The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[professorwho]

Though, if anyone does have the Japanese release and can share stats, that would be very much appreciated. Either way, it's reference quality.

[Naiera]

I'm pretty sure I read something about the JP release having the same "near artifactory" kinda issues.

[professorwho]

Originally Posted by Dailyan

Da funk you talkin' 'bout? It's easily one of the best shot-on-film animated Blus imo.

I'm saying, even if the PQ was bad, I'd still say the show is a must own.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't realise that, as I basically gave it nothing but praise.

[Naiera]

It's also explicitly stated in the highlighted text

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by professorwho

Outlaw Star is a really good show.

Better than Cowboy Beep-boop to me. I'm not a HUGE fan of Outlaw Star, but I very much enjoyed it. I could never get into Bebop.

Yes, I'm weird and must be drawn and quartered.

[Naiera]

I did watch all of Bebop on DVD in my earliest days as an anime-person.

[BigOnAnime]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Better than Cowboy Beep-boop to me. I'm not a HUGE fan of Outlaw Star, but I very much enjoyed it. I could never get into Bebop.

Yes, I'm weird and must be drawn and quartered.

I'm sort of the opposite. Cowboy Bebop I find excellent, Outlaw Star, I liked it, but I didn't love it. I blame the pacing that's a bit too fast. I'm very sensitive to pacing that is too fast.

[mp3dom]

Originally Posted by professorwho

I asked if it was a clone and he said he was pretty sure the materials given were Apple ProRes files.

You always get APR files (or other similar digital quality files) from Japan. You may also receive the JP bluray as *additional* samples but not so often and it's not required. Using a ripoff of the JP blurays or encode from the original APR files is up to you (you=the compressionist). Especially with recent shows, with digital painting that suffers from banding, the JP blurays have an additional work of pre/post-processing compared to the master source. At encoding stage, it's quite usual to deband some scenes so it may be quicker to rip the JP blurays rather than encoding the "untouched" APR files that may suffer from more color banding. Unless you decide to do your own debanding stage to try to obtain a better result than the JP blurays...

Originally Posted by Naiera

I'm pretty sure I read something about the JP release having the same "near artifactory" kinda issues.

Those visible artifacts in the screenshot are mainly caused by the encoder (x264) that Justin is using. It's a design flaws in the x264 rate-control, and it degrade the image for about 1 second but just after 12 frames it starts to "regain" the quality. This happens especially when the previous scene is very complex or have lots of "similar-to-particles" effect. This can be fixed but you need to avoid automatic encode and switch to manual, changing parameters for that particular scene.
JP blurays are not encoded with x264 so they don't suffer from that (maybe they suffers in other areas...)

[professorwho]

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Manga Entertainment, UK)

All screencaps were made with Virtual Dub 2, except for the ones showing subtitles- those were produced with VLC to show off the font

Stand Alone Complex has been screwed over on Blu-ray. The Japanese release only has the English dub as an English option; the Korean Blu-ray sets, which are clones of the JP BD adds in subs, but there are many grammatical and spelling errors; the US BDs have no subtitles, but instead dubtitles (a transcript of the English dub script in SDH); and the UK BD, like the US ones, is 1080p as opposed to 1080i. (I'm not going to explain the frame rate issue again in full detail, so it's worth looking up if you're not in the know).


Episode 1 bitrate

Audio:
Japanese DTS-HD MA 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit) 2490 kbps
English DTS-HD MA 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit) 3840 kbps



I believe this is a clone of the French BD by @anime in France, but with a few changes. By that I mean the French compressionist has used footage with burnt in English text to replace the French text on their BD. The bitrate graph is similar to that of Charbon bleu's BDs and I assume the Japanese audio track was ported over from the French BD as-is and the English dub was thrown into the encode already prepared (and seeing as the bitrate on it is much higher than the original Japanese, it seems most likely).






However, if it is the case, and Charbon bleu did compression here it would explain the image quality. Stand Alone Complex looks really bad. Compression is a joke. It is hard to find a single shot without some sort of issue. Now, given its age (2002) it is possible some of these flaws are from the source, however, I doubt it looked THAT bad.






The bitrate is more than high enough to produce a good image, and if you look at the graph, large sections play out in the 30-35 mbps range. The OP is a trainwreck. Now, it's possible that some of these issues are source related, but it doesn't seem that way. Most of the artifacts are in the backgrounds, which, coincidentally, are possibly the worst aged part of the show visually.



Some shots which are supposed to appear as if they are from security cameras are very low resolution by nature, and since they are supposed to look low quality, they do not affect my opinion of the encode.



That guys's face is a good representation of how I feel about the encode.



The Japanese 5.1 track is very good with no issues to report. The English dub here does not have the mixing issues on the US BD, and sounds equally as good as the Japanese mix. The subtitles are a major improvement over every single release with English subs. There have been edits to improve translation and no spelling and grammatical errors are present. I think the font is too soft and not thick enough (possibly caused to lack of an outline), but otherwise it is very good.

I paid $20 for my copy brand new, and I think it's worth it at that price. Yes, the video is very flawed, and is a terrible encode, however, it is the second best English friendly release. If you do not mind adding subtitles, the Italian Dynit BDs should be on par with the JP/KR BD in terms of quality but at a lower price and only having Italian subtitles.

All 96 screencaps I took can be seen here

[NLScavenger]

Might take some screenshots from the KR BD tomorrow. I don't recall it to be a PQ masterpiece. Banding, chroma artifacts (that I noticed when frame stepping).

The ENG audio track on the JP/KR BD has a problem in one episode that was fixed in the UK BD.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by professorwho

the Korean Blu-ray sets, which are clones of the JP BD adds in subs, but there are many grammatical and spelling errors;

Not exactly. It's an OCR scan of the Bandai subs, but no effort was put into them after that was done. Thus, 1s are Is and text that would be in italics are in air quotes. Very odd, but not completely dooming of the experience.

[pikagreg]

I think The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was the same since it had air quotes as well.

[SeaFox]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Not exactly. It's an OCR scan of the Bandai subs, but no effort was put into them after that was done. Thus, 1s are Is and text that would be in italics are in air quotes. Very odd, but not completely dooming of the experience.

Yeah, and these companies think you should pay them for their (lack of) work in their release...

[NLScavenger]

KR BD


UK BD


--------------------------

What looks to be chroma artifacts on the KR BD (JP/IT BD also have these apparently):

Batou's arm


Car door

[NLScavenger]

Received Maiden Japan's Blu-ray of Glass Mask today and I noticed some ghosting while spot-checking. The video is 23.976p. The ghosting doesn't appear to be present in every scene. Very weird. Maybe an intentional effect? I wonder if it's also on the TC-Entertainment Blu-ray.

https://i.imgur.com/lKO3BEa.png
https://i.imgur.com/5vfAxDA.png
https://i.imgur.com/aQVeW1w.png

EDIT:
These screenshots are from episode 2. The opening also has ghosting. I think the entire episode is f'ed because episode 3 doesn't appear to have any ghosting in the episode+opening.

There are more episodes that exhibit the ghosting.

[Ccharmanderk]

Glass Mask is HD native, correct? Could have potentially been an issue introduced in the original telecine process.

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by Ccharmanderk

Glass Mask is HD native, correct? Could have potentially been an issue introduced in the original telecine process.

Yeah, HD scan from the 16mm negative according to TC Entertainment. I don't know if it's a problem with the scan, but it wouldn't surprise me if Eiken provided 1080i masters.

[Nostalgic Twilight]

I didn’t go past episode one when I created my screenshots and still haven’t gotten around to watching the show. Yikes!

[professorwho]

It's on 3 BD-50s, right? At least that's better than the Japanese BD which is 3 BD-25s...

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by professorwho

It's on 3 BD-50s, right? At least that's better than the Japanese BD which is 3 BD-25s...

2 BD50 + 1 BD25.

TC Entertainment is the worst anime distributor IMO. 52 Gatchaman II episodes in 1080i with lossless audio on two BD50... What were they thinking?