Remaster

Original version: Faded colors, cropped 4:3 Aspect Ratio.
Remastered version: Jack has a right ear!

"Each print has been completely restored, digitally remastered, restored again, then reverted back to crumbling nitrate film stock just for the jolly hell of it."

— Jeff Fitzgerald, "Rare Jazz Films Restored"

Taken in the literal (and original) definition, "remastering" is a process where the original video or audio (analog) source material is edited to (in theory) look newer, brighter, cleaner, etc. and put on the new commercial release, likely of the digital kind in the post-'90s world. It initially started with music in the move to Compact Disc Digital Audio, abbreviated CDDA (the CDDA standard is known as the Red Book standard), before expanding to use with film reissues come the introduction of DVD, which allowed for much better picture quality than prior videotape formats. The practice especially picked up with the advent of Blu-ray and HD video streaming, and nowadays is most commonly associated with new releases of old films and TV shows.

Literal definition aside, though, Remastering is associated with the process of making an old product look more "better", or at least like it's in mint condition. The usual process of a remastering includes such things as;

• Making the product look more colorful, if not applying Colorization in general (Messing this up may lead to more brown, or oversaturated colors)
• Making the audio sound more clear (although some just make stuff louder)
• In the era of hi-definition, increasing the resolution of the masters.
• And of course, some companies may think "Remaster" is a metaphor for "any kind of rerelease we feel like doing", and do changes to the product outright.

This term tends to get used pretty fast and loose with Video Games— although their digital nature means that they usually aren't "remastered" in the traditional sense^note Unless it's remastering an Interactive Movie or a game with Pre-Rendered Graphics, examples being Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition and Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, the term is generally used to refer to a game being ported or updated to newer hardware, often with enhancements and tweaks being made to take full advantage of the hardware and bringing previously outdated aspects of the game design up to modern standards. These generally fall under Updated Re-release, though the line between that, a straight-up port, and a Video Game Remake can often blur together.

The quality of a remastered product tends to vary a lot. Generally, though, people appreciate remasters the best when they're able to increase the visual and audio quality of their product/make them enjoyable to watch on their new Hi-Def monitors with as little modifications to the source material or their memories of the product as possible. Digital Destruction and Loudness War are when the Remaster actually makes the product worse than before (with the latter being specific to music); unfortunately, the common consumer is typically unaware of this happening.

One of the advantages of remastering a project shot on film is that unlike electronic video (analog and digital alike), images shot on film have no fixed resolution, being captured as tiny crystals on a filmstrip. Thus, the quality of the transfer depends largely on the quality of the digital scan and not the film negative itself. With a good scan, a competently-made film from fifty years ago can look like it was made a week ago. A disadvantage of moving to digital cinematography is that projects are recorded with a finite number of pixels from which no new resolution can be created, which is why digital cinematography didn't take off until the image quality was more comparable to film in theatrical projection.

Remastered products tend to be sold as a Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition or an Anniversary Edition. Compare the George Lucas Altered Version. Contrast The Not-Remix, in which the material is improved in quality but also altered from the original version.

The Other Wiki has some more general information. Also look up Master Recording for information on what Masters are when referring to this.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball Z received a few of these over the years:
  • The first one was Funimation's "Orange Brick" DVD set from 2007, often held up as a textbook example of Digital Destruction thanks to its excessive use of DVNR and poor 16:9 cropping.
  • The second one was Toei Animation's in-house "Dragon Box" DVD set. More videophile-oriented than the Orange Bricks, they preserve the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the series, feature closer color grading to the original production assets, and were manually cleaned up to preserve detail. These DVDs became so coveted among fans that Funimation eventually gave them a US release.
  • Funimation also started doing their own "Level Set" Blu-ray remaster in 2012 from the 16mm elements they had on-hand (which are notably prints and not the original camera negatives), and the results were even better than the Dragon Boxes. Unfortunately, they canceled their release after two volumes because of how expensive it was and are instead releasing cheaper Blu-rays with a remaster that can best be described as a cleaner-looking Orange Brick job, featuring decent picture quality and clarity but cropped to 16:9 (albeit more competently than the Orange Bricks) and with noticeably bleached color grading.
• Renewal of Evangelion, known overseas as the "Platinum Edition." Painstaking efforts were made to eliminate as much grain as possible while keeping in as many details as possible, as well as fixing the infamous gate weave that the original footage suffered from. It's almost impossible to see any grain in the new footage at times. There is a caveat, however: the original 16 mm master negative for episode 16 was lost somehow, so Gainax had to make do with an internegative. As a result, that episode has a blurrier and more washed-out look compared to all of the others.
• Typically, anime from the 80's and early 90's get a clean-up job, with visuals made more contrasting in color and audio made crisper, when DVD/Blu-Ray releases come around. Most of these attempts also try to remove film grain from the original footage as well, out of a preference among domestic audiences for animation that looks as consistent with modern digital productions as possible (this mentality is so prevalent that keeping film grain, typically regarded as common sense among western videophiles due in part to the high risk of Digital Destruction, can and will lead to significant backlash from Japanese buyers). In most cases, the fans like them. "Most" being the operative word. Lately anime from the 1960's and 70's has been getting this treatment as well, although most of it so far is a case of No Export for You or such.
• Every Studio Ghibli film has been remastered, with Disney, Sentai Filmworks (in the case of Grave of the Fireflies), and GKIDS (in the cases of Only Yesterday, Ocean Waves, and My Neighbors the Yamadas) carrying over these same versions for their North American releases. Notably, the Ghibli remasters preserve film grain rather than removing it, a huge rarity for anime (given the aforementioned Japanese preference for de-graining) that results in much greater preservation of detail. And even later digitally-animated films have been given a Retraux effect with film grain and gate weave to look like 35mm prints.
• AKIRA underwent a major restoration in the US in 2001 to become THX certified. It was also redubbed because the original dub recorded in 1989 couldn't possibly live up to these standards on a technical level.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995) was originally issued in a George Lucas Altered Version known as Ghost in the Shell 2.0 in 2008 with added CGI effects. The original 1995 film finally got a proper remaster a few years later, with Anchor Bay carrying over this version to their 2014 North American/UK Blu-ray. Although, despite much of the film being animated digitally, the remaster was struck from a 35mm film master complete with noticeable telecine wobble. It was still a huge improvement from the version presented as a bonus on the 2.0 Blu-ray though, which was struck from a horrible LaserDisc master.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena has a rather notable remaster in that the grain reduction wasn't the biggest goal for them. In order to keep the fine lines and details in animation the show was famous for, they focused on color correction and redoing most of the sound effects. This has resulted in one of the best remasters of 90s anime, according for some reviewers, stating that it is on the same level as the Neon Genesis Evangelion 10th anniversary collection mentioned above.
• The 1986 Fist of the North Star movie is a unique case in the fact that while most of the footage was remastered for the DVD and Blu-ray releases, the censored footage was taken from what looks like a VHS copy of the movie, presumably due to said censorship being done on videotape. The difference is quite jarring, and is a contributing factor to the belief that the uncensored film print is missing.
• Pokémon: The Series got the first episode remastered on Pokémon Smash on the 15th anniversary of the anime. The episode Holiday Hi-Jynx was also remastered in Japan, with Jynx recolored purple. Despite this edit, the episode remains banned in the U.S. The first thirteen movies were also remastered in high definition for a limited edition Blu-ray set. Of these, the first four and the eighth and ninth films have seen similar remasters outside Japan. The remasters for the first four movies each streamed for a brief period on Pokemon.com (and before that, the remaster for the first movie aired on Cartoon Network), and the first three of them were re-released on DVD and Blu-ray on February 9, 2016, while the fourth, eighth and ninth movies were released on iTunes. The trilogy was released on Blu-ray in Australia in December 2015.
• Remastering many anime TV shows from the 2000s onward is difficult because they were animated digitally and more often than not are locked in their original aspect ratios, unlike their cel-animated predecessors. They would require an upscale, and the results often vary. Nonetheless, it has been done for early digi-paint shows like Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Blue Submarine No. 6, Shakugan no Shana, and Last Exile with mixed results. Funimation also did their own upscales for later SD digi-paint shows like Ouran High School Host Club and Slayers Revolution, and Viz did one for Death Note.
  • Cowboy Bebop was mostly cel-animated, and benefited greatly from an HD remaster, though a few later episodes were entirely digitally animated and had to be upscaled. On the Blu-ray, they were noticeably of lower quality than the rest of the series. Ditto for Serial Experiments Lain from the same era. It's mostly cel-animated, but some shots were animated digitally and stuck out in the remaster. One Piece was animated in standard definition until episode 207, when it switched to HD. HD upscales of original episodes don't look as good, as well as have cropping to widescreen if they're official.
  • Inuyasha has not been remastered because half of the show was cel-animated onto film (with some CGI effects), but it switched to digital with episode 98. Only the first half of the show would benefit from a remaster. However, Rumiko Takahashi's older shows (Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Ranma ½) all have excellent HD remasters.
• After the success of their Kickstarter-funded Blu-ray release for Bubblegum Crisis, using the gorgeous Japanese HD remaster, AnimEigo recently announced that they will be doing new telecines themselves for some overlooked anime that haven't received HD remasters. A.D. Police Files (a spinoff of Crisis) will be the first such title. AnimEigo has the original 35mm film, and will be funding a new in-house transfer through Kickstarter.
• In contrast to the Sailor Moon anime series (see Digital Destruction for more information on that debacle), Viz Media released a full native HD remaster of Sailor Moon R: The Movie to theaters in a limited engagement in early 2017, with a DVD and Blu-ray release following a few months later. Despite grain removal, the remaster retains sharp linework and solid visual detail, averting many of the issues seen in the aforementioned TV series releases.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: The Season 1 and Season 2 episodes were originally aired in fullscreen before being given widescreen HD remasters for future releases (such as the Youku copies of the episodes).
• The official YouTube channel for Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf has uploaded widescreen HD versions of older episodes that were originally released in fullscreen, though other episodes might receive censorship when put on YouTube.

Eastern Animation

• KikoRiki:
  • The original show had its first 40 episodes produced in a fullscreen ratio. They were soon remade for widescreen, though not without some goofs slipping in.
  • The New Adventures spin-off had "Who Framed Krash the Rabbit?" entirely re-rendered with better visuals for the FUN Union dub, and some additional scenes thrown in as well.

Comic Books

• Youngblood (Image Comics)'s first five issues were completely redone for a hardcover release, with prolific writer Joe Casey redoing the story almost from scratch, changing every single piece of dialog and even re-organizing pages for coherence's sake. On top of that, the colors were redone entirely, fixing some of original colorist Brian Murray's less thought out color schemes.

Films — Live-Action

• Home video distributors like The Criterion Collection and Shout! Factory are known for their high quality film restorations.
• Star Wars has had multiple remasters, starting with THX enhanced remasters on VHS in the early '90s. The Special Editions was another round before the onset of DVD's, with the added George Lucas Altered Version.
• To Kill a Mockingbird uses many zooms in the film by zooming in the negative, increasing grain size. Instead of removing the grain for Blu-Ray, the restoration team matched it with the other grain to make the effect more seamless, while keeping the original picture.
• Monochrome/Black and White movies. Sometimes companies try to color them, too, but that tends to upset some people.
• Some DVD bonus features of films directed by The Coen Brothers parody this with Forever Young Film Preservation, whose "accomplishments" include restoring The Big Lebowski using an Italian film reel and redubbed audio, and making Blood Simple More "worthy of preservation" by cutting out "the boring parts".
• The first 20 James Bond movies had digitally restored "Ultimate Edition" DVDs released during the same year as the premiere of Casino Royale, which marked a Continuity Reboot of the franchise.
• Halloween has multiple remasters. Cinematographer Dean Cundey oversaw one in 1998 that was issued on a THX DVD, and another occurred in 2003 for the film's 25th anniversary. The latter has it's fans, but it's color timing was criticized by some (including Cundey) for being inaccurate (it attempted to make the daytime scenes look more like Fall; the original remaster made it obvious that the film was shot in Spring), and it's DVD fell out-of-print in favor of the 1998 THX DVD. The 2003 remaster was issued on Blu-ray in 2006, but another remaster (done by Modern Video Film, and once again supervised by Cundey) was issued in 2013 for the film's 35th anniversary Blu-ray. It was more well-received, but some fans still preferred the 2003 remaster. Shout! Factory realized this and included both Blu-rays in their 2014 franchise Blu-ray boxset and in the 2021 4K Ultra HD rerelease (the latter also containing a 4K HDR remaster of the film with similar colors as the 2013 release.. Unfortunately it still didn't stop the fans from arguing.
• Prom Night has an excellent remaster that improved tremendously from prior DVD releases. Since the 90s, all releases of the film were struck from a PAL VHS that was slightly sped up, extremely dark (the nighttime scenes were incomprehensible), open-matte with boom mics visible in some shots, and with very muffled audio. When Synapse released the film on Blu-ray (and reissued it on DVD), they did a brand new 2k scan from the original film elements and the results were night and day compared to previous releases.
• Universal's Dracula had an extensive remaster, along with the Spanish-language adaptation released the same year. This included removing surface noise, scratches, and tears, undoing the fading that the master negative's dye suffered over the years, and stabilizing the image. Surprisingly, the Spanish version was in better condition, with the exception of one reel, which had to be filled in with a poor-quality projection print from Cuba (it was thought lost for decades). For the English version, the audio for the "Black Swan" song from the Swan Lake ballet that plays during the opening credits for both films had to be cut/paste from the Spanish film because the English sound print was in such poor quality.
• The two editions for the Super Sentai V-Cinema & Movie Blu-Ray Box sets marked the Blu-Ray debut for every Sentai film from Chouriki Sentai Ohranger: Ohré vs. Kakuranger to Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Vs Go Onger Ginmaku Bang, as well as Goseiger Returns and Go-Busters Returns. The special thing about these two sets are the films from Ohranger vs. Kakuranger to GoGoV vs. Gingaman/GoGoV the Movie: Clash! The New Super Warrior: During the time they were made, both Super Sentai movies and TV episodes were mostly finished on film but completed after being transferred to videotape. Due to the early tapes used, the movies and shows were blurry and didn't look real good. Come the V-Cinema & Movie sets and the films in question look excellent, with good color reproduction and great details. While it's debated whether it's a decent 1080p scan from The New '10s or an upscale of a 480p transfer done during the Turnofthe Millennium, the consensus is that the master copies on the Blu-Ray sets ARE NOT the same masters that were a blend-field riddled mess on the original DVDs. This only applies to the aforementioned films: the direct to video films from Timeranger vs. GoGoV to Boukenger vs. Super Sentai were definitely upscaled from their original masters and, while fairly decent, are not as eye-opening as the older films. Good news: the THEATRICAL films got HD transfers and also look fine, as do all the films after Boukenger vs. Super Sentai..
  • The Blu-Ray sets also fix some Digital Destruction wrought by the DVD of Dekaranger the Movie: Full Blast Action: during the music video playing under the end credits, the color correction desaturated the blue, turning Hoji's/Deka Blue's uniform and Deka suit gray (it also affected Tetsu/Deka Break). The Blu-Ray fixes this. (Pictures from the TV-Nihon wiki: [1]◊, [2]◊, [3]◊).
• The Godfather and The Godfather Part II underwent a restoration from 2006-2008,^note The Godfather Part III also had a less-extensive remaster after director Francis Ford Coppola used the Paramount/DreamWorks SKG merger as an opportunity to alert his friend and DW co-founder Steven Spielberg how worn out the original elements had become. Because the films make copious use of chiaroscuro lighting, much of the remastering process was spent trying to keep digital noise from building up in the large, dark portions of various shots.
• David Cronenberg noted in a 2004 DVDTalk.com interview that he refused to do a DVD Commentary for The Fly (1986) (which was first released as a Vanilla Edition on the format) upon initially being asked because 20th Century Fox wouldn't allow him to supervise a transfer, which mattered to him because previous TV and home media prints had always been too bright. They apparently relented, as a Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition complete with commentary arrived in October 2005 and was praised for (among other things) its much-improved visuals.

Live-Action TV

• Television shows shot and edited on film can be easily remastered in high definition by simply rescanning the episodes at a higher resolution. As most shows prior to the 2000s were also broadcast with 2-channel stereo audio, many remasters also remix the audio to 5.1 surround sound.
• ABC advertised a remaster of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, with CG edits, increased color saturation, higher contrast, and a bit less print damage than some recent airings.
• Doctor Who:
  • While the Classic Series was always shot via the Video Inside, Film Outside technique (before going all-video in 1986), the fact that most of its 1963-1974 episodes survive via lower-quality 16mm kinescopes mean that remastering is needed to bring them up to par with later videotaped stories (what's more, color episodes from this era only survive in black and white due to other countries lacking color broadcast at the time, necessitating colorization). The team that remaster these episodes care so much about the series that they practically (and sometimes literally) invented several methods of remastering (such as RSC, VIDFIRE, and the colour recovery techniques).
  • The 1970 serial Spearhead from Space was able to benefit greatly from a remaster, being one of only two stories shot entirely on film rather than videotape. The other film-only story... not so much, being nothing more than an HD upscale from a 480p broadcast copy (as the film was originally edited on videotape and the BBC had neither the time nor the money to manually re-edit the film from the original negatives, assuming they even still existed).
  • When the Classic Series finally came to Blu-ray, the copious use of Video Inside, Film Outside presented a challenge in how to make the visuals not jar with one another too heavily. While an SD Blu-ray release was possible, the BBC made the choice to remaster the filmed location footage in HD and upscale the SD video footage to match, thus marking the first time that content from the 1963-1989 era was available in some form of high definition past the all-film Spearhead from Space and (upscaled) TV movie.
• When it came to remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation in high definition, there was no film master to restore, as the series was shot on film but edited on videotape. Instead, CBS Digital took the original camera film negatives and re-edited each episode shot-by-shot, going the extra mile to revise the visual effects as well. At the moment, the same can't be said for Deep Space Nine and Voyager, which were also shot on film and edited on tape, due to their heavier reliance on CGI that requires much more complex work to integrate with the available film footage, leaving folks stuck with the 480i broadcast copies for the time being.
  • Owing to the fact that this was an exceptionally expensive and labor intensive process, and that sales were not as good as Paramount had anticipated, The Next Generation may be the only modern Star Trek series that will ever receive this special treatment. However, with advances in artificial intelligence making it possible to intelligently upscale standard definition footage to higher resolutions without sacrificing clarity and detail, we may yet see high definition releases of Deep Space 9 and Voyager in the future.
• Friends was released on Blu-ray in 2011 as a complete series set. The quality varied, but many fans were unhappy that the episodes didn't contain the extra scenes present on the DVD releases, since no HD materials existed for them (that, or Warner Bros. just didn't bother looking).
• Freaks and Geeks received an HD remaster similar to Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the original 35mm film reels from the camera re-scanned and re-edited to match the original SD-video tape edits from the 1990s. Since the show was only 18 episodes long, it wasn't as big of an undertaking. The company doing the restoration also used a software program to perfectly match the edits automatically. Shout! Factory even released two versions: one in 16:9 and one in 4:3, as originally broadcast. The show was filmed with a "safety" aspect ratio, which means it can easily be shown with either aspect ratio. The exception was the pilot, which was filmed only with 4:3 in mind, and the 16:9 version has noticeably poor composition.
• The 2014 high definition remaster of The X-Files restored many episodes to their intended widescreen aspect ratio. The show was shot in 16:9 beginning with the fifth season at the insistence of Chris Carter as widescreen televisions were evidently on the horizon, and to give the series a more cinematic feel, though Fox broadcast the episodes cropped to 4:3, while the original versions were only available on DVD. Most broadcast and streaming platforms used the cropped version of the series prior to the remaster. The first four seasons were converted to 16:9 as well with minimal cropping as Carter had the foresight to shoot episodes wider than intended.
• ER is similar to The X-Files in that it was always shot on film in a widescreen format, but broadcast on NBC cropped to 4:3 until Season 7. Warner Bros. rescanned the original film prints in HD in 2003 for DVD release, meaning that every season is available in widescreen on DVD even though it wasn't broadcast this way. Since then, digital distribution services such as iTunes have made these HD versions available and they are now used when rerunning the series on TV. These transfers are actually very high-quality, with a lot of image gained at the sides of the screen with minimal, if any, cropping of the top and bottom of the picture, not to mention the colors are more realistic and the image is a lot sharper. Warner Bros. didn't bother to clean up these transfers, though, and so some, especially from the earlier seasons, are covered in film hair, dust and scratches in some scenes, as well as some equipment becoming visible in places that were previously cropped out.
• Sex and the City received a full remaster in 2021, rescanning the original film negatives at 4K and reassembling each episode from scratch. The series had always been shot wider than intended, meaning the reformatted 16:9 frame was achieved with minimal cropping.

Music

• The Beatles' music has been remastered and remixed several times over the years, and each and every time it's a big enough event to reach even the mainstream public (because it is, after all, the Beatles).
  • The first of these was the 1987 CD reissues of the band's UK studio albums (plus the US version of Magical Mystery Tour), which definitively codified those as the canonical version of the band's back-catalog (and consequently catching American buyers off-guard after decades of only having the radically different US albums to go off of). These CDs included new stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul by original producer George Martin, who felt that the original stereo mixes were poorly done and with an excess of Gratuitous Panning; while he intended to remix the rest of the band's albums, he only had time for those two, leaving the others to be released exclusively in mono.
  • The second and more notable instance was in 2009, done to coincide with The Beatles: Rock Band. These were a more thorough series of remasters, reusing the 1987 mixes for Help! and Rubber Soul but maintaining the original stereo mixes for the rest of the bunch, poorly-panned audio and all. Notably, these remasters were put out not only on CD, but also on digital download (and later streaming) services, marking a burial of the hatchet between Apple Corps and Apple Inc. after a trademark dispute between the two that stretched all the way back to 1978.
  • In 2015, the engineers at Apple Corps, under the direction of Giles Martin, grandson of the original Beatles producer George Martin, remixed most of the tracks on the 2000 compilation 1 to produce a more modern stereo mix, which allowed for a lot of elements that were buried under others in the previous mono and stereo remasters to be heard with better clarity and a lot of people responded positively to it as a result. This re-release, titled 1+, also included a DVD and Blu-ray that featured remasters of all of the band's music videos and multiple filmed performances, including some in the latter category that were previously thought to have been lost.
  • Over the course of the next six years following 1+, Giles Martin remixed the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, the former three for their 50th anniversaries and the latter to coincide with the release of The Beatles: Get Back. All of this was done in the same vein as 1+ to similarly positive results and reception (especially in the case of Sgt. Pepper, whose original 1967 stereo mix was notoriously sloppy). A similar remix of Revolver came out in 2022.
• One of the first high-profile remastering campaigns in popular music was that for David Bowie, who licensed out his 1969-1980 back-catalog to Rykodisc at the turn of The '90s in order to replace the out-of-print RCA Records CDs, which drew Bowie's ire for their highly variable quality. Rykodisc's CDs were sourced from the original master tapes (unlike the RCA discs, which used multigeneration safety tapes equalized for cassette) and included outtakes and rarities as bonus tracks, setting a standard for later remasters/reissues in the music industry. Virgin Records would then follow up on this with similar expanded remasters of his 1983-1989 albums in 1995. Bowie's catalog would be remastered again multiple times in subsequent years, first by EMI and Virgin in 1999, then incrementally by Parlophone Records starting in 2015. Ironically, the RCA CDs are now the most coveted among audiophiles, who consider them closer to the original LPs.
• Jhariah: "PRESSURE BOMB!!!!" later got a re-release, "PRESSURE BOMB 2!!!!" to raise funds for Jhariah's audio engineer to repair his equipment. It was remastered and has more clear vocals, and it got included as a bonus track on Beginner's Guide. The album also has "PRESSURE BOMB 3?!?!", a new version of the song.
• One notable exception to the tradition of "replace the original SD video with the HD remaster" on YouTube was with Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", which simply included both versions on his official channel without restriction. Part of this might have to do with the fact that the HD version was released just months after the SD one, but whatever the case, it's an interesting outlier to typical convention.
• Queen's discography saw expanded remasters in North America to commemorate their 20th anniversary in 1991, following Hollywood Records' buyout of their discography in the region. A few years later, Parlophone Records put out their own series of remasters outside North America as the Digital Master Series, without any bonus tracks. Because this set also reused the original CDs' packaging, the only way to tell them apart was to check the back of the case for a "Digital Master Series" banner and/or updated copyright information. Queen's discography would later be remastered again for their 40th anniversary in 2011, with the initial releases of these versions including bonus discs containing live performances, demos, and other rarities. Both the 1991 and 2011 remasters remain in print today, with Hollywood prioritizing the former.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers have a couple of remasters for Californication, thanks to the egregious Loudness War on the CD and digital versions of the album. Some even include alternate, demo versions of the songs on the album and the B-sides of the singles.
• When the music video for "Last Christmas" by Wham! was remastered in 4K from the original film assets, it saw a great deal of press attention for how good it looked, with only one reel needing to be upscaled due to the negative being misplaced. The high publicity ended up spurring a number of other labels to provide similar 4K remasters of their artists' videos whenever they were available.

Video Games

• Many HD ports of video games are re-releases of the older titles that are usually redone to be in widescreen and have better quality character models and textures, while sometimes adding new content and/or quality-of-life improvements.
• Xbox's Backwards Compatibility program for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S automatically remasters many of the games available on it. The exact improvements vary between games, but you can generally expect a resolution boost, improved performance, and on a few games even an increase to the FPS cap. For games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, the Xbox 360-era Gears of War games, and Sonic Unleashed, this essentially gives them a thorough remastering job that goes into Polished Port territory.
• Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror got a "Remastered" version shortly after the first game got a "Director's Cut" version. The game had several animated cutscenes remastered in order to justify the title.
• Kinda questionable if it counts (yet), but with the way Satellaview games such as BS The Legend of Zelda and The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets were released as ROMs — with huge chunks of data missing and all — many of the games require extensive hacking to make a project out of which requires restoration of various missing contents. Just check out the BS Zelda hacks, and compare them to the "original" ROM dumps. The difference is almost as drastic as the difference between a prototype and a final game. This trope applies more to the Satellaview's Soundlink audio, but so far the scale isn't quite that high — only a select few songs have been attempted so far, nothing amounting to the amount required for a full game.
• Many of Cave Story's later console and PC re-releases by Nicalis since the WiiWare version and onwards features remastered higher resolution graphics while raising the game's frame-rate from 50 FPS to 60 and offering alternate soundtrack options, but for those who prefer the original presentation of the freeware version, most of the later ports features the ability to change back to the original pixel art visuals and/or the Organya music save for the DSiWare, 3DS eShop, and Cave Story 3D releases. The Switch version builds off the previous Cave Story+ release on PC but it has been updated for 16:9 widescreen presentation, added new lighting effects, more soundtrack options, new challenges, some quality-of-life improvements, and, after an update, implemented two-player local co-op support. Despite these changes and new features, the game plays out similarly to its original 2004 freeware release.
• Strangely, Don Bluth Studios made remasters of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace — although game data is digital, the LaserDisc video is analog as the format is analog — for high-definition gameplay. This makes these a notable case of video games being remastered.
• Square Enix has had to go to great lengths to remaster some of its older 3D games, such as Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX, due to a loss of their source data, as confirmed by one of their regular directors, Tetsuya Nomura. The remasters were made by piecing together data from the original PS1 discs and recreating portions of data they couldn't readily upscale to HD, which also keeps them in 4:3. VIII got the most extensive remaster out of the three, with redone character models and other things per the original creative team's preference. The results are a bit mixed, but at least there are modern ports of the games with some notable improvements out there for multiple platforms. For the X/X-2 HD Remaster, they also recreated X with the same method, which included redoing some of the character models and some of the camera angles to accommodate the widescreen conversion, as well as Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, which had some character models taken from Dream Drop Distance to replace the originals. The remasters of that game and the others for PS4 from the PS2 days would also receive re-recorded music with an actual orchestra to give the games a more grand feel.
  • The first six Final Fantasy games are redone for modern systems as the Pixel Remaster series. The intent is to keep the games Truer to the Text (i.e. no content from previous Updated Rereleases such as Bonus Dungeons) while updating the 2D pixel look for widescreen-capable systems and adding some quality-of-life improvements. The character sprites are redone by the original pixel artist, Kazuko Shibuya, while the soundtracks are given brand-new arrangements supervised by Nobuo Uematsu. The Pixel Remaster version of Final Fantasy III also marked the debut of its original 2D version for non-Japanese audiences...31 years later.
• Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition is a compilation of the first three games of the 3D era. While it's not the first time that Rockstar Games has adapted its old titles to the new generations, it's certainly the first time that the company has remastered its titles on a large scale, with the Unreal Engine coming into play.
• Metal Wolf Chaos was given an XD remaster in 2019 that was handled by General Arcade and published by Devolver Digital, presenting the game with widescreen presentation, higher resolution textures, and a new auto-save system while retaining the original feel of the game's aesthetics and gameplay.
• Metroid Prime gotten a remaster in early 2023 and it goes above and beyond what a typical remaster would go through. Every single asset in the game was remade from the ground up with higher polygon counts and remade textures to make them pop out on the Nintendo Switch. The game was also given multiple control schemes compared to the singular control scheme that the original version had. The only things that were not altered were the audio and animations.
• For Night Trap's 25th Anniversary, it received a remaster for the 8th generation consoles and PC handled by Flash Film Works and Screaming Villains, using the original source-quality footage used for the game. Its spiritual successor, Double Switch, got the same treatment for its 25th Anniversary.
• The Sega Saturn port of Radiant Silvergun was re-released on Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch in 2011 and 2022, respectively, with optional high-resolution graphics, true alpha transparency effects, bloom lighting, and an updated HUD that also keeps track of color chains and experience point meters for each weapon while moving the HUD to the sides of the screen, but it plays identically to its original Saturn port along with the addition of a Training Mode, online leaderboards with shareable replays, and an unlockable Ikaruga Mode that uses the scoring mechanics of its spiritual successor. The anime cutscenes provided by GONZO that were featured in the Story Mode of the Sega Saturn port was also remastered from higher quality sources.
• RAY Series: The home console port of RayStorm received a HD remaster in 2010 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (the latter of which remained exclusive to Japan), which completely remade the graphics with newer assets and effects (although the game itself is stretched from 4:3 to 16:9 to mimic widescreen), but the gameplay for the most part remains the same apart from the difficulty slider affecting all stages rather than individually like in the arcade version, the addition of two new playable (the R-GRAY 0 and R-GEAR), and online leaderboards with shareable replays. The arcade versions of RayStorm and RayCrisis would get HD upscaled remastered as part of the Ray'z Arcade Chronology and the RayStorm X RayCrisis HD Collection in 2023 along with their original low-resolution versions.
• A pair of Resident Evil 4 fans took liberty of remastering the 2014 Steam port of the game themselves over the course of 8 years with the HD Project, featuring remastered high-definition textures based on the real-life European art and architecture sources found across Spain and Wales that Capcom once used for the original game's art assets, along with 3D model edits to previously simplified models or flat 2D texture objects, improved models and textures for the characters, items, and weapons, and fixing environmental errors and correcting lighting effects, all while preserving the original feel of the game's art direction and gameplay. It also comes with a plugin called re4_tweaks that also restores effects and features missing from the GameCube version back into the Steam version while adding various fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
• Sonic Adventure underwent a major graphics overhaul when it was ported to the GameCube and PC as Sonic Adventure DX in 2003, featuring updated textures with higher poly character models from Sonic Adventure 2, unlockable Game Gear games (although its later ports removed them), a new Mission Mode, and Metal Sonic as an unlockable bonus character for 100% completion while boosting the game's framerate from 30 FPS to 60, but the gameplay and story are the same as its previous version.
• Sonic Origins, a compilation of Sonic the Hedgehog's first three games on the Sega Genesis and Sonic CD for the Sega CD, features remastered cutscenes for Sonic CD that were originally handled by a pair of fans from the modding community who were attempting to AI upscale the original videos from Studio Junio and Toei Animation to HD resolutions until Sega hired them alongside Discotek Media to handle the remastering and restoration of the game's cutscenes for this compilation.
• The Super Mario 3D All-Stars Compilation Re-release was billed as this, being enhanced ports of Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Switch. While the original Super Mario All-Stars was a full-fledged Video Game Remake of the NES Super Mario Bros. platformers, this one combines straightforward emulation with graphical enhancements (such as replacing certain textures in 64 with HD versions and re-rendering the cutscenes in Galaxy) and control tweaks to fit the newer hardware.
• WipEout Omega Collection is a compilation for the PlayStation 4 that consists of Wipeout 2048 and Wipeout HD along with its Fury expansion, while remastering the visuals from these PlayStation 3 and Vita titles to newer HD standards (1080p on base PlayStation 4 and 4K on the Pro model) while running at 60 FPS, adds the Racebox mode for all tracks (including the 2048 mode), and brings back the Van-Über and Tigron teams previously seen in Wipeout Pure.
• X-Blades features remastered FMVs 1080p for its 2022 GOG.com re-release, but the rest of the game's visuals has been untouched contrary to its product description.
• Zone of the Enders and its sequel was remastered in 2012 as part of the HD Collection for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, however, due to the company behind these ports, High Voltage Software, the results turned out as a pair of PlayStation 2 games upscaled to 720p with framerate issues rather than being updated for 1080p at a stable 60 FPS as Konami and Kojima Productions originally intended. It took another developer, Hexa Drive, to develop a patch for the PlayStation 3 version to fix some of the errors of the first game and nearly every graphical and performance-related issues of the second game while bumping its visuals to 1080p quality; this patch was unfortunately never released for the Xbox 360 version of the HD Collection. In 2018, Konami in collaboration with Cygames released another remaster of The 2nd Runner for PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam, titled Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner M∀RS. As the upside-down "A" in MARS suggests, it is a 4K remaster of the game with upgraded visuals, 5.1 surround sound presentation, the ability to the game in VR from the perspective of Jehuty's cockpit with various quality-of-life features and new bonus content, but the gameplay and story is faithful to its previous versions.

Web Original

• Alfabusa, the creator of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, made a remake of the series' first episode, adding the second season's "bending" animation, additional scenes in the beginning and speaking lines for the Dreadknight.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series was remastered in HD in 2018 for a Blu-ray release. This involved rescanning the original 35mm film elements, and the result was a tremendous upgrade from the original DVDs.
• The Golden Age of Animation tends to have various cases of remasters with large amounts of controversy and drama, typically due to the abundance of DVNR that leads to Digital Destruction.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the first movie restored with digital computer software, in 1993.
• Warner Home Video began releasing remastered Blu-ray sets of Hanna-Barbera shows in 2019 with The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and continuing with Jonny Quest, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, The Scooby-Doo Show, and The Flintstones.
• The Simpsons had all its episodes prior to mid-season 20 (when the show switched to producing episodes in HD with digital animation) remastered initially for a marathon on FXX and then for all reruns on the channel. Although the episodes did certainly look better, having been color corrected and appearing much sharper, they were unfortunately cropped from their original 4:3 Aspect Ratio to 16:9 through a combination of Visual Compression and Pan and Scan. This meant that about a third of the image in most scenes was lost, which caused some controversy due to the fact that many visual gags were lost. ^note (such as in "Duffless", where three versions of Duff beer are actually coming from the same pipe)
  • These cropped episodes also made their way into syndication in some places, and were also the default viewing option on the now-defunct Simpsons World website (although the old 4:3 versions were an option too).
  • This problem gained much wider attention in 2019, when Disney+ acquired streaming rights to the series and the cropped episodes were used for seasons 1-20, with no option to change to the 4:3 versions. Fan outcry was enough for Disney to announce they would make the 4:3 versions available in 2020. The new 4:3 versions that then appeared on Disney+ turned out to be the remastered versions before they were cropped, creating a "best of both worlds" situation that gave viewers the vibrant colors and sharpness of the remasters but in their original ratio. Many fans now consider those versions to be the best way to view the series, especially considering they are considerably higher quality than the versions on DVD.
• South Park is a pretty interesting case. Although the show is produced on digital software, the production team still had the master renders for all of its older seasons (1-10), allowing them to simply re-render these episodes in HD widescreen for their Hulu streams, future reruns on Comedy Central, and Paramount's 2017 Blu-ray releases. The sole exception is the first episode, which has been remastered (or at least scanned through an HD camera) but was shot in 4:3 and produced with actual cutout animation, unlike the rest of the series; for obvious reasons, remaking the entire episode in 16:9 from scratch would be too impractical. There was a scene in episode 5 of season 1 taken from the original pilot that was re-animated digitally for the HD version in order to be consistent with the rest of the episode. Also, most of the censor bleeps were removed for the remasters, but most uncensored audio in the earliest episodes wasn't properly archived.

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