doo! set was released, Warner Bros. would release fellow Hanna-Barbera show The Jetsons on Blu-ray via their Warner Archive division, which ultimately averted this trope.
• The 2020 Blu-Ray set of The Flintstones features a bizarre error on episode 17, "The Big Bank Robbery" where the music and sound effects are completely absent. Thankfully, a disc replacement program was put out immediately after this audio issue was discovered.
• Warner's DVD of the Superman Theatrical Cartoons claims to include transfers from the original masters, boasting sharp colors and no DVNR or interlacing, but they still includes some changes. These include plastered end logos for several shorts, missing sound effects from two cartoons' opening credits, and an audible jump during the prologue of The Mad Scientist.
  • Another Blu-ray set of the series plays this much straighter, with terrible picture quality, watermarks on every cartoon, and an excessive amount of grain smoothing, making the cartoons look like they were dipped in Vaseline.
  • While the official Blu Ray from Warner isn’t anywhere near this bad, it still suffers from issues beyond the original DVD set. The sound issues are still present and the cartoons are heavily plagued by DVNR causing a great loss of detail and line work.
• When the October 1950-March 1962 Noveltoons from Famous Studios were repackaged for television broadcast by Classic Media in the late 90's, not only were the original opening titles cut, but the soundtracks were remastered in PAL format, for North American audiences. Additionally, the picture quality, while sharper, is marred with faded and inaccurate colors, and certain scenes with objectionable content were cut out. By contrast, the MCA/Universal video releases in the early-mid 90's have the cartoons with some modified opening titles, but are otherwise mostly untouched despite not being restored. To make matters worse, the "remastered" versions were included on Classic Media's DVD releases. Fortunately, Universal reclaimed the rights to the shorts following their takeover of DreamWorks Animation, Classic Media's parent company, sparking hope that a more superior restoration of the shorts are on the way.
• Rhino's original DVD releases of Jem suffered from an interesting case of this - they were taken from 35mm film sources, so they were sharp and detailed. Unfortunately, Rhino only had access to the rough, uncorrected versions (meaning the actual 35mm sources were likely not kept or are in the possession of someone else), so the episodes on Rhino DVD have more animation errors than the TV broadcasts. They also redid the color timing, turning Pizzazz's neon green hair into an ugly "moldy mustard" green/yellow. The new release from Shout! Factory used the broadcast masters of the final episodes, so the color is more accurate and many animation errors are fixed, but because these were tape masters the video is less sharp.
• Like Jem, Rhino's DVDs of The Transformers utilized film sources containing sharp picture, but also some animation errors. Some episodes even ran shorter than originally broadcast because of Rhino's dependence on the filmed versions. On top of that, the soundtracks received 5.1 "remixes" containing additional sound effects. Shout! Factory decided to rectify this by releasing DVDs containing footage from the broadcast tapes spliced into the filmed episodes, which also play synced with the original soundtracks. The picture quality of these versions fluctuates between looking sharp and looking soft.
  • One of Rhino's VHS releases had master tape damage in one episode.
  • The distribution copy of "The Burden Hardest to Bear" circulating since the Shout! Factory release of Season 3 was ripped from an obvious older master tape that looks almost fuzzy (namely, there's a unstable horizontal line appearing at the top of the picture throughout the episode), as if it was taken from a VHS copy.
• The original DVDs of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! starred a Grinch with an unexpected mustard-yellow skin tone. When the special later turned 40, a new restoration tuned the Grinch's fur back to its original green.
• Universal's DVD of the 1972 Animated Adaptation of The Lorax gave the Lorax brown fur for half of the cartoon, as opposed to orange. Warner eventually rectified this by releasing a Blu-ray and DVD where the Lorax's fur has a consistent shade of orange, although the audio for the Cat in the Hat's opening Vanity Plate now plays out of sync. Likewise, for the Universal DVD release, the smog-polluted skies throughout the cartoon became soft and bluish, as opposed to originally having a more convincing plum-colored hue.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Some of the season DVD sets notably have quite a bit of compression artifacts, and the widescreen episodes featured on the season 6 and season 8 DVDs (Truth or Square and It's a SpongeBob Christmas!) have black bars added on the top and bottom of the screen, resulting in rather poor picture quality.
  • In all of season 2, SpongeBob has been turned a sickly pale color (nicknamed PaleBob by fans).
  • Some episodes of season 4, such as "All That Glitters", "Best Frenemies", "Wigstruck", and "Bummer Vacation" look very pale and saturated on TV airings and DVD.
  • "Karate Island" and "New Leaf" have really dark colors on DVD releases.
  • The censored version of "Procrastination / I'm With Stupid" (as in: the version without the sequence depicting SpongeBob watching his friends having fun and then imagining a drag racing crash) suffers from both shorts having less saturated colors and an abundance of deinterlacing lines.
• South Park:
  • The first season DVD set was criticized for being transfers of the earlier VHS releases, with many of the episodes suffering from shimmering and jagged edges around the characters and an odd crosshatching pattern that would be left when a character had high motion, and the rare audio pop (read: over 80) in the first six episodes alone. The second season set also suffers from shimmering and jagged edges around the characters, some minor edge enhancement and a few instances where part of the picture becomes slightly soft, but was generally considered a better transfer. Once the video distribution rights to the series moved to Paramount beginning with the third season, the transfer quality began to improve.
  • The HD remasters of Seasons 1-12 are more or less flawless, with no major issues outside of a slight bit of interlacing here and there. The exception to this are the flashbacks in "Tom's Rhinoplasty" and "City on the Edge of Forever", where they are stretched versions of the SD, 4:3 originals with very reflective blur filters applied to the sides of the screen. In the latter's case, it isn't even exclusive to the flashbacks to other episodes; even the flashback scenes wholly original to the episode weren't remastered, not even the one to earlier in the same episode. Even the flashbacks are odd given that the same scenes were restored digitally in the episodes they originally appeared.
• The 2013 Blu-ray release of Mickey's Christmas Carol appears to have been rendered under a gaussian blur tool, which snuffs out a lot of the detail and line quality.
• Many 2000s DVD releases of Filmation cartoons have the sound higher pitched and the footage sped-up. This was because, when they owned the rights to the library in the 90s, Hallmark (the card company) deliberately threw out the original masters (as well as sound masters and other important archival material) and made new ones- but only for international distribution, apparently because they hated Filmation's library; this was discovered when Entertainment Rights (which has, though various mergers, been absorbed into DreamWorks Animation and Universal Studios) bought it off Hallmark. Hence, the majority of the library is now high-pitched and sped-up, due to being in PAL format as compared to NTSC. Some of the lucky few to escape this included Filmation's Ghostbusters (both the live-action and animated versions), several of their little-known live-action series like Ark II, and Star Trek: The Animated Series (the latter being held by Paramount, then CBS).
• When The Simpsons was first released on Disney+ in 2019, viewers immediately noticed that all of the pre-HD era episodes had not only been restored to high-definition, but cropped to fit a widescreen TV - and meticulously at that, as reverse Pan and Scan is so prominent that on multiple occasions, the frame shifts vertically to capture key details (it's especially noticeable in the opening sequence and certain action scenes). The frame cropping came at a significant cost for fans, as certain visual gags would vanish off-screen compared to the original fullscreen versions. Sometimes, shots containing hard-to-crop items and text would instead be squashed, causing the opposite effect, while scenes facing televisions and other screens would be left uncropped entirely.
  • This would ultimately be averted in May 2020, when Disney+ added the original fullscreen versions of these episodes (which had also been restored to HD) to the service following heavy backlash, alongside an option to switch between either aspect ratio.
  • These restored episodes had actually made their first appearances during the 2014 "Every Simpsons Ever" marathon on FXX, and were subsequently brought to the former "Simpsons World" streaming service before themselves being replaced by the original masters.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had Yukon Cornelius' coat look green instead of blue in early pressings of the Blu-ray. The 50th Anniversary Edition has it changed back to blue.
• When The Little Drummer Boy was released on DVD, Classic Media used a newly-discovered stereo mix of the soundtrack during restoration. Unfortunately, the stereo mix is missing many sound effects, such as Aaron's drumming and the sounds of the crowd commotion in Jerusalem, and subsequent releases have not corrected these issues. Thus, the only way to watch the original broadcast with the mono mix is on VHS.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • Seasons 1-3 of the classic series suffered from this when HiT Entertainment restored them. While some of the scenes are cleaned up and were zoomed out to make it clearer, others weren't done well. One particularly glaring example is "The Flying Kipper", where a majority of the shots are zoomed in. Season 3 zigzags this, as some shots are better, but often have something chopped off. Other issue is that the restored version might use different takes, or don't use them at all. Sometimes scenes are simply "color-corrected" versions of the late 90's analogue transfers.
  • The most egregious example comes from the episode "Coal" when Henry is backing into a siding. In the original, Henry backs into the siding and Edward comes out of another siding to take his train. However in the restored version, an outtake is used where Henry backs into a siding and then quickly moves forward offscreen again. It's pretty evident the editor did not care about this outrageous example.
  • While the sixth season was the first to be in widescreen, the first 6 episodes from said season are not. Some of the scenes from the episodes are done in 16:9, but the majority of them are done in 4:3. Because of this, the DVD release of the season cropped the first batch of episodes in 16:9, cropping out the footage. This also applies to season 7 and 8 when stock footage from before Jack's stories was used.
  • The last seasons of the model series suffer from this due to the footage being in yellow.
• VeggieTales:
  • The original two shows that were released on DVD seem not to be remastered for whatever odd reason as the ones after those were completely clean footage. So when it came to the 15th anniversary of Where's God When I'm S-Scared?, they tried fixing it by saturating the colors, but it ends up having a purple tint over the whole episode and some sound effects were missing (eg. the Psycho sting when the wisemen were taking Daniel away). The reason this is odd is because the Silly Song was restored for the "Ultimate Silly Song Countdown", done in the similar way from Are You My Neighbor? (show 3) onwards. So it's possible either the original masters were either stolen or are currently in possessions of someone. Speaking of the Silly Song, the audio for The Water Buffalo Song from the 15th anniversary release was taken from the live shows which is completely re-orchestrated and uses Larry's current voice. While one can understand why since Mike Nawrocki stated he disliked the old voice, the problem is that only parts of the old audio can be heard and the beginning bits of Archibald's lines were cut.
  • When the VeggieTales Classics line in 2002-2004 remixed earlier episodes in 5.1 surround sound, a few major sound effects did not survive the transfer, and in "Rack, Shack and Benny"'s case, some music cues either play at the wrong time or go missing entirely. Also, changing the DVD track to "Stereo" will not save you, as it's typically just a mix-down of the newer 5.1 track instead of the original audio. The only DVDs in the Classics line that give you a choice between new and original audio are "King George and the Ducky" and "Madame Blueberry."
  • Aside from the two films, the show never went into widescreen until Tomato Sawyer and Huckleberry Larry's Big River Rescue. Strangely, this move never came onto the DVD releases until Pistachio. So many of the compilations made after 2011 would either zoom in the footage from the pre-2008 shows or stretch the sides to match with the new footage. This also includes the Blu-ray releases of the pre-2008 episodes.
  • Framerate is another issue. Despite the earlier episodes (up to and including Esther) being animated at 30fps, compilations and some rereleases bring it down to 24fps, creating noticeable frame-skipping.
  • Rack, Shack & Benny has a bizarre example: When the video was originally released, several complex shots were rendered at 15 frames per second due to crunch time. These shots were reproduced at their intended 30fps for all reprints of the video from 1996 to 2001, but for whatever reason, the 2002 DVD and all subsequent re-releases "restore" the original broken framerate, alongside introducing many other problems with color and sound.
  • Many of the official YouTube channel's uploads of some videos, mainly full episodes, have a glitch in the audio that sounds like echoing. Examples include the uploads of Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, Pistachio: The Little Boy Who Woodn't and "The Story of Saint Patrick" segment from Sumo of the Opera.
• The music for the original two Muzzy in Gondoland is pitched down when it was released on DVD.
• Cartoon Network uploaded the Cartoonstitute short Danger Planet in HD on their official YouTube channel, but the colors are way too bright compared to the original and there are glitches, such as severe ghosting showing the Danger Planet arcade machine frozen in midair when it falls at the beginning.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: In an example that occurred during the show's airing, Cartoon Network digitally turned the saturation up on several episodes in season 2 for no discernible reason, making the show garishly bright and nearly painful to look at. The show's crew was not happy with this changing of their work and fortunately season 3 returned to an acceptable color palette that didn't cause eye strain.
• The premiere of the Regular Show episode "Power Tower" aired with overly saturated colors, presumably because it was unfinished or a video compression error. Luckily, reruns and digital releases fixed the issue.
• In November of 2017, Rainbow Brite was finally released on Region 1 DVD. However, all 13 episodes were taken from the UK home video release, and as a result, they suffer from the PAL speed up problem that currently plagues many of Filmation's productions as well as washed-out colors. Additionally, all DVD releases use the edited-for-syndication versions of the first five episodes, which change the show's intro and have edits to reduce running time. It's presumable the original master tapes were lost or are in a private collection somewhere. The only way to access the uncut versions of the first five episodes with the original intro would be to import the German DVDs, which have English audio tracks.
• On October 31, 2018, an HD remaster of Garfield and Friends was issued on Boomerang, and fans weren't happy with the final results.
  • Instead of scanning the original film for an HD master, the intro was instead re-animated in Flash. Not surprisingly, fans of the show quickly noticed that the animations of the characters looked cheap and stiff, it was missing reactions of the animated characters and some special effects were completely ruined. This can be justified as apparently the original film masters couldn't be located for the opening, and the original effects were edited on videotape and the master tape is too low resolution to upscale to HD, meaning a true restoration is straight up impossible.
  • The entirety of episode 7, as well as the episode "Beddy Buy" and the quickie before "Temp Trouble", narrowly avoids this by being presented with a border around the cartoon (dubbed "Retrovision" by the restoration team) because, like with the original opening, the original film master couldn't be found and the master tape couldn't be properly upscaled, so they used this method to present the picture quality as best as they could.
  • Meanwhile, the title cards are cropped to 4:3 with a random-colored border filling the rest of the screen, while the episodes themselves are cropped and zoomed in to fit a 16:9 picture.
  • The remaster also has a number of other differences: For one, the original credit sequences were done away in favor of a new credit sequence◊ with changing colored backgrounds, and the Film Roman logo was replaced with new logos for Mendelson/Paws Productions and Film Roman's then-current logo, though the original audio on the Film Roman logo remains. Some of the title cards had their colors changed; for example, "Banana Nose" originally had a blue background◊ that was changed to green◊ in the remaster, and "Unidentified Flying Orson" uses green text◊ whereas the original was orange; "Swine Trek" had its opening crawl redone, and "Orson Goes on Vacation" has a noticable zoom in on the footage after the title card with Wade.
• The current DVD release of A Boy Named Charlie Brown looks rather grainy, while the other Peanuts movies are much better-looking.
• The Arabic dub of Blazing Dragons has this issue, as evidenced by the intro. The colors are way too bright and the picture looks a little blurry.
• Several episodes of Anatole uploaded to the Treehouse Direct YouTube channel were uploaded in partial master tape form (as in the video starts with color bars and a production slate, and the episodes cut off before they even end).
• Peacock ended up getting the PAL masters for The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat when they began streaming the series. Besides the slightly higher speed and audio pitch, it's very obvious that these masters haven't been maintained well. The first episode, for starters, looks so incredibly fuzzy that it almost looks like it was taken from a VHS tape, and a few episodes have visible (though thankfully brief) tape damage. It's highly plausible that, given the obscurity of the show, these were the only masters NBCUniversal could find in their archives. That being said, most fans are fine with this since the series at least is back in circulation again after more than two decades.
• On Tom and Jerry DVD releases, most cartoons shot in the CinemaScope format (mainly those near the end of the first series) have been cropped with Pan and Scan.
• Airings of Madeline on Qubo had the image yellowed due to master deterioration.
• Many DiC Entertainment shows have suffered from this trope thanks to the masters not being maintained well. Examples include The Get Along Gang ("Half a Map Is Better Than None" has a noticeable grey tint in some portions), Inspector Gadget (half the colors are washed out in many releases), Rainbow Brite (the colors are washed out) and The Real Ghostbusters (some episodes have noticeable tape damage, one episode has the brightness turned up on one release).
• For the DVD release of the Fraggle Rock animated series, episodes 8-13 (except for episodes 9 and 10, "Laundry Never Lies/What Boober's Nose Knows" and "Mokey's Flood of Creativity/What the Doozers Did") are noticeably higher pitched (except for the intro, credits, and episode title cards), due to being sourced and remastered from 50Hz prints.
• When 101 Dalmatians: The Series was added to iTunes and Disney+, the intro sequence, title cards, and end credits were completely redone, making them stick out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the over twenty-year-old show. The redone intro also features different animation that doesn't match up with the original version's animation, and only uses the "blue background" variation of the intro for all episodes, getting rid of the Couch Gag where six different versions of the intro had different episode clips shown and backgrounds used.
• When Star Wars: Clone Wars was released to DVD in two volumes, the series was subject to awful DVNR, resulting in a blurry, jagged look that's nothing like what Genndy Tartakovsky intended (it's especially apparent when you look at the cel lines for each character or object). Disney+, despite billing it as having been remastered in high definition, used these exact same masters, complete with a 16:9 widescreen crop.
• The Family Guy episode "Da Boom" suffered greatly from this due to what is presumably a bad tape-to-digital transfer that nobody fixed, resulting in a much duller palette and cruder-looking outlines that◊ almost make it look cel-animated◊ (despite every episode being inked and painted digitally).
• Various episodes from the first 3 seasons of Rugrats when aired on NickRewind have the blue colors turned up leading to a lot of over saturation, alongside various instances of characters being blurred.
• The original remastered version of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin suffered from this at times. In "Octopede Sailors", dirt and hair can be seen on the screen right before we first see Captain Zelza, and there are various audio issues as well (most notably with the song "Freedom" from the Octopede Sailors arc). The 2019 remastered version fixes these errors.
• In 2006, Warner Archive announced a complete series DVD for Wally Gator, but pulled it because it needed a lot of remastering work (it's for this reason that Quick Draw McGraw still isn't on DVD). Around 2019, they finally released the complete series, but were heavily criticized by customers due to the perceived poor quality of the transfers. Messy artwork, random dropouts, color oversaturation, and the volume of each cartoon varying wildly were among customers' complaints. While some cartoons were remastered well, others were VCR-quality.
  • Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, another member of The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series, also got a complete series DVD. While the picture and transfer rate are top-notch, the sound quality varies wildly from episode to episode, being either too loud or too quiet.
• For IMPS' overseas restoration of The Smurfs (1981), made sometime during the 90s, the digital-ink episodes from seasons 6 and 7 look very sloppy, presumably having been restored from film prints (which were used for unrestored versions in certain countries, including Germany). Additionally, every episode of seasons 1-8 use the same intro and closing sequence for season 1 (with two Alternative Foreign Theme Songs) with a different opening logo, along with the episode titles and credits all re-done and modified. There are also several episodes which use the edited versions from the syndicated Smurfs Adventures show, instead of the original unedited versions. This restoration for the entire series was released to DVD in Australia and Germany.
  • Starting with the official YouTube release of the series, these same editions were used, except all the episodes were cropped into widescreen. The aforementioned sequences of the opening logo, episode titles, and credits were re-modified again.
• The complete series DVD release for Magilla Gorilla and its backup segments lacks the opening and ending credits for absolutely no reason. Also, none of the cartoons were restored. Some of the cartoons have sharp images, but others, especially that of Ricochet Rabbit, are fuzzy.
• The complete series DVD release of The Yogi Bear Show only has the main cartoon segments, lacking the opening and closing credits and inserts that were in the half-hours. However, one bonus feature shows the uncut versions of the first three episodes. When an unrestored insert or commercial plays after a restored segment, the first part of the audio is missing.
• When Disney+ began streaming PB&J Otter, a few episodes were sourced from 50Hz PAL masters. It's unknown why this was done, given that the Disney Junior re-runs in the early-to-mid-2010s used the original 60Hz NTSC masters, but it's likely those were the only masters Disney had on hand at the moment. That being said, many fans were glad that the show was back in official circulation after quite some time.

---