Anime general settings

[Kaiousama]

I've heard the good advices in the xvid general settings thread, and i like to ask you your general xvid settings for a normal 23 min/175mb episode encoding, a little note: do you experencied with xvid more than other codecs that ugly ghost effect near the character's edges (note that the virtualdub output to the codec is perfect, there are only in the output avi)? how to solve it?

Tnx

[Hanty]

Ghosting? You are talking about noise right?

[soujir0u]

Ghosting? Isn't that due to your deinterlacer? I don't have much advise, but I would say that H263 quantizers are better for anime...

[Aktan]

i have been using mpeg quant and it seems fine to me...

[Vash]

My usual "Anime"-settings are:

Motion Search Precision: 6 Ultra High
Quantization Type: H.263
Maximum I-Frame intervall: 100
Minimum I-Frame Intervall: 1

(Hint: More Key- /I-Frames reduce some "ghosting-effects")
H.236 Quantization softens the picture a little, in my case it´s useful compressings Animes: To me it avoids some macroblocks in huge one-coloured areas. I often use this in combination with the "Divx50" FourCC (seems to soften out some Blocks even without Postprocessing). However this effect is noticable only when having a close look at certain frames....

As regards Quantization I restrict quantizers like this

Min I-frame Quantizer: 2
Max I-frame Quantizer: 2
Min P-Frame Quantizer: 2
Max P-Frame Quantizer: 31

Hint: I chose this Max P-Frame Quantizer setting to enable the codec the widest range of quantizers possible. In combination with the settings above, this offered best quality to me as far as Anime-Videos are concerned.

Two Pass
I-frame boost %:25

Alt.Curve
(enable "Use Alternative curve system")
Curve aggression: Medium
High distance from average %: 200
Low distance from average %: 50
Strenght%: 50

I leave anything not mentioned at its default settings.

One last thing: These are just my default settings for Anime Videos, maybe you have to adjust them to better fit to your source.

As always: If someone knows better , please tell me. Anyway I´m just a newb ;)

[Vash]

Coming back to "ghosting-effects", what kind of source are you wirking with Kaiousama? Is it a TV or VHS capture? A DVD Rip?

What kind of ghostings do you encounter? Where do they appear?
Are these ghostings follwoing every moving object (in case a Hand moves up and down, do they appear first under the Hand while it´s moving up and over the Hand while it´s moving down?) or are they fixed at a certain position in relation to the things shown (always left or right of the original picture, like a kind of transparent mirror image)?

The use of Key-frames is able to reduce the first kind of ghostings only, while the second one can be removed with certain Virtualdub filters.

[Suikun]

I think he isn't referring to ghost effects like we think but to the noise, which appeares at the edges from one color to another...

[kastro68]

Originally posted by Kaiousama
do you experencied with xvid more than other codecs that ugly ghost effect near the character's edges (note that the virtualdub output to the codec is perfect, there are only in the output avi)? how to solve it?



My hunch is that it is a decoding problem. I have experienced this effect with normal movies too. I already told Nic about it...but I think he is a bit busy to fix it atm.

If you open the encoded video in virtual dub, do you still have that ghost effect?

Try changing the fourCC to DX50 if you haven't already.

[Vash]

Possible, but I´ve seen the first kind of ghostings described using divx50 decoder for playback too, when compressing some scenes quite heavily or when settings high brightness and saturatior settings for playback watching less compressed videos.

BTW: Does Virtualdub use the same filters for playback any Divx-Player uses? If so, why aren´t (at last some) ghostings visible checking certain frames with it?

[Kaiousama]

excuse my italian, when i said ghost effect i'm talking about a noise, distorced original quality (bad quality) in zones near the edges of the people or the things, probably this bad effect doesn't happen with films because the character doesnt have a pencil that draw their edges.
This kind of effect appear with all the codecs (sbc and divx5) but in xvid is more evident:confused: . bye

P.S. do you encode the initial titles separately from the episode, bacause it has more action and in my opinion need a better bitrate (and slightly different settings in the encoding process) and after that, join all together?:p

[Suikun]

The noise you describe is caused by the nature of the way MPEG compresses the video.
Namely it is the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the following quantization. The DCT doesn't like edges and when quantizing it's output it gets even worse and the result is the noise in the decoded pictures you noticed.
Some ways to lessen the artifacts are
-using H.263 quants (at least for anime, I think, helped me in some way)
-using a bilinear filter instead of bicubic ("softer" edges)
-just using a higher bitrate =)