looking for a cartoon source for the next codec comparison

[Doom9]

No, no, it'll be a long while till then, but it can't hurt to start looking now.

As my Futurama source is actually not so great quality wise, I'd like to go for something else. It should be progressive, mainstream cartoon that not only kids like (so Little Mermaid and Lion King are out ;), and be reasonably hard to encode. There's a few animated movies that I found rather amusing, like Ice Age, Shrek, The Incredibles.. so something along those lines would suit me just fine. It has to be rather hard to encode though (target being 1 CD), so length is of importance.

So, now is the time where you may make suggestions ;) Also note that I don't like Anime and I'm not about to spend hours upon hours watching something I don't even like.

[Sirber]

The Incredibles should be pretty hard, with the scene in the forest. :)

[Tommy Carrot]

The iron giant would be good as well, and it's more or less a 'real' cartoon, not 3d animation.

[kappa]

Originally posted by Tommy Carrot
The iron giant would be good as well, and it's more or less a 'real' cartoon, not 3d animation.
Are we searching for "cartoon" material like The Incredibles or Shrek (solid colors), or more real stuff like Final Fantasy, Kaena etc? INO Ice Age has too much ice :) to be difficult.

[Tommy Carrot]

Originally posted by kappa
Are we searching for "cartoon" material like The Incredibles or Shrek (solid colors), or more real stuff like Final Fantasy, Kaena etc? INO Ice Age has too much ice :) to be difficult.
I think The incredibles or Shrek are not really cartoon either, they are 3d animations, and their characteristics are closer to real movies than to cartoons (no sharp lines and edges, no truely flat areas, etc.), so we wouldn't learn anything about the cartoon encoding performances.

[iapir]

How about Ghost In The Shell ? Innocence (v2) has a good mix of 2D and 3D images and some vey high quality pictures with lots of details.

[Surco]

Originally posted by kappa
INO Ice Age has too much ice :) to be difficult.

I my self compressed this movie in the dev-api3 times and was really easy to compress, xvid had not any problem to compress it at cd size, so I don't think it's a good candidate.

And I'm with Tommy Carrot on this, the 3D movies you are talking about are more like real action films from the codec point of view than cartoons, so my vote goes for Iron Giant too (unfortunately I'm not sure if it is hard enough to compress :rolleyes: )

[iapir]

Also since Doom9 uses Matrix a lot, why not use AniMatrix too ?

[bot]

It's difficult to find good quality feature length traditional cell animations if you don't want to use the Disney catalogue.

I haven't seen the dvd version of Fantasia, but the film itself was restored in the early 90's and it looked good in theatres at least.

And Robin Hood still tickles my funny bone even if it's not ironic or iconoclastic like, say Shrek.



Edit: The different segments in Fantasia are very different to each other in movement and light and might prove revealing

[iwod]

it depends you want cartoon or Anime?

Or you simply want something, 2D, blocks of colour, (Cartoon/Anime like material )

Is 3D included? Like ice age or FF - Advent Child?

Or Ghost in the shell ( It is hard to encode, fast motion 2D charcter with some 3D / 2D background )

AppleSeed?

[Neo Neko]

Doom you really need to get over your irrational dislike of anime. We are not suggesting you go encode some ugioh or DBZ as they both suck and blow at the same time. Give something like Akira or Ghost In The Shell(one or two are both excelent) a try. Last time I encoded akira it was rather tricky to do on 1CD. Honestly unless you go with a 3D animation most american animation today is just to simple. If you want a challenging source you are almost going to have to look to the japanese. Or perhaps you could give the original Heavy Metal movie a try. Lots of dynamic animation going on there.

[Doom9]

Doom you really need to get over your irrational dislike of anime. Since when is liking or disliking ever rational? Taste never has been and never will.

Also, I'm looking for progressive sources so keep that in mind. Mix of 24fps and 29fps is no good.

[Manao]

I'm not an anime's fan but I really appreciate miyazaki's films. Mononoke Hime or Sen to Chihiro would be very good sources ( 2 hours long, detailed, and bright ).

But if you really don't want to spend money on these, and still want "not childish" cartoons ( which seems, if I understood you correctly, to rule out Disney's ), then you'll end up with CGI films. In that case, I think Finding Nemo would be the hardest. Monters Inc would be also interesting, with the monsters' furs very detailed.

[Gabriel_Bouvigne]

I'd suggest Finding Nemo because of the frequents "reflexions" of the water that made luma values sliding.

[Dali Lama]

I agree with Manao,

Disney animation DVDs are by far the best: easy to IVTC (progressive), noise-free, sharp, perfect color, etc., and they are widely available in the world. If you don't want a cinderella story, then look at Lion King. If you don't want a Disney story, then choose one of the Miyazaki films (adults and children love it, mostly adults). Miramax (Disney subsidiary) has their rights to distribute it in the U.S. so their DVD quality is excellent as well (similar to regular Disney releases).

In addition: I think Manao and Gabriel have suggested two good options for 3D animation (Nemo and Monsters Inc.). However, I feel that 3D animation encoding is quite different than regular animations encoding and test different qualitites of the codec. I personally, would like to see how codecs do against traditional animation. Interestingly, some of the Miyazaki films (esp. Spirited Away) have a mix of 3D animation and traditional animation (mostly traditional).

Sincerely,

Dali

[minolta]

'The Incredibles' or 'Shrek 1/2' are good choices for CGI (even most adults really enjoyed these movies). The "forest scene" of 'Incredibles' caused my bitrate to explode...my hardware mpeg4 player choked (started/stoped) all the way through it.

If you're thinking 'image quality' (no ringing, etc.) then go with non-CGI animation. Most folks here seem to love Japanese style (not always pure progressive, though).

[acidsex]

I agree with Finding Nemo or Shrek 2. Shrek 2 always gives me fits.

[babayaga]

If you want some really hard animation to encode, that's old hand-made disney movies that come to my mind : The Jungle Book, The aristocats, Robin Hood etc.
Another one, more recent movie, which is also very difficult is Kirikou and the Sorceress.
In my opinion, none of these fit correctly on only one CD without a proper pre-processing or heavy resize.

Shreck or Final Fantasy for instance are much simpler to encode on one CD. I've not seen an encoded version of Finding Nemo.
Myiazaki movies (Spirited Away and Princess Mononke, I've not tried Castle in the Sky) are also quite easy, but funny for the rate-control.

Note : when I say a movie is hard to encode, I mean that there is usually no need to look at the source to find the encoded version that has kept most details. Just like Spiderman or Saving Private Ryan on one CD.

[nicco]

My choiches:
***TRIGUN***
http://img144.exs.cx/img144/2528/vash4tl.jpg


***SAMURAI JACK***
http://img144.exs.cx/img144/2708/jack24zd.jpg

[DigitalDeviant]

You could try the Korean films Wondeful Days or Oseam. I found Wonderful Days to be pretty fun to encode. It blends 2D and 3D rather smoothly (it incoperates cel, CGI and minature animation) and is progressive. There is a fair amount of fog and rain as well fast and slow motion scenes to make it difficult. Oseam featured some nice details and colors. I'm 99% sure both are progressive.

[DeathTheSheep]

When I hear the word "animation," cartoons come to mind such as Futurama, Naruto, and the stuff on Cartoon Network. High-contrast edges, 2-3 color flat textures, and detailed backgrounds. Frankly, I DO picture stuff like "Yu-Gi-Oh!" and "DBZ" as being cartoons for these very reasons, and are therefore hard to encode.

Computerized content such as that which constitutes "Shrek" and those of its genre are NOT animation in any way as "viewed" by codecs. They are made very much like a normal movie and have very similar 3D textures/objects and fluid movements.

By contrast, mainstream "animation" is composed of drawings flashed repeatedly onto the screen, perhaps amids a textured background, with only periodic computerized effects.

For this reason, a seperate test under the title of "animation" is useless, as a Shrek/Nemo-like movie itself is computerized realism, or "virtual reality" which is assuredly NOT animation in a codec's eyes, and therefore provides only marginal encoding differences compared to "real" animation (Hate to say it, but "anime" is becoming a heck of a lot more popular, and a ton of people want to see a high-quality doom9 comparison with it as a source).

Therefore, a Disney movie or Anime film would provide unprecedented results most accurately correlating to the title of "animation" in a codec comparison. If you absolutely refuse to go near the stuff, cartoon source such as that on Cartoon Network would surely suffice.

[Sergei_Esenin]

Something like Shrek or The Incredibles, though, isn't really cartoon material--it's complex highly detailed and adaptively lit and shaded CGI with more in common with live-action material than with cartoon animation.

There really should be a distinction drawn between complex CGI and traditional animated material, because they require very different optimized settings and traditional animation shows certain artifacts like blocking and ringing more clearly.

EDIT: DeathTheSheep, you beat me to saying the above! Darn, I type too slow... Anyway...

While certain anime are definitely not "kid stuff"--even stuff marketed to kids like *Spirited Away* can be sophisticated and adult--if anime is out of the question there are still great traditional animation choices. Some newly remastered Looney Tunes DVDs are already out and judging by their quality the remastered Tex Avery DVD set due out this year should be suberb. You can't get much more adult than Tex Avery--his cartoons were always the most sophisticated and fun for adults of all the Golden Age animations, and several of his cartoons are banned from TV and not included uncensored on current DVDs due to sex or historically insensitive racial contexts. A newly restored and completely uncensored DVD set of his cartoons is due to be released this year.

[hellfred]

Originally posted by DigitalDeviant
You could try the Korean films Wondeful Days or Oseam. I found Wonderful Days to be pretty fun to encode. It blends 2D and 3D rather smoothly (it incoperates cel, CGI and minature animation) and is progressive. There is a fair amount of fog and rain as well fast and slow motion scenes to make it difficult. Oseam featured some nice details and colors. I'm 99% sure both are progressive.
You have forgotten to mention that it does have a nice plot, to make it easier for doom9 to convince himself give it a try and watch it. :)

Hellfred

[DigitalDeviant]

People will debate the merits of Wonderful Days plot, I'll just say it certainly doesn't interfear with the stunning visuals. The varied animation methods used would make it a great idea for such a comparrison.

I managed to suprise even myself with how well it looked as a 2cd XviD encode with virtualy no filtering and a HVS matrix. I'm looking forward to trying it with recode once I get the time.

[netchris]

My vote goes for Ghost In The Shell 2 Innocence

Superb visually, should be very hard to encode in one cd.

[Bogalvator]

Not really animation, but what about something like Chicken Run?

Might be interestesting..........

[akupenguin]

Originally posted by netchris
My vote goes for Ghost In The Shell 2 Innocence
Superb visually, should be very hard to encode in one cd. I'm quite happy with my 1CD H.264 encode of Innocence. But maybe that just means that H.264 is good.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by Doom9
Since when is liking or disliking ever rational? Taste never has been and never will.

I can rationalize alot of my dislikes and likes. Those that I can't are irrational. I don't like ugioh or pokemon type cartoons because there is no real plot or story. The animation is often crappy. And they are little more than a marketing device to sell cheap stupid toys, games, trading cards, or trading card games. I don't like DBZ because for every minute of action you have 40 minutes of setup with characters grimacing and looking constipated. Not to mention the plot is rather repetitive. And then there is the horrendus milking funimation is making of the series. Most 3rd world countries had seen the entire dragon ball series all the way to GT and funimation had only released the first 20 or so episodes of Z in a time span of about a decade.

I like Akira and the Ghost in The Shell movies because they have deep stories, spectacular visuals, with excelent animation. Same for any of Myiazaki works. Excelent.

Originally posted by Doom9
Also, I'm looking for progressive sources so keep that in mind. Mix of 24fps and 29fps is no good.

Why? Actually I think it would be a rather good addition. Frankly not everything is going to be progressive. Or 24fps for that matter. Not even on DVD. Why baby the codecs with easy stuff like 24fps progressive? Put them through their paces. Give them 30fps mixed mode material interlaced or progressive and see how they fair. Frankly it is getting rather easy to get decent results on a single CD for almost any normal movie. Why not spice it up with what you might considder abnormal movies. ;)

[Doom9]

Why? Actually I think it would be a rather good addition. Frankly not everything is going to be progressive. Or 24fps for that matter. Not even on DVD. Why baby the codecs with easy stuff like 24fps progressive? Put them through their paces. Give them 30fps mixed mode material interlaced or progressive and see how they fair. Frankly it is getting rather easy to get decent results on a single CD for almost any normal movie. Why not spice it up with what you might considder abnormal movies. Well, it is not up for discussion so I'm not going to give an answer then ask everybody to stop discussing it.

Question for those who keep suggesting Akira and Ghost in the Shell: Are those progressive? And if so, I guess I'd need to see at least a trailer.

[sysKin]

Originally posted by Doom9
Well, it is not up for discussion so I'm not going to give an answer then ask everybody to stop discussing it.

Question for those who keep suggesting Akira and Ghost in the Shell: Are those progressive? And if so, I guess I'd need to see at least a trailer. All movies are progressive, even if they are anime ;)
Lost of GITS2:Innocence trailers here: http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2004/DEFGH/GhostInTheShell2_Innocence/trailer.html

(edit) heh, the comparison between american and japanese trailers is, as usual, interesting.

My personal favorite would rather be Spirited Away, if only because it's the most classical animation you can get (and also because Miyazaki is the best animation author in existence, imho). Just to be clear, Spirted Away won an Oscar (best animated film) in 2003.

[BlindWanderer]

Hmmm sounds like people want Disney catalog..
well...
Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are both in the Disney library (Disney holds the US distribution license). While Spirited Away won awards, Princess Mononoke IMO is the more difficult of the two to compress (there are some very high motion scenes). Both have plenty of detail and motion. While both movies appeal to the crowd who watches anime, they both have crossover appeal.

I was disapointed at how well Futurama came out. I don't think it was a hard enough source.

EDIT: (didn't see the post above, was writing for a half hour on and off)

Sprited Away (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/video/sen/) and Princess Mononoke (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/video/mh/) can be gotten in PAL or NTSC.

Trailers:
PM (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/mh/relmedia.html)
SA (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/relmedia.html)

[plonk420]

wonderful days: AWESOME movie, freakin' eye candy
and nemo?! are you crazy? that would ... be quite problematic :\

i might suggest Fantasia 2000, possibly, tho i don't really remember if the content was well suited to emulate "most animation."

we won't mind waiting for you to come to your senses and start to like anime, doom9.

Cowboy Bebop as a starting point i'd highly suggest if you ever do ;)
edit: or, yes, Spirited Away

[Manao]

and nemo?! are you crazy? that would ... be quite problematic :\Why ? That's really the hardest thing I tried to put on 1 CD ( and I encoded Aliens extended version on 1 CD... ).

[RadicalEd]

My vote goes to Mononoke.

[Doom9]

actually, I have some Cowboy Bebop at home (one of my samples for the "the people who made this should be shot" category of screwed up mpeg-2 streams). I did not like it..

[Soulhunter]

Another vote for Animatrix...

Mainly coz it contains alot different animation styles !!!

Originally posted by Neo Neko

I don't like DBZ because [...] characters grimacing and looking constipated.

Guess you really love my avatar then... :p

Actually I found this "grimacing" very entertaining !!!


Bye

[Gabriel_Bouvigne]

Another vote for Animatrix...

Mainly coz it contains alot different animation styles !!!

Even if overall it is probably easier to encode than Nemo, I think that this is a good idea, considering the various styles featured in Animatrix.
Moreover, an advantage of Animatrix is that some parts are freely available. This would allow readers of the shoot-out to check for themselves what is inside those parts, and could be interesting along with Doom9's comments.

[dragongodz]

so some of the basic points so far are

1. CG is not the same as animation so using nemo or incredibles(whatever) would not tell you anything. maybe another test seeing as there are CG movies coming out regularly ? (Doom9 no doubt wonders if we think he should ever have a life :D )

2. the source needs to be fairly hard to compress, so really short movies etc are not really worth considering. people may want to remember that before just suggesting just movies they like. :)

3. Doom9 dislikes anime. thankfully he does appear to be willing to atleast consider it now since anime is the biggest source/styles of animation in the world IMHO.

Another vote for Animatrix...

Mainly coz it contains alot different animation styles !!!
and this would be indicitive of encoding a movie or even a series where the animation style stays the same ? no, so count my vote against it.

while Akira is an incredible film the animation is not up to todays standards so i dont think it would give totally useful results. maybe Mononoke but i havent watched that in some time either.

[Omni]

well why not split it in real cartoon and cgi movie?
both have some nice properties like cgi being very clean and noise-free with mostly lots of motion and cartoons consisting of mainly static backgrounds which is on the one hand easy to compress but on the other hand it's easy to find areas where the codecs differ.

for cgi i'd say to use either shrek, finding nemo, gits innocence, appleseed 2004

for cartoon/anime: Mononoke Hime, Spirited Away, Juuni Kokki

all have their up and downs on the various codecs.

[rushin_911]

Princess Mononoke.
Very clean sorce, progressive, more than 2 hours long, and one of the hardest anime movies to encode.

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by dragongodz

and this would be indicitive of encoding a movie or even a series where the animation style stays the same ? no, so count my vote against it.

Well, you would see which codec copes best with a certain style... :)


Bye

[BlindWanderer]

The trouble is, most modern cartoons on tv *are* anime (all the stations that show cartoons show anime as well).

This may just be me but i find most cartoons are created by people interested in drawing cool stuff; they want to draw cool looking costumes, weapons and vehicles. They aren't interested in drawing backgrounds. In anime there is also this same tendency but usually you get good looking backgrounds; you see blades of grass in the background (and the wind blowing through them).

If you don't like anime, thats ok, we will have alto of trouble finding a non anime source. Iron Giant is an ok movie; I don't think of it as a high motion film but my memory isn't perfect (I found the child irritating). I don't really think we should use a pure CG source, that being a source that is at some level made to look real (a CG cartoon like GITS 2 Innocences is ok). CG is too close to a real film. Could do worse then picking one of the other series running on Cartoon Network.

(i was very tired when i wrote this so please show mercy)

The movies I recommended in the previous post I have watched many times.

[Lefungus]

I would choose Princess Mononoke. It's a great movie, far far away from usual anime crap. Myazaki movies (http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/films/#film_g_m) are just the best animation movies.
Very hard to compress on 1CD. I have the Zone 2 PAL which is also, thanks god, progressive. You can't go wrong with this one.

Ghost in the Shell 1 could have been a good choice since there's no CGI in it either. But the Z2 is blended-interlaced crap. I don't know about other releases though. And some people just can't avoid sleeping while watching it so beware. GITS 2 contain too much CGI.

I would dismiss any CGI stuff like the Incredibles, or any Pixar stuff. Those movies are great but it's not animation, it's cgi. And most of the time, those movies are easily compressible.

[Mug Funky]

for Mononoke, you'll have to get the NTSC version i'd say. it's so hard to encode even the DVD has some troubles (at least the R4 one where unfortunately the storyboard feature comes as a multiangle, sucking valuable bits away from the film... that and it's a field-blend).

if you want flat colours and lots of action, try "Dead Leaves". short, but excessive motion, and progressive in both PAL and NTSC (thank you manga entertainment and their insistence on 24p HD masters). just so as not to put you off, there's NO plot, but there's a lot of violence and perversion. have a few beers and you'll love it (the director himself says to watch it drunk).

for western stuff, the earlier suggestion of Chicken-run is an interesting one - the main reason natural video compresses so much better IMHO is the motion-blur, which is completely absent in stop-motion (of course). this would be an interesting experiment, but perhaps not for the next comparison. when the spongebob movie comes onto DVD, i'd say that's just what you need - flat colours, feature length, and not disney!

maybe try "beavis and butthead do america" for a laugh (huh-huh)

i vote for Spirited Away - Mononoke is possibly too taxing for a codec. besides, Miyazaki movies are just so nice you can't not like them.

[edit]

as for CG movies, the best part of these is a guarantee that if you use a noise filter you WILL lose detail for no benefit whatsoever. impossibly clean sources are cool :)

[Lefungus]

Well, as I said Mononoke is PAL progressive, so there is more resolution than NTSC, and no interlacing :)

[Mug Funky]

oh, okay. which country is that one in? the PAL release in australia is a field-blend unfortunately. i might have to ebay your one, as i really like this movie.

[niamh]

How about Corto Maltese? It looks enough like anime, but it´s most definitely not anime ;). It doesn´t come in english though, you´d have to swallow the subtitles if you want to understand it :)
What it´s about (http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=5389)
Otherwise I can´t see anything that´s not going to be japanese. I don´t recall anyone mentioningJin-roh (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0193253/).It´s a "real" story as opposed to constipated, grimacing people ;)

[Lefungus]

Originally posted by Mug Funky
oh, okay. which country is that one in? the PAL release in australia is a field-blend unfortunately. i might have to ebay your one, as i really like this movie.

Sorry. I forgot that there were more than one PAL release. I was talking about the french version. Hopefully, it's the same version for all european countries. This one (http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000634P5/qid=1105720866/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_11_2/171-0158681-9065876) or this one (http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000634P4/qid=1105720866/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_11_1/171-0158681-9065876)

[DigitalDeviant]

For more anime, I'd also recommend Satoshi Kon's Millenium Actress. It's got a good range of motion and colors, not to mention an extrodanry story telling style. It's almost a psudo-documentry of the history of Japanese cinema since most of the "movies" used to tell the story are based from old Japanese films. Tokyo Godfathers was good as well and hard as heck for me to compress, but I don't think my copy (R1) was progressive.

If I were doing a comparrison test using any Miyazaki movie, I'd use Kiki's Delivery Service. Despite being a bit older than either Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke but is still as well animated and detailed as either of them, plus it's quite a bit shorter if I remember correctly.

[Joe Fenton]

Here's a vote for splitting it into at least three categories: computer graphics animation (The Incredibles, etc.), traditional animation (Disney, Miyazaki, etc.), and cartoons.

I make cartoons separate from traditional animation because while traditional animation is known for it's complex and lush backgrounds, cartoons are the exact opposite - they are known for NO background what-so-ever. Examples of cartoons are Yogi Bear and PowerPuff Girls.

My choices -

CG: The Incredibles. New and state of the art CG. Good story line so you don't get bored encoding it 100 times. :)

Trad. Animation: HBO's Spawn. Kind of an odd pick here. The animated version of Spawn from HBO is a modern gothic horror drawn in vivid detail. The best of both worlds - old fashioned animation and modern story-telling. None of that mamby-pamby Disney cr@p here! :D

Cartoon: Dexter's Laboratory - The Mock 5 episode. Side-splitting parody of Japanese cartoons. You can't go wrong with the first two seasons of Dexter's Lab.