Resolution, which type of artifacts do you prefer?

[Chu]

Here is the story. I encode a ton of anime at high quality (3 eps/700 meg cd), and at this high bitrate almost everyone uses a res of 512x384. The thing is, even though you loose a ton of detail by moving down to 448x336, the encode is almost pixel perfect. Am I the only one who prefers less detail, but pixel perfect encodes, over more, but artifaced, detail?

-Chu

[Acaila]

You consider 512 a high resolution??? What's the original resolution then?

If you are capturing from a TV source you should stick to that resolution (400-something?) and not upsize to 512, but if the source is DVD you're already loosing a lot by going down to 512.

To answer you question, I'd prefer more artifacts and more detail over less artifacts and less detail. Artifacts can be cleaned up with post-processing, detail is lost forever.

[theReal]

I usually prefer lower resolutions over artefacts (well, depends on how much artefacts we are talking about), but I do all I can to stay above a 512x384 resolution. Below that, I find the picture loses too much detail.

--> Better use a little more filtering and stay at 512x384 without artefacts ;)

[poopity poop]

You get as many artifacts at one resolution as you do at the other... and yes 512x384 is a fairly large resolution:

512 x 384 = 1.96x10^5 pixels 4:3
640 x 480 = 3.07x10^5 pixels 4:3 <- nobody uses this its too high
640 x 272 = 1.74x10^5 pixels 2.35:1
640 x 345 = 2.20x10^5 pixels 16:9

For normal DivX movie resolutions, its in between the two aspect ratio's in surface area. 512x384 is the perfect resolution for a 233mb episode which will be normally encoded at around 1000-1100 producing of course very high quality. no one encodes an episode at 640x480 because its a freaking lot of pixels almost 3/2 more than the highest normal resolution DivX movie. Anyway.. that's my 2 cents.