The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[professorwho]

Obviously it isn’t, but it’s an animated BD, so...

[professorwho]

(Main reason I posted all the Castlevania stuff here and in its own thread is that more people are likely to see it here than in its own thread. That way, more people see how bad it is, and maybe more complaints and so on.)

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by Dailyan

I cannot believe somebody Q&A’ed this and thought it looked good.

I don't think anyone did that. Maybe they hired Stevie Wonder.

[professorwho]

I’m willing to bet they just cobbled up some settings for a BD-25 and just did one pass without texting any sections first. (Generally, you do a test encode on a section that about 10 or so minutes that’ll consist of what the film generally looks like.)

[chronoclast]

Which authoring company was credited for Castlevania? I believe Viz still outsources for their releases.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by chronoclast

Which authoring company was credited for Castlevania? I believe Viz still outsources for their releases.

I’ll take a look when I get home. Whoever did it needs to get fired.

[pikagreg]

Viz always seems hit or miss which does make me worry if they do pick up Eva or some other Netflix shows.

[professorwho]

Martin Leibman will he reviewing Castlevania. Confirmed it with him when I shared my write-up to him. His reviews have always been the best for anime on this site (for the official reviewers) so we won’t get any of the “aesthetic” nonsense.

[Mangaranga]

Originally Posted by professorwho

I’ll take a look when I get home. Whoever did it needs to get fired.

It could still be the normal studio they use for their anime releases.
Whilst some titles like Jojo look okay with it's relative muted colour palette, the colour saturation issue they have going on has the potential to wreak havoc during encoding, as proven with K Missing Kings and K Return of Kings. The source could just be ass though.


EDIT: Had a quick look at the Netflix stream as I remembered the Windows app exists.
Your screencaps have the the wrong gamma levels and also exhibit a lot more aliasing, but I'd assume that both of those are down to VLC and not the BD itself though. I remember having this conversation before when another person was capturing Anime Limited's Kiznaiver BD through VLC, and we thought it was shit for a while as a result. When MPC caps were posted it was a completely different story.

TLDR: You really want to capture those again in MPC/MPV, because as they stand currently they're not accurate.

[professorwho]

I've said it before, I know VLC sucks for taking screenshots. I've made it clear. I don't know if my PC (which is really poor) can even run those programs, and/or me getting used to a new program is annoying.

I said it as a caveat. I never said they were accurate, just that they give some idea of how it looks- which is horrible.

This is a Viz Media BD, so there's the possibility that the gamma was wrong to begin with, seeing their track record, but I digress. I don't feel like taking those screenshots- maybe someone else would like to? Hit me up via PM and we can work something out.

[NLScavenger]

Dragon Ball Z Kai Season 1 (with Kikuchi replacement score) - US BD

Episode 14 & 22 screenshots

- Audio -
Japanese Dolby TrueHD 2.0 24 bit
Japanese AC3 2.0 16 bit
English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 24 bit (Missing on episode 22!!)
English AC3 5.1 16 bit

- Bitrate viewer report -
Episode 14

AVG: 20405 kbps | MAX: 37263 kbps

Episode 22

AVG: 20356 kbps | MAX: 38589 kbps

[pikagreg]

Originally Posted by NLScavenger

DGAVCIndex (included with DGAVCDec), but it has a bit of a learning curve:

- It can only read .m2ts/.h264 files and derivatives. There's no .mkv support, but the .h264 stream can be extracted from the .mkv.
- It saves screenshots as .bmp, so make sure to convert to .png for smaller file size.
- Framestepping can only be done in the 'play' mode (F6 is 'Play', Esc is 'Stop'). There's no support for backwards frame-stepping

I was doing this to take screenshots after ripping from MakeMKV and just putting them on imgur though idk if that is correct or not lol

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by pikagreg

I was doing this to take screenshots after ripping from MakeMKV and just putting them on imgur though idk if that is correct or not lol

Yeah, DGAVCIndex is the most reliable tool, but a bit clunky to use and no mkv support.

I've just been testing out VirtualDub2 (not to be confused with regular ol' VirtualDub). It supports mkv and appears to produce reliable screenshots if the correct decoding settings are used: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/127853

Settings:

[Show spoiler]
Go to decode format


Use these settings and save as default


Take screenshot

I use MPC-HC + madVR only for screenshots with subtitles now. Older versions of madVR take screenshot of the next or previous frame, newer versions produce unreliable results (take screenshot. Restart player. take screenshot of same frame, compare color information and checksum)

[professorwho]

Sailor Moon DVD
(Madman, Australia)

480p MPEG-2
1.33:1 Aspect Ratio
23.976 fps (2:3 pulldown)

Season 1 Episode 1:
6287 kbps AVG (6.3 mbps)
8796 kbps MAX (8.8 mbps)

Season 2 Episode 1:
6797 kbps AVG (6.8 mbps)
8736 kbps MAX (8.7 mbps)

Season 3 Episode 1:
5483 kbps AVG (5.5 mbps)
8688 kbps MAX (8.7 mbps)

All 3 seasons look beautiful. Madman did a fantastic job encoding Sailor Moon- I cannot find any non-source issues in the video*. Season 1 looks the worst by default due to its age- not because it's a 90s anime, simply due to Toei not keeping it in the best of shape. It still looks nice and has a warmer colour grade than Viz's atrocity of a release. Season 2 (R) looks about the same, though there are less source issues. Season 3 (S) is easily the best. It is a stunning image from beginning to end. (Well, about as good for DVD as possible...) S has the lowest bitrate, due to the fact Madman used less discs per set (3 instead of 4), but because the compression was great to begin with, it hardly matters.

*That said, the 2002 remasters aren't perfect, thus the masters had several issues, but ignoring them, these are artifact free encodes.

Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 at 224 kbps in both Japanese and the new Viz English dub. I've only ever watched the show in Japanese, and the audio here is perfect. Despite being lossy at a low bitrate, I heard zero compression issues or age related ones- it appears the audio was fully remastered.

Now for the ultimate comparison. (Again, I'm using VLC, don't tell me it's bad, I've agreed 10+ times in the past)

Viz:


Madman:





(Personally, I much prefer Viz's BD subs, but the Madman ones aren't that bad)

[Ccharmanderk]

I keep forgetting just how awful those Sailor Moon BDs are. I don't purchase them so I guess it's out of sight, out of mind. But just seeing Madman's release on a standard DVD utterly wiping the floor with Viz's efforts on a far superior format is really indicative of precisely how much went wrong with the US release in terms of masters and image quality.

[Raye]

Seeing how bad Viz's release is compared to a DVD makes me sad... You would figure they could do what they did with Ranma. Pretty sure we will never see a proper R1 release. I don't know why I continue to buy the releases knowing how awful they are, but at least I know I can resell them down the line. *shrug*

[kk1]

Originally Posted by Raye

Seeing how bad Viz's release is compared to a DVD makes me sad... You would figure they could do what they did with Ranma. Pretty sure we will never see a proper R1 release. I don't know why I continue to buy the releases knowing how awful they are, but at least I know I can resell them down the line. *shrug*

Season 4 is fine, it's only the first 3 that are bad.

[Nostalgic Twilight]

They didn't have to pay the huge bill to produce the HD masters from the original film elements for Ranma, though. Japan did that. Granted, this doesn't excuse Viz for producing and releasing a shoddy upscale. If any series could make back the high cost associated with properly remastering the footage, it's Sailor Moon.

[Rozay]

What did y'all think of Funimation's 2199 set?

Wondering if I should pre-order 2202. Would like to watch the dub, but always wary of Funi.

[professorwho]

Never seen any screenshots so I can’t say anything on it. There is a huge lack of screenshots and stats on it...