AnimeWorks Sucks

[DaCoolGohan]

WTF, my Berserk dvds look like crap, there is a sort of film over the video, it looks like your watching them on tv on your pc. Does anyone else have this problem, and is there some sort of filter for this? If not I guess I'll deal with it.

[Jnzk]

Screenshots would help.

[rose4emily]

If the "film" somewhat resembles a picture moving around behind a glass sheet with some dirt and fingerprints, this is probably temporal filtering applied to reduce the bitrate of the encoding.

Essentially, it's a sort of blur that applied from frame to frame rather than pixel to pixel. It can be good for things like reducing film grain from an old live-action film when encoding it to DVD (since the grain is essentially noise that, IMHO, looks good but encodes poorly - get a copy of "Charade" with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, there's visible artifacts throughout the film due to the coarse and prominent grain of the apparently un-remastered source - good film though, esp. if you're a Hepburn fan). I don't know exactly how old Berserk is, but I recall it having a fairly "dated" look, so it's possible that the DVD transfer was done from an aging film master or (worse) some sort of analog recording on magnetic tape. That last possibility is pretty "out there" in terms of probability, but it has been done and does look really ugly.

It's strange to think that a professionally mastered DVD of an animated series would have any other reason for temporal filtering. Most animation has little to no visible film grain in the first place, and contains a very small amount of visual detail compared to live-action film. The hard lines aren't too DCT-friendly, but a little light spatial filtering is the solution more commonly applied to that problem. Berserk didn't even have too much in the way of super-saturated colors and heavy black lines, compared to stuff like Azumanga or most of GAINAX's works.

Then there's the possibility that those DVDs are bogus. An amateur second-generation encoding would explain something weird like temporal filtering on an anime DVD, especially if the disks are single-layer and/or hold an unusually large number of episodes. I'd check the video bitrate, the disk capacity, and the number of episodes per disk. The disk might be a 4.5-5 GiB single layer, but most professional DVDs are 9GiB dual layer disks, especially if they contain a lot of extras (which also take up space). An average video bitrate under 4-5 Mbps should really be throwing some flags, too, since even that range is on the low end for professionally mastered DVDs. Finally, I've never seen an anime DVD with more than four episodes per disk. This is often a marketing thing, as there's often room left on the disk (esp the dual-layer disks), but it'd seem weird for a company to distribute a series on three or four disks when most would make you pay for six.

Finally, there's the possibility that the "film" is actually an artifact of the animation process - especially where a lot of 2D animation is actually shot on "cranes" with cels on one or more glass sheets, and sometimes a glass sheet over everything to make sure it's flat (though that last glass sheets more common for some forms of non-cel animation - such as the "construction paper" technique used for, among other things, the first few episodes of South Park). Still, letting actual oil and dust gather on the equipment would be really unprofessional for a team of professional animators. I also remember seing four episodes of Berserk at a club showing earlier this year, and recall the picture from that DVD being pretty clean.

[Qyot27]

Well, I haven't seen the Berserk discs, but if they look anything like Weiss Kreuz (which was also released by AnimeWorks), then I can see what you're talking about. For Weiss Kreuz, this script was necessary to make it look clear:

Code: Select all

mpeg2source("C:\dap\vid\tba\vob decode\wk.d2v").deen("w3d", 3, 8, 8).ColorYUV(gain_u=15)

I've used beforeafterdiff() to compare the two, and it's pretty drastic.



I don't know if this will help with Berserk, but considering I seem to remember AnimeWorks doing this on the Kenshin DVDs as well, it's not too much of a stretch to believe that Berserk might be the same way.

Finally, I've never seen an anime DVD with more than four episodes per disk.

There are a few official American releases that have five or six episodes on the disc. Witch Hunter Robin, Evangelion Platinum, Shamanic Princess (all six episodes on one disc), the Ranma ½ boxsets, Weiss Kreuz, and I believe His And Her Circumstances also. Of course, the five episode discs are only the first couple of discs in the set, and then the number drops to 4, and then sometimes to 3 later on.

[rose4emily]

So it's more like a yellowing kinda thing?

That makes a bit more sense than the static "film" artifacts caused by temporal filtering. You can get yellowing through both old film and bad telecine - and bad telecine is actually a pretty common production error (though the fact that I see it so often amazes me, considering how reletively inexpensive the telecine process is compared to the rest of the production process). There might also be some attempt to compensate for the shortcomings in television color reproduction as well, however, since televisions are incapable of reproducing all of the colors a computer display can produce (and both have far more restrictive color gamuts than film). Both color televisions and computer displays also tend to vary quite a bit in terms of their color response - meaning that a picture that looks fine on one screen might seem badly discolored on another.

[DaCoolGohan]

I actually saw none of the "Yellowing" effect. It was as you said before, looks as if they recorded it from under a screen of some kind, such as what the TV screen looks like when it distorts things. The Picture is completely solid, but there is a sort of static that is all over every frame. I have heard from a few other people who bought the Berserk Perfect set from AnimeWorks, they said it does that as well. It looks fine on a TV but like crap on the PC.

[Scintilla]

The Picture is completely solid, but there is a sort of static that is all over every frame. I have heard from a few other people who bought the Berserk Perfect set from AnimeWorks, they said it does that as well. It looks fine on a TV but like crap on the PC.

Is your monitor display set to at least 24-bit?

I remember once having this kind of problem when going through a DVD rip in VirtualDubMod because VDM was set to output in 16 bits.

[bum]

The berserk dvd's have 3-4 epps per disk, so if it has more its probably a bootleg, which could explain the dodgy quality.

[DaCoolGohan]

The Picture is completely solid, but there is a sort of static that is all over every frame. I have heard from a few other people who bought the Berserk Perfect set from AnimeWorks, they said it does that as well. It looks fine on a TV but like crap on the PC.

Is your monitor display set to at least 24-bit?

I remember once having this kind of problem when going through a DVD rip in VirtualDubMod because VDM was set to output in 16 bits.

Umm




Of course its set to at least 24-bit its set to 32 bit, why would I have it any lower, Im not a retard.

[DaCoolGohan]

The berserk dvd's have 3-4 epps per disk, so if it has more its probably a bootleg, which could explain the dodgy quality.

I have heard from a few other people who bought the Berserk Perfect set from AnimeWorks, they said it does that as well. It looks fine on a TV but like crap on the PC.

Umm yeah AnimeWorks owns Berserk in America.