has anyone else already encoded...

[Amateur]

i have many cartoons on dvd which i've been encoding. i get pretty good results on most of them but that was before i knew just how many filters are out there. now i'm wondering if anyone has encoded any of the following shows and still have the script for them:

ben 10
ben 10 alien force
spectacular spiderman
x-men evolution
wolverine and the x-men
teen titans
batman animated series
1987 ninja turtles
2003 ninja turtles

would love to do some comparisons because i'm guessing my encodes could be greatly improved.

[yetanotherid]

I really hate cartoons. :)

So I'm not the best person to answer the question but it did occur to me to ask, what format are you converting them to and with what program? I'd assume anamorphic x264 would be the best place to start for pure quality (hopefully no resizing required), with maybe a little sharpening along the way. Apart from some sharpening now and then I tend not to apply too much filtering to anything I convert, not just for the sake of it at least, and because s%$t in is usually just filtered s%^t out anyway. I prefer to get as close to duplicating the original as I can most of the time, as I use my PC for playing just about everything I watch, so if I apply the filtering on playback (either using ffdshow or an AVISynth script loaded into ffdshow) then I can change my mind or adjust it without having to re-encode (of course there's always exceptions where something does need to be "fixed" before encoding).

Are they interlaced or progressive DVDs? If they're interlaced then hopefully a cartoon de-interlacing expert will come along to say what's the best.... errrr.... sorry particularly silly forum rule regarding not referring to "the best".... to say which de-interlacing methods are preferred when converting cartoons.

I guess none of that really answered your question, but at least it's some reading till a cartoon expert comes along.....

[Amateur]

to answer the questions:

i use megui to convert standard dvds (north american so ntsc?) into mp4
i get a mixture of progressive shows and interlaced shows
not all of my shows are widescreen so i resize to 640x480 often
from my experience, i tend to get better looking results when i resize widescreen material to 848x480 instead of keeping 720x480 and using anamorph. don't know why...maybe i'm doing something wrong?

[yetanotherid]

from my experience, i tend to get better looking results when i resize widescreen material to 848x480 instead of keeping 720x480 and using anamorph. don't know why...maybe i'm doing something wrong?

That does seem unusual. If you use anamorphic encoding, and if you crop to mod16 dimensions so there's no resizing (or you encode non-mod16) then in theory there's no way resizing and encoding using different shaped pixels to those used on the DVD should look better, even if it takes more of them to do produce the same resolution. Unless I'm missing something?

If I encode a DVD I generally use anamorphic and a CRF or 19 or 20 (I never do 2 pass encodes) and if I play the encode and the original DVD side by side on each monitor, they look virtually identical to me. Are your anamorphic encodes lower than the original DVD quality, or has the resizing and square pixels encoding somehow improved the quality?