Better Quality

[kakomu]

For Ripping an Anime DVD, which do you think would produce better results (and each anime Episode I rip I cut the ending credits since they're resource hogs)? Making one long 4 Episode Encode, and chopping it up so that out of the 700 megs, all 4 of the episodes look relatively the same, or encoding each episode seperately? I've been using the latter in order to be able to maintain tighter quality control, and make sure that each individual episode turns out well, whereas I think that encoding one large encode would take forever to re-encode (especially with heavy duty smoother filters on bad source) and be a lot harder to inspect for quality control.

[hakko504]

I would encode the parts separately, after running a few compression tests to make sure they all have the same compressability.

[kakomu]

thanks for reaffirming my POV.

[yingx2]

I would encode it as a whole, which allows greater flexibility for bitrate allocation.

If you encode it seperately, you'll have to struggle among different resolutions, smooth parameters and all the other possible encoding settings, in order to achieve a constant compression value. Think of it this way:700MB / 4 episodes --> to assure size preditability, you probably need to divide your encoding into 4 equally sized parts --> 175MB per episode. However, each of your episodes cannot be equally compressible. Episode 1 might reach a comp value of 70% at 448x336, while Episode 2 could safely stay at 640x480 for the same compressibility. The final quality of each episode could vary a lot( 448x336 vs 640x480 ) even if you stick to a fixed compression rate.

Encoding each episode with a flexible filesize accordingly is the way to go if you want to maintain consistent visual perception for all of your encodes. It's not hard at all when you process your source as a whole. And of coure, you can encode each episode seprately if you think all of them is practically equally compressible.

[cordraconis]

Indeed, I tend to agree on this.

Encode as a whole, and then split it up. The result will be more equally distributed. For example, the 2nd DVD of LOTR-EE takes only about 25% (without credits) of the whole movie. To put that on one separate CD, would be a waste of space.

When I encoded LOTR Extended Edition, I also "glued" the 2 DVD's together, and encoded as a whole. (In your case: Just select the first VOB in DVD2AVI, and then go to the next subdirectory and select the first VOB of that subdirectory, etc ...)
Proceed as usual. :D

At the end I had one large DivX videostream, that I cut into smaller pieces to mux it with the extracted AC-3's and then I "glued" the pieces back together in one large 2.1 Gb file.
Then I split it into 3 pieces to fit on 3 CD's.

[Hanty]

I'd encode them all separately. It's perfectly possible getting good quality anime encodes at 175Mb a pop WITH credits. (I prefer keeping them for sake of completition) BUT that requires lots of tweaking and smart use of different smoothers as it's likely for the encode to have noise problems if you don't watch out at those sizes. Therefore I would recommend you go for 233Mb and 3 eps /CD if you're new to encoding or if you're feeling lazy. When it comes to anime, getting 4 eps/CD and having them all look great is the test of firethat will put you above 90% of the anime encodes out there.

...and beware of the mass naked child events.

[kakomu]

So far, I have been able to get some really good results with Love Hina, and Nadesico @ 175 Megs per Eps. Nadesico required heavy smoothing, since the source material was awfully grainy.

The credits are a giant no-no. The anime companies recorded them at 29.97 fps, so when you de-interlace, you only get interlace lined credits. By applying a de-interlace filter that blends them, you get this running blur that looks really bad as well. So far, I have yet to find a good method to do so.

[Stampede]

I'd do them separately. Let's say the second one in the series was oversmoothed by the production company. You might need a sharpening filter or at least an edge enhancer. This takes more trial-and-error work because you'll need to figure out how low you can take the average bitrate for the episode to make it look similar to the other episodes you completed but in the end I feel you'll have a better and more consistant product.

Heck, I'll even break up large movies into little parts. For example when encoding LOTR on 2 discs there were a couple of scenes that had macroblocking or other issues. I trimmed those sections, created an appropriate AVS script to fix each of them, encoded them separately, and joined the pieces at the end in the same way you do with your end credits.

[madoka]

I encode the episodes separately, mostly out of convenience. While encoding them as a whole may improve quality, cutting them can be tricky since it can only be done at keyframes. The keyframes may not be at places where you want them to be. Furthermore, if VBR mp3s are used, then audio sync may also be problematic after cutting.

As for compressability tests, my experience has been that testing one episode is sufficient; compressability varies from series to series, but not much between episodes of the same series. Generally the variation is within 1~2 MB.

[madoka]

Originally posted by Hanty
When it comes to anime, getting 4 eps/CD and having them all look great is the test of fire that will put you above 90% of the anime encodes out there.
This is somewhat off topic, but I feel the above statement is a bit misleading. Often the rips look great not because the person who encode them discovered some magic settings for certain filters, but rather that he / she had access to high quality originals.

I really believe that this is the actual deciding factor. For example, when I encoded El-Hazard OVA (the first one), I hardly need to do anything and the resulting rip came out perfect. Whereas there was nothing I could do about the Slayers series; there's just too much frame jitter and noise in the source.

Just my 2 cents.

[Hanty]

Originally posted by madoka
This is somewhat off topic, but I feel the above statement is a bit misleading. Often the rips look great not because the person who encode them discovered some magic settings for certain filters, but rather that he / she had access to high quality originals.

I really believe that this is the actual deciding factor. For example, when I encoded El-Hazard OVA (the first one), I hardly need to do anything and the resulting rip came out perfect. Whereas there was nothing I could do about the Slayers series; there's just too much frame jitter and noise in the source.

Just my 2 cents.

Well, that's something ALL encoders, ALWAYS have to deal with and consider so I'm sorta taking it for granted. It is true as you say, but it is possible with tweaking to come down with a great looking episode at small filesize, near the original.(or many times better than the original, something than only happens with cartoons/anime)

And these settigns aren't magical by any means, it's mechanics.

[Angrychair]

Call me synical, but I consider great 175 meg rips to be rather average now-a-days.

Maybe it's since I use xvid (which has gotten much better than divx5) but I'm shooting for 140 megs for anime where possible (5 eps per cd) and with the amount of motion in some series, it's not really an unattainable goal.

[magomago]

"The credits are a giant no-no. The anime companies recorded them at 29.97 fps, so when you de-interlace, you only get interlace lined credits. By applying a de-interlace filter that blends them, you get this running blur that looks really bad as well. So far, I have yet to find a good method to do so."

Really? I've done a lot of anime (latest was EVA...man that was hard but it was all worth it) and I don't have that problem in the credits.

call me spoiled but EWWW to the idea of 3-5 episodes a disc. I do two episodes a disc. That usually ends up to be 1800kbps for the videostream b/c I pick 160kbps for my audio (both are VBR).


And what is compressability? FAQ anywhere? Like I said when I encode I just jack up the bitrate till I can approach a filesize ~350 megabytes and I'm happy. Is compressability like a zip where you can make the file smaller and get the same quality, but the downturn is that you need a beffier computer to play and uncompress?

I ask this because I would be VERY interested provided I can get better video quality for the same size even if i need more Mhz :sly:

Then again I'm the one who encoded the Ruroni Kenshin Samari X OVA (its like 1 movie in 4 episodes) at 1 episode a disc (~25 megabytes for 700Megs)

[Acaila]

Compressibility is (just like the word says) a measure of how easy the movie is to compress. In other words divide the encoded size by the maximum possible size (highest quality) and that is what compressibility is. It has nothing to do with achieving a lower size with a better computer.

[magomago]

Then why do people run compressability tests? To tell them what VBR bitrate to encode at?

[jggimi]

As the guides describe, so eloquently, to produce the highest possible quality video at a specific file size.

[Candock]

encoded Cowboy Bebop 6 - 9 as one whole!
Ep6: 148MB
Ep7: 175MB
Ep8: 155MB
Ep9: 196MB

with 175MB per episode the sixth would look very very good.
the ninth very very bad!
so all look the same way good...

[N_F]

@Candock - Can you add the length of ep 6-9?

When I do series (quite often) I always try to keep the bitrate consistent between the episodes, which require some calculations for the length of each episode.

In my experience most series have similar motions and colors for every episode, therefore giving a similar comp. test value at the same bitrate.