R4 Anime - Motion Judder? - Fixable??

[Mr.Bitey]

Hi All,

Ive been getting into Anime recently, however ive noticed that the titles ive been watching all seem to have some sort of motion judder which is a little distracting..noticable mainly on pans and looks like a frame is being repeated/blurred every second or two (sorry I dont know the technical term here for what im seeing) - It looks like im watching an NTSC disc on a PAL display. Ive seen it in the following R4 PAL Anime Titles:
Neon Genesis Evangelion (Platinum series)
Ghost in the Shell SAC (Series)
Princess Motokoke (not sure on that spelling :)

Is this type of thing fixable?

Cheers,
Bitey

[iantri]

maybe, maybe not. you'd have to give us a more specific example.. anime tends to get pretty badly brutalized on PAL DVD's (cheap NTSC to PAL conversions), but in many different ways.

Often, something that started on film is telecined (sometimes on ancient analog equipment depending on the age of the series) to NTSC Video, where some post work is done (titling, etc), then for the PAL release merely standards converted to PAL with predictably poor results (because the video does not have smooth motion already due to 3:2 pulldown).

Post us a sample clip, and look into Restore24 and RePAL.

[Mr.Bitey]

iantri,

Thanks for repling, I'll have a look at those functions and pull very short clip out showing the issue..

Cheers,
Bitey

[Mug Funky]

for Eva platinum:

it's just standards-conversion combined with 3:2 pulldown on the original master... you'll be seeing a lot more of this, because unfortunately NTSC doesn't sell in PAL land (we did "Ah! My Goddess" in NTSC and it barely sold at all, so PAL's the way to go unfortunately).

for Mononoke:

same deal really. Studio Ghibli gave us NTSC masters for all our movies (except Howl's Moving Castle which looks utterly spectacular... i recommend it when it comes out. it's one of the most perfect encodes i've ever seen/done :)). add to this that Mononoke is multi-angle encoded as per Ghibli's request (there's storyboards on angle 2). standards-conversion plus multiangle will give you blocks.

for GITS SAC:

only the last disc has any actual frame blending - i saw this as it was encoding. there's not much of it either, so i wouldn't be worried. for the rest of the series, it's all progressive PAL downscaled from HDTV masters (that we, alas, didn't get our hands on... i guess Manga Entertainment in the UK have those). however, the intro sequence is the original Japanese CG one. so it was rendered in 30 fps and down-converted to 25fps by simply dropping frames. so the intro legitimately IS slightly jerky, but the rest is fine (any jerks you see there on pans are due to the fact that your TV is blinking twice for every frame).

as far as fixability goes, the blending from standards-conversion on mononoke and eva should be, but it's a slow process (search for "restore24").

for Mononoke (i love this movie btw), all i can say is wait a while, and i think madman will be releasing a ghibli box set, where we do a better (progressive PAL speedup) conversion for the movies we've already done - that's "spirited away", "nausicaa", laputa, yamadas (which doesn't need it imho as it's very simple), etc.

watch out for Pom Poko, My Neighbor Totoro (out in march), Howl's Moving Castle and Whispers of the Heart, as these ghibli titles are much better quality... the older releases were done before i started here so they were just standards-converted the regular way. the new ones are losslessly captured off the digibeta, then IVTC'd, lanczosresized, denoised if appropriate (only a little bit as i hate to lose detail) and software encoded. the results are much much better :) not to brag (too much), but the totoro that's being replicated as we speak is IMHO the best looking release in any region - even better than the japanese one :)

[edit]

btw, thanks for buying those titles :) keeps the food on my table...

[Mr.Bitey]

Thanks Mug Funky, thats a lot of detail and info - I appreciate it! sounds like your right in the heart of it :)

Slow doesnt bother me, unless its a week and the power goes out/pc hard locks :eek:

I'll double-check GITS SAC... I was fairly sure it wasnt smooth BUT I did watch the eva series and some others after that and might have gotten confused (not hard to do when I do all my viewing once the 'family' has gone to sleep as to not be distirbed!)..

Will keep an eye out for that ghibli box-set..

Cheers,
Bitey

[Mug Funky]

well, don't hold your breath for the ghibli box. AFAIK it's just an idea for now. it's definitely something i'd like to see happen - the movies are so good they deserve the best possible conversion (of course you could go further than what i'm doing and re-telecine the original film to HDTV, then de-grain and scale down to PAL, but that's not likely to happen any time soon :))

as far as restore24 - the slowness is proportional to the quality of deinterlacing, so if you're worried about power outages i'd suggest processing an episode at a time, or even a chapter at a time :)

[Mr.Bitey]

well, don't hold your breath for the ghibli box. AFAIK it's just an idea for now. it's definitely something i'd like to see happen - the movies are so good they deserve the best possible conversion (of course you could go further than what i'm doing and re-telecine the original film to HDTV, then de-grain and scale down to PAL, but that's not likely to happen any time soon :))


Tell you what, forget that box set and just save me a 1920x1080 version from those masters ;-)


as far as restore24 - the slowness is proportional to the quality of deinterlacing, so if you're worried about power outages i'd suggest processing an episode at a time, or even a chapter at a time :)

Hmm from what ive read on restore24 - it might have to be by cell :-)

PS: Im looking forward to GITS SAC 2nd Gig Vol1 thats being released here on the 15th!

Cheers,
Bitey

[Mug Funky]

sry, the masters we get sent are NTSC digibeta... that is 720x486 10-bit 4:2:2, 90 mbps (almost lossless, but not quite. certainly better than a kick in the teeth) all on a great big hulking tape (digibeta is backward-compatible with the analog betacam SP - it's on the same tapes, but they're coloured blue instead of grey.. it's a bit like Hi8 and Digital8). 1920x1088 would be great :)

[zilog jones]

Does anyone ever do proper PAL telecine for anime? The PAL R2 Spirited Away looked pretty decent, but then again it could just have been NTSC IVTC'd (I was watching it letterboxed on a 21" so I couldn't really see if it was *that* good). The special features and stuff on the other disc looked pretty awful in comparison - washed out colour, blend-o-rama, etc.

[Mug Funky]

@ zilog: not often.

off the top of my head, i can think of these though:

- GITS SAC (plus 2nd gig)
- GITS special edition
- Akira
- Dead Leaves (this is awesome, btw)
- Howl's Moving Castle (not out yet, wait till mid-march)

these are all (except probably Akira) direct transfers from HDTV masters. so there is hope. interestingly enough, 3 of the above titles are licensed by manga entertainment, who are (AFAIK) based in PAL land. companies like FUNimation and ADV aren't likely to provide direct PAL transfers, and besides that, almost all anime is still currently produced in NTSC standard definition.

there's probably some others titles that slipped my mind, and there will be more in future as HDTV gets more feasible for animation studios. the good thing about HD equipment is it's compatible with NTSC and PAL SD output, so it's a simple matter to dub from an HD deck onto a digibeta or other standard def mastering format.