DVD Rebuilder with Anime?

[h00z]

Has anyone done any serious testing with the newer builds of DVD Rebuilder on anime titles? I'm currently trying to clean a bunch of ISOs off my working drive so I can start with some serious anime testing (nothing like a few hundred GBs of ISOs laying around), but I was wondering if anyone has had any luck.

I'm mostly concerned with the deinterlacing/IVTC issues and how they're handled by the app. So far I am completely sold on Rebuilder, and if it can do anime... That'd be all the better.

[Joergen]

Why couldnt it?

Though I'm in PAL and the closest to anime I've done so far is the anime section of kill bill but it came out spot-on.

Animation is easy to compress afaik since it has wast still areas of pure flat color. This is especially true to rendered animation like Shrek, Ice Age etc.

[nwg]

The anime sections of Kill Bill turned out fine (CCE). I have also done Spirited Away as well. That was with Rejig

Is that any help? :)

[h00z]

Anime actually compresses much worse than normal "live action". It's not the big patches of blocky color, it's the sharp edges that make it difficult.

Edges are the hardest thing to compress correctly and anime is full of edges. Anyone who has tried to encode anime (DivX, XviD, DVD, whatever) will know what I'm talking about.

One anime scene in a Hollywood flick isn't nearly enough to judge. I guess I'll just have to do some serious testing of my own.

[quantum]

Titles like The Simpsons episode disks were very hard to handle using big3 as I recall. There were ivtc and interlacing problems and I eventually fell back to using transcoders for these.

Hmm. Maybe I'll stick in the Simpsons Season 1 original disk and see how DVD Rebuilder handles it...

[esso]

Hey all, 1st post. i've done a couple of animes (last exile, Yukikaze, abeno abashi, Escaflowne), all ntsc, and i've had quite a bit of problems with sharp edges and interlacing. It may be just how it was made, some come out fine, others i do with DVD Shrink. i do hear ya hooz on the encoding with divx an all, (hated that). don't know if this helps and all, oh yeah! sorry, the last time i tried RB and an anime was v.35 havent since.

[legomen]

well I'll run some tests on various animes today using v.45 and see how well they do.

[CiViC]

Well, i did the trigun dvd's and it came out fine. I don't remember which version of DVDRB I used (it was 0.4x).

BTW, this is originally an 8 disc DVD-5 set..but since i'm cheap, I combined sets of 2 discs to 1 (for a total of 4 dvd's), and sent it over to DVDRB. The result was flawless, which was good considering I couldn't even ivtc it properly with dvd2svcd (and i'm not about to manually select the frames for each dvd just to create "proper" svcds).

[zeus163]

I did GTO volume 1 and thought it came out great (with version 3.8). I haven't done another anime DVD since, but will on some of my new and cheap Right Stuff purchases when I get them.

[h00z]

I started my testing with a (relatively easy) re-encode of Wild Arms disk 2. I'll know in about an hour how well it did, then I'll move on to something more difficult.

[Joergen]

I have to admit, DVD-RB could have some settings for anime titles.

I've been trying to encode Titan A.E. SE R2 that is true progressive, and I've had to tweak the average bitrate for the main movie up to 5300kbit and its still not quite enough for all scenes, but I cant go higher as I've already put the extras to 1500kbit half-d1 with ecl optimizer.

The biggest problem is mosquito noise and some block noise that follows certain shades of colour and edges.

CCE does have settings for animation that might help, maybe jdobbs could build special settings for anime in the AVS Setup.

[DDogg]

Joergen, you might just try putting undot().Deen() in the main avs's. This normally yields a 20-25% reduction in required ABR, but may not do as much for anim.

To test the effect without doing the whole encode you can make a quick avs using the entire appropriate d2v in the rebuilder directory adding SelectRangeEvery(1200,12) to the end. If you will run that with a fixed Q, say 28, you should be able to identify the percentage of reduction the filtering will make and be able to judge any effects from its use by previewing the resulting samples. Also, you will know the quality that will be generated in advance of doing the encode. Anything up to a Q40 ought to be decent if you have to go there, IMO.

To derive the bitrate of the two resulting samples use this (http://forum.doom9.org/attachment.php?s=&postid=475110).

As you know, there is a point where there is just not going to be enough BR to allow full DVD replicas of some problem encodes. At that stage you have to use filters, or go to 1/2D1 on the main which is of course the last resort.

This is why we need a way to use filters in dvd-rb when required.

If an optional feature, perhaps an INI entry, requested DVD-rb to place a generic but named import line directly after the mpeg2source line we could do this so very easily without the grudge of manually editing a ton of avs files.

In this case, placing the line 'import ("myfilters.avs")', would import myfilters.avs which would just contain "Undot().Deen()" or whatever you desired. That makes it as if you actually typed those lines in the real avs. Jdobbs said he was looking at this way back. I don't know what became of it.

Alternatively, does anybody know of a commandline or program that can alter every avs you specified and add a line in a certain position? That would be very useful to many of us.

From avisynth docs

Import (string filename)

Import evaluates the contents of another AviSynth script.

This is useful for storing multiple script-functions, global variables, and pre-built streams. Strictly speaking it is a script function and not a filter.

[Joergen]

Sorry, but most of that is beyond me :(

I'm pretty happy with the results I got from the last encode but I suspect the available bitrate could be used better. There are some scenes that are somewhat blocky with no apparent reason (midtone scenes with nearly no movement or film grain).

But if you could work those into preconfigured AVS options for dvd-rb that might yield better results for animated titles, I'm sure people would appreciate it.

[DDogg]

Just go stick Undot().Deen() after your mpeg2source line in every avs of the main movie and then re-encode. You would have to have undot.dll and deen.dll in your plugins dir and it will slow down the re-encode btw.

There has got to be some utility to to do this automatically out there somewhere. Like this:


#------------------
# AVS File Created by DVD Rebuilder
# VOBID:01, CELLID:07
#------------------
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\MPEG2Dec3.dll")
mpeg2source("D:\WUTEMP\D2VAVS\V12.D2V")
Undot().Deen()
trim(31734,32942)
ConvertToYUY2()
AudioDub(BlankClip())

[Joergen]

Perhaps quantum could incorporate this into RBFarm since it already parses the segments in some way. I can test the resutls easily by adding that to one segment AVS and running it's RBFarm .ecl.

edit: Ok I tried a short segment with undot and deen and compared it to the original encode (withouth these) in dvd2avi and although this quite nicely removes mosquito noise and flattens out areas, imho the effect is perhaps too strong (smart blurry) and removes detail.

I'm against post-processing though. Since the source is very clean it would be best if CCE itself could be tweaked into producing better encodes.

But I can see undot+deen could be added as a cleanup filter into dvd-rb if people so choose.

[quantum]

Try the animation filter in CCE. Load an ECL and resave with the filter settings and encode. I suggested to the ECL Optimiser author that adding CCE filter settings would be a nice addition but he hasn't bought into it yet.

Maybe some day I'll think about coding up another add on. :(

[Joergen]

The animation filter built-into CCE is what I'd like jdobbs to enable/disable like other features now.

But luckily it looks like I was overcritical of the encoding quality. It's hard/impossible to evaluate the timeline of scenes in animation while scrolling in dvd2avi and the scenes I was worried about are so fast on playback that you dont see the difference.

Plus the half-d1 option combined with ECL Optimizer manual bitrate setting gave me 4.36GB output, and as the original extras were VERY blurry (bad ntsc->pal conversions) you cant see the difference there either!

Another brilliant DVD-RB backup.

[DDogg]

quantum, if you would consider doing a quick hack to just insert a single text line into a group of avs I would be in your debt. Heck, maybe even a 3 beer debt. I would love to pay off that toll. :)

I have a funny feeling there is actually a way to do this with a dos command, but my memory has faded a tad over the last few years.

[thedeath]

I tested Spirited Away (PAL), and it was a great result. No Problems,
just a HQ-Copy of it.

Greetings,
TheDeath

[dragongodz]

also you dont have to use both undot() and deen(). you could just try using 1 of them, or any other denoiser for that matter. most do have settings for strength aswell(i havent looked at or tested them all of course) so that can be adjusted to your personal preference.

if edges look a little blurred then you can add Blur(-0.2) for some general light sharpening. i actually prefer MSharpen for anime(with slightly lighter than default settings) but its not exactly fast. :)

[Beer-chan]

Haven't encountered any problems using DVD-RB+CCE with interlaced anime. Been doing it with the 'Disable "interlaced"' option unchecked. I use a Holo3DGraph (Faroudja FLI2200-based) card to deinterlace on playback though.

[mistame]

For those who have done Spirited Away NTSC R1: Anyone else have trouble with it? The first time around i did my usual Decrypter -> DvdReMake -> DVDShrink -> DVD-RB and got an error message saying that it had mulit-angles and/or interleaving and could not continue. I thought something might have happened in the re-authoring process but i also tried going straight to DVD-RB from DVD Decrypter and the same thing happened.

[PINOBIRD]

Angles is not (yet) supported by DVD-RB
But you can strip them if you like.
Read about it here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74411&highlight=angles

[h00z]

I've had the opportunity to do some more testing (~15 anime DVDs) and I've had some very good results. Originally I found the anime recodes to be a little smooth (fuzzy), but I did some playing a bit with the 'Quality_Prec' setting and found it to be very effective. From Doom9's guide:Quality_Prec corresponds to Image Quality Priority in CCE 2.50, and Quantizer characteristics in CCE 2.66/2.67. The value ranges from 0 - 64 (as in CCE 2.66+) ... This setting determines if CCE gives priority to image details, or evenly colored areas. The lower the value, the more priority will be given to details, which could result in blockyness or banding in other areas. A high value will result in good looking evenly colored areas, but could result in edge artifacts.I started tinkering with a value of 24, but I found that on most anime titles (that I have done), a value of ~30 works very well. It maintains most of the sharpness without killing the large areas of blocky color. The real beauty of this method for anime encoding is that we don't have to worry about those impossible to IVTC (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=79312) titles anymore.

If anyone else has some additional filter suggestions, post them in here and I'll give them a shot too.

[ks03]

I encoded The Family Guy and Chobits with 3 Pass + VAF using VBR_Bias: 25 and Quality_Prec: 16.
Both came out fine, near perfect.