256 colors in anime?

[TelemachusMH]

Is there a way to save an avi file that only has 256 colors? It seems to me that the commpression on that file would be much better and it wouldn't change the picture too much. Also it would help when trying to reduce noice.

Any thoughts or comments are welcomed.

[MxxCon]

actualy i think it will make noise even worse.
w/ 256 colors you will need to do alot of dithering.

it could work if original source was something like gif images. but i think it will look pretty bad converting mpg movie

[Zarxrax]

Most anime would look terrible with just 256 colors. While its true that the characters and such dont really consist of many colors, the backgrounds often use a plethora of colors, usually gradients. Heck, there is even some very noticable quality loss when viewing it with just 16-bit color.

[TelemachusMH]

I think that you guys are probably right about it, but I would like to try it and just see how it looks. How can it be done?

[-h]

You can convert it to 256-shade grayscale, that's about as close as you're going to get. Use VirtualDub to set the saturation to 0%, and save the file as a raw 24-bit uncompressed avi. Then compress the avi with RAR (you can try enabling/disabling multimedia compression if you want) and see how bad the ratio is.

GIF relies on LZW compression, which performs exceedingly bad on typical (natural or anime, or cgi) video.

-h

[bb]

Images having an optimized 256 color palette can look better than 16 Bit images. It depends on how many different colors are needed, and on a good color quantisation.

Maybe this is possible (though I didn't try it yet):
1. Save an image sequence using VirtualDub.
2. Compress each image as GIF.
3. Play the resulting image sequence (maybe you can create an AVI from them).

I'd like to have something like a "motion GIF" codec, similar to "motion JPEG" know as MJPEG. Maybe more than that: a codec including motion search which can produce key frames and delta frames.

bb