High quality anime encodes

[dvd_master]

When I look at some encodes done by other anime groups, they got fantastic, close to DVD worth encodes at around 150-200 MB for a half hour episode.

How can you achieve that? In virtual dub, if I just set it to DivX it doesn't look anywhere near as good. Is there a certain way to do this?

[Gaia]

They use various filters like warpsharp but they are not going to tell their "secrets" so don't bother asking them. This has been discussed many times. Use search... By the way lot of fansuppers use XviD nowdays.

[alucard83]

Originally posted by Gaia
They use various filters like warpsharp but they are not going to tell their "secrets" so don't bother asking them. This has been discussed many times. Use search... By the way lot of funsuppers use XviD nowdays.

Is there any other threads that discuss this as you mentioned? Can you link me to one?

[esby]

Well warpsharp is not really a 'secret'
Warpshap reduces borders size and sharp them,
but abusing of it can produce ugly results.

I don't know two people using the same filter chain exactly,
what i think, is that:
use the best source possible,
( why would use a bad source if you can find a better one...)
apply the less filter possible,
( for speed purpose & for quality, the more filter you apply, the more you are modifying your source, and the more risk you'll have a risk of having a 'non natural looking at the end' ( aka 'i overfiltered my raw')
But apply these inteligently.

eg: diagnose what could be the problems of the raws,
and try to fix them...

from a statistic point of view, i'll try to :
* Do ivtc or deinterlace first
* Crop & resize if there are thin black border not wanted,
(no need to allocate some bitrate to these bands),
watch out for yellowish taint in left,
* Tweaks the color,
(using tweak() if you are a true 'warrior' ,
or tweaking with hue/saturation/intensity filter of vdub,
get the good value, saving them to a temp profile, and loading the filter in avisynth.)
And then after that, apply what could be needed,
such as:
c3d, deen,
Sometimes blockbuster (when the source is presenting visible blocks),
Sometimes, you'll want to get ride of chroma shifting (colored taint on borders), see chromashift() for that.
Then in the last, you can decide to apply warpsharp if you think you need to sharp borders by reducting them...
Or any other filtering that might be needed.
Check www.avisynth.org for a list of filters... and what they do...
And read the discussions attached to them, they are instructive too.

esby

PS: some people will try to stay in the same colorspace, to gain speed, and saying it will not have color conversion problems,
but sometimes if you need a filter that only exists in RGB colorspace,
doing yv12-->rgb filter --> yv12 may be better than not doing the filtering, from a quality point of view, despite the double color conversion(not lowless).

PS2:"but they are not going to tell their "secrets" so don't bother asking them."
It's not they are not going to tell any secrets, but encoding need some inteligence, and you have to find by yourself what you think produces the best 'results', since each anime can be different from a euristic point of view..., and of course, those people don't have necessary the time to answer you, or can't (for various reasons) or don't want (that exists too)
If I'll be you, i'll try reading the threads in the avs forums,
including the older ones and the threads linked to video capture too.