Different Quality: Anime DVD from HK or Anime DVD from USA

[loa-ash]

I live in Italy and here anime dvd quality is poor as a results of the processes of
NTSC->PAL....so I've buyed some anime dvd from hong kong but these hybrid dvd are also difficult to rips... in fact they've many problems about chroma, blending, etc...so my question is for the people that live in USA or in R1 DVD's region... (US, CA...)... the quality of these DVD is equal to Japan DVD source???
What's the difference? it is better to buy these or those of hong kong?

thanks to help...

[Shinigami-Sama]

I think Japanese sources are best, those sometimes they're filter well for shiping, but I still like Japanese beter, and hongkong anime is usualy "professtionaly bootleged"
meaning they somehow acquire a highquality version via whatever means and amkes dvds with it, thouhg not all of them are bootlegs, the majority are in my experiance

[Joe Fenton]

What I've noticed is that HK discs tend to have more episodes on them, so they are at a lower bitrate and therefore not as good quality-wise.

[loa-ash]

What I've noticed is that HK discs tend to have more episodes on them, so they are at a lower bitrate and therefore not as good quality-wise.

this is the problem!!! if someone has anime from R1 region can tell me if there are the same problems in Hong kong dvd?

[Shinigami-Sama]

nope
r1 dvds have 4 eps per disk, and usualy about 5min of previews for the other series that that licancer<series-raper> has.
and maybe a few more extras, still Japan sources I think are the best, scaled down from hi-def to SD not filter-raped like some licancers over here

[Wilbert]

Please no discussion about bootlegs.

[darkavatar1470]

you must be careful when buying HK anime DVDs off the net, most of them are actually pirates that use downloaded sources from p2p networks....and they are far from being high quality....

Japanese R2 DVDs is great in quality, but hybrid video is always there....

[Mug Funky]

@ Shinigami-Sama:

filtered discs? i've never seen an R1 that gets filtered. the worst that happens to R1 discs in my experience is they get an analog transfer and pick up some unwanted guests (rainbows, dot crawls) along the way.

also, i highly doubt most anime is even mastered in HDTV, let alone transferred from it. they'd all be 24p if that were so. the only thing i know for sure came off a HD master is GITS SAC. maybe Dead Leaves is too (it looks the same for sure - same 8 pixel top and bottom letterboxing, same progressive 25p PAL transfers). but for now it's mostly 30p motion graphics with 3:2 animation.

as for r4 anime... hehe. it gets a right good blending. but it's worth it because we're cool. please buy as much r4 anime as you can afford :)

[Shinigami-Sama]

lol, sometimes it get filter-raped, there were a few series that I know of, but I can't ermmber what they are right now, being late and I just set up my forum which I accidently isntlled hte wrong mod and fought with for the last hour while trying ot teach someone as I was learning it also, so I'll try and rember tomorow

[Mug Funky]

fair enough. like i say, only in my experience are US discs not filtered - we get our masters straight from them (or straight from japan, but they've always got eng and jap audio on them). the worst i've seen is Scrapped Princess, which has such bad dot crawls and rainbows that the opening titles (which are of course in bright red) are almost unreadable. a few other titles get the composite treatment - i suspect the japanese discs are the same again though (we don't see many here, as they're no use to us - no english subs, and if there are any, they are so all-your-base that they're almost useless).

[edit]

hardware de-dotting would be totally awesome, but unfortunately it's nearly an intractible problem, and the only hardware that might be able to handle it is hella expensive (half a million expensive... might as well buy a new building for that).

[mg262]

@Mug Funky:

I've been waiting to say this... congrats on the (double) millennium!

Edit:
but for now it's mostly 30p motion graphics with 3:2 animation.Is there any sensible way to push that kind of stuff back to 24p (e.g. before standards conversion)? Equally, if you get field blended material arising from that, what would you be aiming for when removing/reversing the blends? (That's not a completely abstract question... I've summoned up the energy to pick up the effort to make that ConvertFPS blend-reverser I wrote deal with real material.)

Sorry, this is all getting a bit OT... I'll stop now.

[Mug Funky]

i really don't know... theoretically 30p->50i is reversible, but i imagine it'd be handled the same way that telecine would be (after all, the converter gives everything the same treatment, so reversing should be the same).

as far as a good way of turning 30p into 24p, TIVTC seems to have a few approches for dealing with this. i'd like to write some kind of super-script that speeds everything to 25/23.976, blends the 30p and IVTC's the animated bits. that'd be pretty cool, but i'm not sure how difficult it is (i think it'd be pretty difficult)

[mg262]

theoretically 30p->50i is reversible
But (per second) the input has 60 fields and the output has 50 fields... so some information must be lost?

[Contrast
24p --telecine + field blend--> (kind of)50i,
where the input has 48 fields and the output has 50 fields, which makes it possible to reverse.]

The rest sounds interesting... still thinking about it.

[scharfis_brain]

30p in 50i is reversable. Not resolution wise, but motion wise.
of course 60i in 50i is irreversible!

i'd like to write some kind of super-script that speeds everything to 25/23.976, blends the 30p and IVTC's the animated bits.

Also thought about this, too.
But it failed :(
My script was intended to do this kind of conversion:
23.976p > Speedup -> 25p
29.97p -> Speedup -> 31.25p -> 2:1:2:1:2 - Pulldown (NO blending!) -> 50i
59.94i -> Speedup -> 62.5i -> motion compensation -> 50i

[mg262]

of course 60i in 50i is irreversible!Is the only kind of 60i->50i this:
59.94i -> Speedup -> 62.5i -> motion compensation -> 50ior is there anything else? (I really mean, "what is used in practice?" rather than "what ways can you think of".)

I'm curious... did the script crash or just not do what you wanted it to do? Did some of the 3 source types work?

Edit: @scharfis, I tried to PM you with some links to some reversed 24<-25 material I just produced, in the hope that it would be of some interest... but your inbox is full.

Edit: just found this post of yours, @scharfis_brain...
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=559291#post559291
on 50/60i... conversion; I'm putting this link here because otherwise I'm sure to lose it.

[scharfis_brain]

Inbox cleared.

There are two commonly used kinds of NTSC -> PAL conversion:
blending & motion compensation (I'll drop field duplication, because it is a minority)

Also there are two kinds of conversion schemes: True speed or Speedup.

This sums up to 4 methods you can convert PAL to NTSC:

60i -> blending -> 50i
60i -> motion compensation -> 50i
60i -> speedup -> blending -> 50i
60i -> speedup -> motion compensation -> 50i

where the speedup is only used, if there are a LOT of NTSC-Film scenes.
Normal NTSC-Video usually gets converted without speedup,

[darkavatar1470]

also, i highly doubt most anime is even mastered in HDTV, let alone transferred from it. they'd all be 24p if that were so.
but for now it's mostly 30p motion graphics with 3:2 animation.
I can be sure most new series this year are broadcasted in HD , since I have a few episodes in 1080-30i & 720-24p..... even some 480p clips have tiny BS-i logos that I hope it means it was downsized from a HD source, but I dont know if its mastered in HD or not.
maybe AIR , since the DVD vol.1 sucks, looks like some cheap downsizing with lots of chroma bleed & interpolation artifacts....the original sat-TV ver was way too better....
Scrapped Princess, which has such bad dot crawls and rainbows that the opening titles (which are of course in bright red) are almost unreadable../~/..i suspect the japanese discs are the same again though
who knows? the R3 Taiwanese version looks pretty nice .....

[DigitalDeviant]

To answer the posters question, no, R1 DVDs do not ususaly have the same problem as HK DVDs, which are almost always bootlegs. If you pay attention, a lot of the more recent anime series are out on HK DVD way before the R2 Japanese release and a lot of times still have the TV stations logos or other broadcast overlays. Your basicly paying for someone to author a capture to a DVD and most of the time you could probably do better yourself.

Now to compare R1 to R2 Japanese DVDs, there isn't that much difference in the video nowadays. Most Japanese discs have 30-50 minutes of video per disc layer and R1's are usualy 50-75 minutes per layer, but the bitrates are still high still high enough on R1 discs that you won't notice any quality difference. However a lot of Japanese DVDs have uncompressed LPCM audio and I've never seen any R1 anime DVD with anything other than AC3 (with the exception of a few DTS releases.) I don't have enough experience with R4 to comment.

R3 DVDs vary. What I've seen from legitimate Chinese discs has been worse than bootleg. Taiwanese discs seem to be decent, but I haven't seen many of those. Korean DVDs are usualy very well done. Wonderful Days is one of the best looking DVDs I own, easily rivaling either Ghost in the Shell movie or Kumo no Mukou, Yakasuko no Basho, at least as far as the disc itself goes.

@Shinigami-Sama
I've been an anime fan in America for about 2 decades. Your comment about licancer<series-raper> (you do mean licensor, ne?) is pretty jaded. 95% of what is released on R1 DVD is very well done these days. The 5% that isn't is usualy slammed so hard on the internet that it's rerelased in a better version sometime later on.

[Shinigami-Sama]

yes licensor, they over cololcutate series to the point where I cant even figure what drugs the editors been doing, even in the sub which are generally sub-par add-ons<but they are getting better> of course it doesn't help the matter in that I'm trying to learn Japanese in my spare time and I still catch horrid errors some series, grated stuff like GIST is very complicated even for Japanese people and I give them credit for series like that, and I would've used DBZ as an example but I heard from a friend they're re-doing it without the horrible cuts to it. I've seen both Japanese titles raw and the american version side by side before, and I have to say, the cuts they;ve done somethings are horridly hence "series-rapers" I even went so far as to compare american and Japanese pokemon, which was cut as much as DBZ, they took as much Japanese influence out as possible, even going as far to try and edit out the kaji on buildings

now so we don't in an argument, these are opions my opions

[SirCanealot]

I can be sure most new series this year are broadcasted in HD , since I have a few episodes in 1080-30i & 720-24p..... even some 480p clips have tiny BS-i logos that I hope it means it was downsized from a HD source, but I dont know if its mastered in HD or not.
maybe AIR , since the DVD vol.1 sucks, looks like some cheap downsizing with lots of chroma bleed & interpolation artifacts....the original sat-TV ver was way too better....


Very few, if any, series are mastered above 480. Most of the series you've seen in over 480 have mostly been upscalled by the TV station ^^;;

And there seems to be very few shows using 30fps effects these days. Just the odd few with 30fps scrolling credits...