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So, around 2017, anime encoders started clueing into the fact that it was possible to do something called descaling. To give a mildly inaccurate explanation of what that is, studios don't usually export their anime in 1080p and put it on a Blu-Ray disk—they normally export it at a different resolution, like 720p, then do a simple upscale to 1080p. Anime encoders discovered that there were certain benefits to reversing the 720p --> 1080p upscale (i.e. "descaling" from 1080p to 720p) and working with the original image. (Anime is produced at all sorts of resolutions, not just 720p, but I'll use 720p as a shorthand to make things clearer.)
What benefits are there to descaling? First, encoders thought that it might make sense to get the original 720p image and release encodes that were 720p instead of 1080p. By doing this, the theory went, encoders could save filesize with no loss of quality. However, because of the need to encode in 4:4:4, this process doesn't actually save any filesize. If you compare a 720p 4:4:4 encode to a 1080p encode that's even a bit bigger, the 1080p encode will generally win out. These so-called "native res encodes" died out over time, and now pretty much only herkz does them.
Second, it turns out that getting the original 720p image allows encoders to smooth out imperfections in the image more effectively than if they were working with the 1080p upscale. For a long time, when it came to dealing with aliasing in an image, the best combination of effectiveness and safety was to upscale a descaled 720p image with nnedi3, which has an antialiasing effect. Bringing a descaled image back to 1080p using a better upscaler than the original studio used is called "rescaling." Nowadays, encoders are experimenting with other versions of rescaling, like doubling the descaled image with waifu2x cunet (which is probably the best "neutral" upscaler in existence right now) and applying eedi3.
Recently, I was made aware of a [relatively new technique](https://github.com/YomikoR/GetFnative) that allows encoders to deal with the following process by a studio:
1) The studio exports an anime at 720p
2) The studio upscales the 720p image to 1080p and observes that their upscale process has created ugly borders, so...
3) The studio goes back and upscales the 720p image to 1084p instead, then crops the image to 1080p.
KyoAni did this for several projects, including Kanon 2006, Clannad, and The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi. Though I haven't confirmed it, they probably also did the same thing in their 2012-2017 projects except with 960p instead of 720p.
Kanon 2006 has three different upscale processes depending on the scene, so it's hard to reliably get the original image without writing a program to detect which scene is which. So I did that, and these encodes are the result.
[Here's some comparisons.](https://slow.pics/c/Q157p3M1) Some of the images nicely demonstrate the strength and safety of descale-based AA methods over full-res methods. These encodes are not strictly better than Beatrice-Raws, which is to be expected because they're half the filesize. I'm not sure if I will ever have the time to make a v2 of my Kanon 2006 release with these raws.
All this also means that there is room for improvement in existing Clannad encodes.
![[Okay-Raws] Kanon (2006) (BD 1080p)](https://f.t0r.space/no-cover.webp)
