Anyone who has seen To Heart knows that video looks somewhat bleak. Fans also may know about the massive restoration effort. The nearest to the official story that I was able to find is located at the official website (100% flash — but the important catalog is available in PDF). Reprinted from Right Stuf Catalog - Fall 2006, there's a article by Judy DeFrieze, Assistant Producer.

Judy writes that original masters were destroyed. She is careful not to mention what was the master for the restoration (I presume it was a tape, perhaps Beta), but the effort itself dealt with problems of the film: jitter due to improperly glued segments, giant white blobs of glue, natural degradation of film, and build-up of dirt. Judy also calls the process "frame-by-frame" and "manual". The article is accompained by a thumbnail-sized illustration.

All this was fascinating enough to grab a DVD of R2 To Heart yesterday. I watched it but I cannot tell if it uses the video which TRSI cleaned or an independent production. It seems to have some of the film defects, but I do not remember if they were present in the R1 version. Screenshots that I do have on the blog are identical to the R2 DVD.

Although the show itself seems the same, the Omake 6 looks much brighter in R2.

That was a surprise. Worth the money in any case.