How to encode old animes?

[huang_ch]

I'm trying to encode an old anime called Robotech, I think many of you should have memory of it. :p
But the problem is, the version I got is something called a digital repaired version, so its quality is far less than animes produced nowadays, the original frames are not so good and contains pretty much noise. The source file I got is dvdrip, about 200~300M per file encoded in divx 5, so I want to encode it with x264. Below is what I use to encode it: (not the full command line, but only some of the major ones)
--crf 26 --ref 3 --bframes 10 --subme 6 --trellis 2 --me hex --merange 16 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --b-pyramid --b-rdo --bime --weightb --direct auto --analyse all --8x8dct

Now the problem is, the output file is mostly at the range of 105~135M, about 600~750Kbps, but to my understanding, such kind of old animes should have much less details to encode than recent ones, and I've encoded many recent animes with even --crf 24/25 and the results is about 400~500Kbps (for extreme details/high motions will use 500Kbps~600Kbps), so I originally thought that I could probably get at most 400Kbps for Robotech like old animes, but the result is really disappointed. And if I use --crf 27 to encode it, the size will be about 10%~15% smaller but the quality is not acceptable, the major issue is that the noise are amplified, especially for the edges/lines.
So is there any suggestions on how to encode this kind of old animes? Thanks.

[Mug Funky]

robotech "remastered" (notice the quotes) is a bit of a joke really.

they went to a lot of effort on what they had, but did it wrong basically. you'll notice the grain freeze completely in some scenes when nothing's moving. i think Harmony Gold did it on a budget.

it's also over-sharpened, and the contrast is way too hard - this is why compression is suffering.

all in all it looks a little better than the original, but not by much. you might have some luck going back to Macross and editing down to match the audio from Robotech, but that'll take ages... might be worth it depending on how much you like the series.

[edit]

on the difference between old and new anime, new stuff will be noiseless and flat areas will be truly flat, and not vary frame-to-frame. they're more sharp but less ringy, but generally new anime will compress far, far better as there's no noise

nothing is done on film anymore :) not even studio ghibli.

[killerhex]

i erased the the entire 85eps after i watched it the quality sucked

[SergeyFedosov]

Go to the site
http://www.compression.ru/video/denoising/index_en.html
and find a lot of video filters for VirtualDub(Mod) to handle and restore old videos.
If you are going to use VDub with x264, take the latest version x264 VfW from
http://gabextreme.googlepages.com/x264vfwunited
thanks to DeathThe Sheep, kurtnoise and others.

[huang_ch]

to Mug Funky, thanks for your explanation about the difference between old & new animes.
to killerhex, since it is an rather old anime, I don't expect there'll be any much better edition in the future though this one is not good.
to SergeyFedosov, thanks, it seems powerful, I'll try those filters.

[movax]

Indeed...it's a real shame that a lot of the old, hand-drawn/cel anime had an incredibly shitty transfer to VHS (and in some cases, companies just tossed the VHS version into a DVD). But that's a whole other rant.

Almost enough to make me shed a tear or two, since no one will care enough to take the originals and even remaster them for DVD, or HD. Then again, I doubt any of the cels still remain intact. :)

[foxyshadis]

Warehouse fires have occasionally destroyed the masters of some classic anime series, along with tv shows and movies (here and abroad). Mostly of the lesser known, mid-to-lower budget variety, but notably much of Sunrise Animation's library in the early 90's, and MGM's in the 60's.

I'm pretty sure that macross prints survive, though. I bet these guys just digitally restored the original LD american release, though, instead of working off the jap masters.

[huang_ch]

I've found that by using fft3dgpu as denoise filter, the quality improved a lot, and also the bitrate reduce at least 30%, but the video looks a bit blurred, so by adding LimitedSharpenFaster, it looks better, but the bitrate increased to the origin level(but may be still 10%~15% less with a much better quality). And I think what I'm doing is really called digital repairing... right?
It's obviously that the publisher of Robotech didn't carefully do it!
Before encoding Robotech, I was always encoding with no filters, but since I've already putting two filters, I'm looking for the 3rd one to have some de-block effect. I don't know whether any other filters can be added, any suggestion?

[Mug Funky]

@ foxyshadis:

there weren't composhits on the footage, so i don't think they went off the LD. also, in spite of being a bit ugly and grainy, it was sharper than most LD transfers would offer.

i think they did a cheaper digital SD telecine from the English dubbed films - those would have been copied from the Japanese films onto 16mm, and hence the contrast would be much higher and there'd be 2 sets of film grain on them.

also, there was some temporal denoising applied, but after some editing happened (someone had the brilliant idea of freezing 1 frame for long periods where nothing moves). this means the grain comes right back to full power on still scenes...

i doubt there's much out there that comes off VHS, but there'll be lots of stuff off one-inch tape or beta SP (or beta SP dubbed from a one-inch master). those formats will have similar issues to VHS but suck a lot less.

...and to add to warehouse fires the practice of destroying films for contract reasons - for instance if a licensor goes out of business, under some contracts the licensees are obligated to destroy any content in their posession.

the only reason we have every episode of Astroboy 1960's series is because forward-thinking people breached their obligations and stole the films. all the rest were destroyed, and to this day some episodes only survive as bootleg VHS dubs. thankfully the japanese kept most of their films so there's enough quality floating around for a DVD release that's watchable (and actually quite good for most of it). although, some episodes were only found days before the project was due.

dr who is a similar story, but i don't know the ins and outs of that one.

sry about the rant... i believe it's a crime to destroy culture, no matter how minor some people might think it is - everything has value. and it's sad that cultural archiving has to be done by budget and deadline conscious entertainment companies rather than governments who can spare the resources to do the detective work in finding sources and spare the time to perform a careful restoration. ah well.