Special settings for anime?

[t-diva]

I have been working on an anime title, I don't have a log file as I've been using the default settings that came with dvd2svcd and i set it to pass 5 times. when i watched it during high action sequences mainly bright ones the picture was blocky and it would jump, my friend referred to it as watching it on lsd. The title is Demon City Shinjuko.

Has anyone done this movie and/or had this kind of difficulty, are there guidelines for doing anime to prevent this from happening?

TIA


DiVA

[GtMustangJim]

I think it has something to do with "hybred" animes. I did one called cool devices and it came out real jumpy, its even more chopier than south park. I'm not sure if theres a way to get around this. Its not all animes just some. I did tenchi muyo and it came out perfect.

[smiller667]

Check DeathByBitrate's intro to Anime ripping ... http://www.inwards.com/~dbb/ might give you some hints. Good luck ...

[GtMustangJim]

Thanks for the link. I read the whole damn thing. I had no idea what a problem anime is. I love anime and now I feel like somebody thru poo poo in my cheerios this morning :(

Is there any tips you could give me when using DVD2Svcd program? Or do I have to go thru that nigntmare like everybody else if I want to back up anime?

[t-diva]

Wow thanks for that link I had no idea I was taking on such a complex project I'm gonna ask the same thing GtMustangJim did and see if there are any tips for using Dvd2svcd for backing up anime if i can help it :p

[smiller667]

I just posted that link cause it describes some of the pitfalls of anime encoding. It is not too recent, better methods might exist.
I have yet to tackle my first anime project, probably Princess Mononoke ...

[Kedirekin]

I've done dozens of anime. In my experience, it is possible to get a fairly good encode - but I think it does take a lot of experience, and it is often a lot of effort. Some titles are just plain impossible with the freeware tools at our disposal (changing field order is a bitch).

If I were you, I'd start by doing one-chapter one-pass CBR test encodes in dvd2svcd for any anime you want to encode. Proceed through the list till you get results that are watchable.
- Force Film On (this will rarely, if ever, work)
- IVTC
- IVTC reversed field order
- Force Film Off, Upper Field First unchecked on CCE tab
- Force Film Off, Upper Field First checked on CCE tab

Once you find the settings (if any) that look good, here are some tips to improve the quality of the encodes.
- use at least 3 pass VBR - 4 is better and 5 a little bit better yet
- enable Temporal Smoother. It really does improve the quality.
- enable 'Edit avs file (not for newbies)' and crop overscan

Crop(24,16,672,448)
BicubicResize(448,448,...)
AddBorders(16,16,16,16)


Note: it is possible to visually inspect the video stream before hand and make a really good guess at which of the encoding methods you need to use. However, it's really beyond the scope of what I can describe here. Start playing, read lots of guides, and start gaining the experience.

[GtMustangJim]

Kedirekin,

Thanks for the reply. That gives me a lot to experament with.

[Kedirekin]

BTW: I tried cool devices too. That's one of the titles that I think is impossible with our current tools. I believe it has changing field order. Of all anime, hentai (sp?) seems to be the worst of the worst.

By that, I mean that the source DVD plays even field first for a while, then switches to odd field first, then even field first - and so on throughout the entire show. Since our tools encode the whole thing as either top field first or bottom field first, we end up with an encode that has the wrong field order half of the time. The result: video that is choppy (kinda jumps back and forth) half of the time. It's especially bad since the field order swap seems to happen about every ¾ second.

On the other hand, I did it a long time ago, and I've learned a lot since then. I should take another look, just to confirm that I didn't mess something up.

[GtMustangJim]

Kedirekin

When you put the original anime DVD in the player, How does the player know which fields to play first? Isn't there a way to the frams on the SVCD the same way they were on DVD?

So far I have read that page 5 times. I'm learning a little more each time.

[Kedirekin]

There are flags in the MPG stream on the DVD that tell the player what order to play the fields in (I believe they're called TFF flags - for Top Field First). This is how the DVD can play the video correctly even when it has changing field order.

The tools we use all convert the field-based encodes on the DVD so that they appear to be frame based avi streams. Thus the field based information gets lost. When we re-encode in CCE or TMpg, we can only tell it 'top field first on or off' for the entire encode.

Note that it would be technically possible to create our own stream with changing field order. The TFF flag is part of the MPG spec - it's not special to DVDs - so the MPG on an SVCD could do anything an MPG on a DVD can do. In fact, commercially made anime SVCDs (if there are any) probably do have changing field order - the studios that author them probably have access to the same tools that the DVD authoring studios do. The problem is, we don't have the tools, and we're not likely to get them for any price we can afford.

Now that I've said all that, I'll add one caveat: there is one tool that preserves the field information. It's called reMPG. What it did was a true transcode - it re-encoded each frame of a DVD and preserved all mpg flags into the transcoded file. This concept was extremely attractive to me - unfortunately the tool was overwhelmingly slow, and it produced substandard encodes (very blocky, even in low motion). I (and some others I've talked to) have done transcodes on flaky material similar to Cool Devices, and it does result in smooth playback. Unfortunately, the results were unwatchable because of the poor video quality, so that tool is largely just a novelty.

[Mozart]

Hi,

Wizard_FL is working in a smart IVTC plugin which will be able in handling these changes of field order during the encoding. Read more here (http://rilanparty.com/vbb/showthread.php?postid=54403#post54403)

[GtMustangJim]

Kedirekin,

Thanks for the well thoght out and excellent reply. It made a lot of sence to me. Damn...I can see where that program could have so much potential. I wish I had the know how to continue where that program left off. You could then call me Anime2SVCD :)

Looks like its the Anime way or the highway

[GtMustangJim]

Originally posted by Mozart
Hi,

Wizard_FL is working in a smart IVTC plugin which will be able in handling these changes of field order during the encoding. Read more here (http://rilanparty.com/vbb/showthread.php?postid=54403#post54403)

Aw man that would be too sweet if he could get this to work.

[Kedirekin]

Yes, that would be sweet. It would be the solution for a lot of anime. I wish I had more time to spend in the divx forums, even though I don't often do divs encodes. There seems to be a lot more innovation going on in the divx world. But there are only so many hours ion the day.

Unfortunately a new IVTC tool won't solve all problems. A lot of anime doesn't use the nice clean 3/2 pulldown type of telecine, so you can't use IVTC on them. And some anime has CG sequences at full 29.97 fps. You have to encode those at 29.97 fps, and when that is the case, you still get bit by changing field order.

[t-diva]

thanks for all the replies i now got alot to fool around with, just one last thing does this apply to computer generated cartoons/movies as well?