The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[CrashOveride95]

Originally Posted by dubudavid

Well, when you're working with 35mm film scans of anime, the way they actually shot the feature can be inconsistent.

An example (This was 16mm so it might be different tho) was the Dragon Boxes where some shots had the edge of the film frame

Perhaps those edges were originally intended to be cropped by CRT overscan?

[dubudavid]

Originally Posted by CrashOveride95

An example (This was 16mm so it might be different tho) was the Dragon Boxes where some shots had the edge of the film frame

Yeah, 16mm is a lot different in terms of frame size, but I think the same principle applies, almost every shot has a slightly different alignment that can sometimes poke out on a global crop, so I am not surprised that happened on those sets.

[Kyle15]

It looks completely marvelous. Definitely going on my mental want list.

[Kriztoffer Swank]

Those Angel Cop caps look mint. It's disheartening to hear that Japanese studios seem to love degraining their HD masters lately, so it's great to see something like this where it appears untouched.

[Dailyan]

NSFW warning: some bloody and "suggestive" shots.

Angel Cop (remastered) (continued)

Episode 3


Episode 4


Episode 5


Episode 6

[The Collector FX]

Shit, I need to buy this.

[CrashOveride95]

Saw nobody posted about the Lupin III Part III R1 BD so thought I'd chime in

It's a good release, my main issues are the way the grain looks; there's a strange layer over the image I can't describe, almost like a rainbow-like effect? It's probably not an authoring issue, rather a source issue; everything else about the release is stellar. A good comparison, IMO, is that it looks similar to how the City Hunter BDs look.

Lupin the 3rd Part III: The Pink Jacket Adventures - Discotek Media BD

BDInfo for Disc 1

[Show spoiler]

PLAYLIST REPORT:

Name:                   00000.MPLS  
Length:                 5:19:56.760 (h:m:s.ms)
Size:                   47,205,249,024 bytes
Total Bitrate:          19.67 Mbps

VIDEO:

Codec                   Bitrate             Description     
-----                   -------             -----------     
MPEG-4 AVC Video        16985 kbps          1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1

AUDIO:

Codec                           Language        Bitrate         Description     
-----                           --------        -------         -----------     
LPCM Audio                      Japanese        1536 kbps       2.0 / 48 kHz / 1536 kbps / 16-bit

SUBTITLES:

Codec                           Language        Bitrate         Description     
-----                           --------        -------         -----------     
Presentation Graphics           English         29.927 kbps

Episode 1 bitrate


Episode 1 Gallery

[Kyle15]

Originally Posted by Dailyan

NSFW warning: some bloody and "suggestive" shots.

Angel Cop (remastered) (continued)

Episode 3


Episode 4


Episode 5


Episode 6

Can't get over how immaculate this looks. Discotek knows how its done!!

[DigitalDeluge24]

Naruto's latest release got me thinking: why are so many Blu-ray releases of SD digitally animated shows based on interlaced sources? Interlaced video is harder to compress and doesn't play nice with modern upscaling algorithms.

Why not go back to the original finished frames of animation, that are just a series of raw 4:4:4 digital images, and make a new encoding out of those?

[dubudavid]

It's mostly due to the fact that those crummy composite masters are the only ones that are easily accessible to them. There's almost certainly no way they still have all those original files and projects, or the software they used for them no longer work on modern operating systems. From a business perspective I suppose it's just too much of a hassle.

The best one can do when dealing with earlier digipaint shows is to filter the living heck out of them, and Viz has been... attempting to do so with Naruto at least. It's not great but hey.

[CrashOveride95]

Originally Posted by DigitalDeluge24

Naruto's latest release got me thinking: why are so many Blu-ray releases of SD digitally animated shows based on interlaced sources? Interlaced video is harder to compress and doesn't play nice with modern upscaling algorithms.

Why not go back to the original finished frames of animation, that are just a series of raw 4:4:4 digital images, and make a new encoding out of those?

It's very likely the original rendered frames either do not exist or are not accessible for the licensor

[Kyle15]

Originally Posted by DigitalDeluge24

Naruto's latest release got me thinking: why are so many Blu-ray releases of SD digitally animated shows based on interlaced sources? Interlaced video is harder to compress and doesn't play nice with modern upscaling algorithms.

Why not go back to the original finished frames of animation, that are just a series of raw 4:4:4 digital images, and make a new encoding out of those?

I believe what you're thinking about is a re-composite. They rarely do that because it's resource intensive and as we all kno typically it's easier to upscale an already existing master.

[CrashOveride95]

Originally Posted by Kyle15

I believe what you're thinking about is a re-composite. They rarely do that because it's resource intensive and as we all kno typically it's easier to upscale an already existing master.

What I was curious about was how were old digipaint shows mastered in the first place

i.e did they just have hardware that piped directly to digibeta or something similar?

[DigitalDeluge24]

Originally Posted by dubudavid

It's mostly due to the fact that those crummy composite masters are the only ones that are easily accessible to them. There's almost certainly no way they still have all those original files and projects, or the software they used for them no longer work on modern operating systems. From a business perspective I suppose it's just too much of a hassle.

The best one can do when dealing with earlier digipaint shows is to filter the living heck out of them, and Viz has been... attempting to do so with Naruto at least. It's not great but hey.

Originally Posted by Kyle15

I believe what you're thinking about is a re-composite. They rarely do that because it's resource intensive and as we all kno typically it's easier to upscale an already existing master.

I'm not referring to the intermediate project files and software packages. If they had those they would indeed be able to do a full HD recomposite. I'm only talking about the final output; the final composited SD digital images in EXR format, that are very much compatible with modern off-the-shelf software. Studios don't normally throw these out. In fact, this is how they archive all their digital films, even live action. And these images can be upscaled and encoded into pristine 24p video for Blu-ray.

So using a dated master and throwing all sorts of filters on it to make it look presentable doesn't make sense to me. It would be like Disney using an HDTV recording of Frozen for the Blu-ray release.

Originally Posted by CrashOveride95

What I was curious about was how were old digipaint shows mastered in the first place

i.e did they just have hardware that piped directly to digibeta or something similar?

Actually that would explain a lot. Perhaps they did not have a completely digital pipeline early in the digital era, and simply output to a master tape that only supported interlaced video.

[dubudavid]

Yeah, from what I know, the majority of TV anime in those days, up till the late 2000s, were mostly mastered on video, the majority of which was on Digibeta, until HD became a thing somewhere along that line and higher quality formats came to be (though this doesn't matter as much as you'd think, since most anime even nowadays are still animated at sub-FHD resolutions).

Japan did not fully transition to an entirely digital television broadcast standard until 2011, so I'm pretty sure this had something to do with it.

[MD_Prometh]

The OOP release of the Gatchaman OVA uses the HDTV masters, meaning any bits involving flashing imagery are dithered.

[DigitalDeluge24]

That explains it. However, I still think that in some cases they're just being lazy, because there are modern digital shows that are interlaced on Blu-ray, like Pokémon Origins (2013).

Yeah, it bugs me a little that modern anime is not exactly 1080p. I know it doesn't make a huge difference, but modern LED TVs look extremely sharp only when they play content that matches or is an exact multiple of their native resolution. And now that the whole world has finally agreed upon a single universal TV resolution and aspect ratio anime is not using it.

[jsevakis]

Even if the animation itself was done 1080p, a lot of times there were extra video effects added somewhere along the line (sometimes things like camera shake, sometimes just motion titles) that are 1080i. The final-final master is all that's usually saved and archived for many shows, so that's all there is. We try to IVTC shows like that (if the credit roll is a little stuttery, it's not as bad as the rest of the show being interlaced IMHO) but other companies are a lot more conservative about that sort of thing. And to be fair, there were a few discs (that shall remain nameless) that I IVTC'ed that should've been probably kept 1080i.

I have never, ever in my life been sent EXR files for anything. I've been sent DPX files a couple of times, but only for HDR scans. Nobody in the final-mile part of the delivery ecosystem uses that.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by DigitalDeluge24

That explains it. However, I still think that in some cases they're just being lazy, because there are modern digital shows that are interlaced on Blu-ray, like Pokémon Origins (2013).

Yeah, it bugs me a little that modern anime is not exactly 1080p. I know it doesn't make a huge difference, but modern LED TVs look extremely sharp only when they play content that matches or is an exact multiple of their native resolution. And now that the whole world has finally agreed upon a single universal TV resolution and aspect ratio anime is not using it.

Your problem is that you’re using a bad TV; not that the anime isn’t composited at the exact same resolution.

[DigitalDeluge24]

I see... I would never think of doing video effects like shaky cam and end credits in 1080i, I'd probably master the entire show in 1080p, archive it and then create a 1080i copy for TV. But I guess that's how not the TV anime industry works currently. If there are Japanese studios that do this sort of archiving, they likely don't bother using these higher quality materials for home video.

Oh, what might have been...

Thankfully, skilled video engineers can do wonders with a high-quality QTGMC deinterlacer. But I think, for now, I'll just stick to Blu-rays of theatrical movies and HD remasters of shows shot on 16mm film.