Excuse my ignorance, I would have thought Anime would be much easier to be produced in 4K or even 8K when compared to movies that requires 4K / 8K Camera.

Why have they stuck with 720P and 1080P?

It is actually harder to produce in 4K/8K due to more details that need to be drawn to not make it looked too empty and need to make sure the lines are not too thick (e.g. by using a larger paper). TV series are usually drawn on an A4 paper with 1-2 inch margin while a proper theatrical releases are drawn on a B4 paper.

Another factor, I believe, is the know-how. In my opinion, despite anime being broadcasted in 16:9 for so long, it is only in recent years where the extra width are put in a good use during layouting.

A reasonable substitute for ground truth might be to get a single drawing done in an anime style with the appropriate pixel dimensions. There are many artists out there who can produce such a thing for a modest fee.

This would apparently cause other problems:

> Interesting enough, waifu2x performed very poorly on anime. A plausible explaination is that the network was simply not trained to upscale these types of images. Usually anime style art have sharper lines and contain much more small details/textures compared to anime. The distribution of images used to train waifu2x must have been mostly art images from sites like DevianArt/Danbooru/Pixiv, and not anime.

Your Name and the 2 Gundam Thunderbolt movies have 4K BDs, but I don't know if they are upscaled or native 4K. There's also a Gundam F91 and Space Adventure Cobra movie 4K remaster, but those were animated with cells, so I don't know how useful those would be for testing an upscaler.

IIRC the consensus is Your Name is not native 4k. Not sure about the others.

There is a 4k remaster of Akira being produced from the original 35mm film that should be out next year. 35mm to 4k should be a downscaling, so that might do when it becomes available.

Not sure how the myth that anime isn't made at 1080p perpetuates itself, but it's not true. It only holds true for most anime made between ~2000 and ~2007, because those were made already digitally, but with DVD in mind. Anything prior is hand drawn on cells, anything after is done in 1080p or above, with some exceptions. There are a couple of 4K anime already out there.

The list I provided was from 2017 and only a single anime of an entire season was mastered at 1080p. Even in 2018 and 2019 that's still typical. Maybe 1-2 series produced at 1080p with every other series being an upscale. Some seasons even have 0 series produced at 1080p. Instead of calling it a myth, try to find a season where a large number of anime were produced at 1080p as counter-evidence.

Being upscaled and released on DVD or BluRay at 1080p (which most anime have been for most of the past decade) is not the same as being produced at 1080p.

I wasn't aware of the two Gundam movies mentioned by fireattack, but I can't confirm they were mastered at 4k and aren't just upscales. So if you could name some of those 4k releases that would be helpful, especially if you can provide information as to them being mastered at 4k and not just upscaled to 4k.

Yeah I knew. But he can do it with 1080p/480p, or 720p/480p.

This is not correct. Many productions are produced at in-between resolutions between 720p and 1080p and then upscaled to 1080p. It's even in the link you provided.

The point is they are upscaled to 1080p and few are produced at 1080p. Yes, I didn't label every in-between resolution that they get produced at. This seems rather needlessly pedantic, since as you cited, the resolutions are in the link I provided.

Would you feel better if I said "they upscale 720p and 837p and 900p and 810p and 806p and 873p and 864p and 957p and 878p and 719p to 1080p"? I excluded non-standard resolutions for simplicity since it doesn't really change my greater point: most 1080p releases are just upscales. 19 of 41 listed are 720p and 720p is the most common resolution listed.