The Anime Blu-ray Video Quality Thread

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by professorwho

The compression is really poor, as expected of such a low bitrate. It's not a Re:Zero-esque disaster as I expected, but in some scenes it gets really close. I took these shots from a sequence later in the film, which is debatably the worst in the film's duration. Despite being shown in marketing and being key art, I'm not directly including it in the main shots, so look here if you want to see the encode at its worst. If anything the scenes in U are quite "fuzzy," for a lack of a better word. Not a blocky mess as I was fearing, but a fuzzy image. It's possible a low pass filter was used for some of the background blurriness, or it may be inherent to the image, I have no clue. But, despite all that, it is (mostly) watchable, I guess, albeit very poor and still unacceptable for a major release of a big film. About on-par visually with a low bitrate Netflix stream, to give an analogy.

That scene also doesn't look good on JP BD, but not as bad as US BD. JP BD has less banding overall.

US BD seems to be low pass filtered in all scenes. Chroma is softer and less intense than JP BD, even in scenes that don't take place in U.

JP BD also has a lot of artifacting in U scenes, but artifacting is kind of unavoidable even if the bitrate were to be bumped up.

BDInfo JP BD

Name: 00001.MPLS
Length: 2:01:13.266 (h:m:s.ms)
Size: 38,664,265,728 bytes
Total Bitrate: 42.53 Mbps

VIDEO:

Codec Bitrate Description
----- ------- -----------
MPEG-4 AVC Video 26999 kbps 1080p / 23.976 fps / 16:9 / High Profile 4.1

AUDIO:

Codec Language Bitrate Description
----- -------- ------- -----------
LPCM Audio Japanese 2304 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 2304 kbps / 24-bit
Dolby TrueHD/Atmos Audio Japanese 7848 kbps 7.1 / 48 kHz / 7208 kbps / 24-bit (AC3 Embedded: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 640 kbps / DN -31dB)
LPCM Audio Japanese 2304 kbps 2.0 / 48 kHz / 2304 kbps / 24-bit

SUBTITLES:

Codec Language Bitrate Description
----- -------- ------- -----------
Presentation Graphics Japanese 33.800 kbps

[professorwho]

With the severity of the artifacting, it was pretty obvious that there was either a master issue (partially) or that the film was too visually complex for BD, and it was both.

Even from the trailer I could tell this was going to be a challenge for BD, as the scenes in U have so much shit going on (I'd repeat the Rick McCallum quote again, but memes, lol), so I guess it's both comforting and not to see the JP BD struggling as well. It's why I pre-ordered the UHD, as it was clear that the sheer intensity of the visuals would be sorted out with UHD's substantially higher bitrate, and with Q-Tec's grade being very restraint in nit count (according to a friend who has it), it wouldn't be as overdone as Weathering With You's conversion by IMAGICA.

[Show spoiler](On the topic of "too visually complex for Blu-ray," I hope Sonny Boy fares well. Episode 11 was insane.)

[Naiera]

Soooo... One should try to get a UHD BD with this one?!

[AreaFive]

Here's hoping that the 4K set has the extras on an accompanying blu and takes advantage of that space to maximize the bitrate on the 4K.

[SpaceDandy]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Soooo... One should try to get a UHD BD with this one?!

Or wait for a release by a competent company. But the movie got licensed by atypical anime publishers in Europe and the likes (Acontracorriente in Spain, Koch Media in Italy) so chances for a good release are rather low.

So, remember when Mangaranga looked at In/Spectre from Viz and discussed padded bits? Well, Shout Factory and Duplitech have been doing this for years. I don't fully get how padded bits work with a CBR setup, but if I had to guess, (someone more knowledgeable, please correct me if I'm wrong!) it's possibly a VBR encode with a 25 mbps max rate, and the padded bits are to pad it to a constant 25 mbps, rather than actually being a legit 25 mbps CBR.

You are always going to have very slight bitrate variations with target bitrates encodes, so defining the legitness of a CBR encode is a bit silly. Perfectly constant encodes are always padded (I gues for this instance, --ts-cbr would be the x264 equivalent here).
My only additional suggestion to your review is to check if the encoder parameters are still in the mkv using MediaInfo.

[mp3dom]

Just think about a 25 Mbps CBR stream where you have 1 second of completely black screen (that you can encode it losslessy in less than 1 Mbps). The encoder is forced to adhere to the 25 Mbps targed and in such a case the only way to reach it is the use of padded bits.

[Naiera]

Originally Posted by SpaceDandy

Or wait for a release by a competent company. But the movie got licensed by atypical anime publishers in Europe and the likes (Acontracorriente in Spain, Koch Media in Italy) so chances for a good release are rather low.

I'd be fine buying the JP release and adding subs, but since that one's also slightly sub-par, I feel like the extra data on the UHD BD would be good to have.

Not sure if I can add subs on the fly on my Panasonic DP-UB824. It plays files exclusively at 60Hz, no matter the framerate on the source, and I can't rip UHD discs anyway

[Prince_7]

Originally Posted by Naiera

Soooo... One should try to get a UHD BD with this one?!

Absolutly. The upscale is convincing and the HDR grade is pretty darn good, quite similar to Violet Evergarden The Movie, as in it remains under 100 nits for most of the runtime but goes above for a select few key parts.

Here's a matching shot with one of professorwho's captures, converted to SDR. Banding is absent

[Naiera]

Would be awesome if my UHD player could do external subs...

[Ketchrust]

Anyone have info on Ninja Robots? Since it's 4 BD-50s and the online samples look good this should be a decent master. Maybe even better than the obscure Japanese one.

[sagadego]

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Belle...311915/#Review neil says wait for the 4k

[professorwho]

Not that I’d trust the reviews here, but yeah, I agree; the film is too complex visually for most so-so compressionists, so the UHD should be a massive improvement (if Shout doesn’t mess it up again as well; I have no doubt Anime Limited will do a great job, however)

[NLScavenger]

professorwho added my screenshots of the Ghost in the Shell JP 2017 BD re-issue to caps-a-holic https://caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=2490

[Kyle15]

Shart Factory and their Dooplitech compression antics will never cease to amaze! I'm not even interested in that film but their treatment of it still ticks me off. Good god.

[NLScavenger]

Originally Posted by Prince_7

Absolutly. The upscale is convincing and the HDR grade is pretty darn good, quite similar to Violet Evergarden The Movie, as in it remains under 100 nits for most of the runtime but goes above for a select few key parts.

Here's a matching shot with one of professorwho's captures, converted to SDR. Banding is absent

Went to see the film on 2K DCP today and I don't know if seating distance played a role, but the DCP seemed to be quite clean like that UHD screenshot.

BD is never going to provide the same level of quality as DCP, but the banding on the BDs released so far is nonetheless disappointing. I do hope the mediaOCD authored UK BD fares better in that regard.

[Ccharmanderk]

New masters were acquired for the Blu-ray-only season set rerelease of Sailor Moon. No more ghosting artifacts, many of the various quality issues have been mitigated or resolved, and some editing errors have been fixed, though any remnants of grain have been scrubbed away. Still, a marked improvement over the previous sets.

https://twitter.com/fredjfrancis/sta...78831210303488
https://twitter.com/fredjfrancis/sta...87779707510793
https://twitter.com/fredjfrancis/sta...92879331102720
https://twitter.com/fredjfrancis/sta...96618053926913

[Total Procall]

AnimEigo's Megazone 23 just popped through my letterbox. 1 bd-50 and 360mins + Extra's...yikes.

Would it be so bad to charge an extra dollar or so to cover the small expense of a second disc?

[Suikoman444]

Got 5 Centimeters Per Second from GKIDS. Here's how it compares to the Discotek release. I can also confirm that it only has the Bandai dub, no ADV dub.




GKIDS blu-ray

Audio is DTS-HD MA 2.0 for the English dub and DTS-HD MA 5.0 for the Japanese track.

Video
ID                                       : 1
ID in the original source medium         : 4113 (0x1011)
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4.1
Format settings                          : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames        : 4 frames
Codec ID                                 : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration                                 : 1 h 2 min
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 26.6 Mb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 35.0 Mb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.535
Stream size                              : 11.7 GiB (77%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray

Discotek blu-ray

Audio is PCM 2.0 for the English dub and DTS-HD MA 5.0 for the Japanese track.

Video
ID                                       : 1
ID in the original source medium         : 4113 (0x1011)
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4.1
Format settings                          : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames        : 4 frames
Codec ID                                 : V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC
Duration                                 : 1 h 2 min
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 34.5 Mb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 37.0 Mb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.693
Stream size                              : 15.1 GiB (91%)
Language                                 : English
Default                                  : No
Forced                                   : No
Original source medium                   : Blu-ray

[NLScavenger]

Discotek BD of 5CMPS uses the encode from the Japanese Global Edition release. The thing with the two Japanese BDs is that they are overfiltered. There's a lot less banding compared to other releases like the Dynit BD for sure, but it does come at the expense of detail. Details are erased on the Japanese BDs, but it's something you'll only notice when comparing side by side: https://slow.pics/c/1F7gUHNT

[Prince_7]

Review of the FR release of ACCA-13
Doesn't include the 6 shorts or the OVA sequel

https://anime-hd.fr/2022/06/06/revie...3-par-prince7/