I remember reading about Platinum having a lower video quality than Renewal, with stuff like interlacing and such. Is it true? Does anyone have links to comparisons or pictures showing these differences? Thx.

http://animenation.net/forums/showthread.php?t=193288

also includes a brief explaination of why you get interlacing in animation on DVDs plus Shin-seiki's post of the translations of the "death threats".

AchtungAffen wrote:I remember reading about Platinum having a lower video quality than Renewal, with stuff like interlacing and such. Is it true?

Yes.

The interlacing should be easy to see on a computer, even if you have DVD player software attempting to compensate. Seeing that the picture is not as crisp as Renewal requires side-by-side comparison.

Does anyone have links to comparisons or pictures showing these differences? Thx.

I've posted the ZOMG INTERLACING pics in the past, but I don't think a series of Compare and Contrast has been done. Yet.

EDIT: NEVERMIND.

Interlacing typically means you lose 50% of the resolution in order to get it to work with NTSC (29.97fps?) screens. So non-interlaced is clearly superior.

Just got me the Elfen Lied thinpack from ADV. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it wasn't interlaced. In a perfect world, that would that neither should mean the next edition of Evangelion be.

@ Reichu: Whoa... I posted my post in response to YOURS

I've posted the ZOMG INTERLACING pics in the past

in b4 TIME PARADOX

I think there may be some forum hokeyness (this server running ntp?), because i'd mark all posts as read and they still show up as new posts.

Kaysow wrote:Interlacing typically means you lose 50% of the resolution in order to get it to work with NTSC (29.97fps?) screens. So non-interlaced is clearly superior.

DVD VOBs are simply mpeg2 streams with a fixed framerate (either NTSC or PAL). Depending on the source, when authoring and encoding the VOB, you can choose to either repeat certain frames (because the source is probably not strictly NTSC or PAL, film is 20, or even a fixed framerate) or interlace and/or blend them. I don't know why they choose to interlace as opposed to simply blend, but I have noticed that it downscales nicer (fewer artifacts) than a blend.

Thanks!

There are additional telecine problems with the Region 2 editions as well.

One last thing: does Platinum hardsub signs and stuff like Perfect Collection did?

AchtungAffen wrote:One last thing: does Platinum hardsub signs and stuff like Perfect Collection did?

No overlays in platinum (AFAIK). Like this you mean?

--- Perfect Collection
--- Platinum

Yep, that was it. Thanks!!

I'm much too lazy to make a systematic presentation or anything, but I did go and take a bunch of screenshots...

http://www.evacommentary.org/misc-files/renewal-vs-platinum.rar

First off: Many fun examples of unfiltered Interlacing in Platinum, simply because I felt bitter.

Second: Various side-by-side comparisons of Renewal and Platinum screenshots, taken from the OP and four completely arbitrary episodes. Now that I do a proper test sample like this, the actual visual quality difference is, interlacing aside, indistinguishable. Renewal and Platinum crop their frames somewhat differently, though, and overal Platinum gives you more image.

Say, Ornette, what's that magic trick you use for removing interlacing...?

Reichu wrote:Say, Ornette, what's that magic trick you use for removing interlacing...?

I use mplayer to watch and mencoder to encode, using the "-vf" (video filter) option, and using the "pp" (postprocessing subfilter, filter is applied after decoding) filter. Depending on the interlacing a few postprocessing filters can be used, for platinum I used the "lb" (linear blend deinterlacing). But for other DVDs, such as the perfect collection, I used the "l5" (lowpass deinterlacing filter). Mplayer provides several types of postprocessing deinterlacing, so I usually have to try a few to see which one gives me the best results, although "lb" works pretty well most of the time. Sometimes you end up losing a bit of quality on the non-interlaced frames with some filters. So the entire command line looks something like this:

mplayer dvd://1 -vf pp=lb

Very effective, but it doesn't get rid of the blended frames.

mplayer man page wrote: lb/linblenddeint
Linear blend deinterlacing filter that deinterlaces the given block by filtering all lines with a
(1 2 1) filter.

li/linipoldeint
Linear interpolating deinterlacing filter that deinterlaces the given block by linearly interpo-
lating every second line.

ci/cubicipoldeint
Cubic interpolating deinterlacing filter deinterlaces the given block by cubically interpolating
every second line.

md/mediandeint
Median deinterlacing filter that deinterlaces the given block by applying a median filter to ev-
ery second line.

fd/ffmpegdeint
FFmpeg deinterlacing filter that deinterlaces the given block by filtering every second line with
a (-1 4 2 4 -1) filter.

l5/lowpass5
Vertically applied FIR lowpass deinterlacing filter that deinterlaces the given block by filter-
ing all lines with a (-1 2 6 2 -1) filter.

While encoding, you can choose to drop the interlaced frames altogether with the "-vf dint" option. This will cause the encoder to repeat frames.

There is also the "il=i" filter, which "interleaves" an interlaced frame by spliting them into 2 half pictures. This doesn't always work, but the outcome is frames that are not interlaced aren't filtered, only the interlaced ones.

For 'Evangelion Opus' (my version, you should have seen it by now), I used Telecide. It's not really recommendable tho.

@Reichu

That's great, thanks a lot! One question, why is it that Renewal images are narrower?

AchtungAffen wrote:@Reichu

That's great, thanks a lot! One question, why is it that Renewal images are narrower?

If you're watching on TV, overscan causes the border of the image to bleed off the edge of the screen, so you can't notice while watching it on TV. As for why it's that way? Probably transfered from film that way, and when ADV transfered (from the same film I assume), their's looked different.

seems you know your editing stuff. How about helping me figure out how to compress this stupid movie without making it crap quality -_-

Fearthebait wrote:seems you know your editing stuff. How about helping me figure out how to compress this stupid movie without making it crap quality -_-

Step 1) download mplayer, this should come with mencoder. There's a windows binary and I assume it's the same as the linux version. If it doesn't come with the x264 libraries, don't bother continuing.

Step 2) The h264 codec is amazing, I often rip a 2 hour movie down to 300 megs or less regularly. Unlike other codecs with fixed bitrates, your final encoding size will vary greatly, whereas a fixed bitrate codec your encode size is determined by what you set your bitrate to. For best results, I use a 2 pass encode. This is the command line I use for the first pass:
[code:1]mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=1:turbo=2:qcomp=0.8:keyint=5000:brdo:mixed_refs:bime:bframes=50:weight_b:b_pyramid:8x8dct:crf=25:threads=2::partitions=alllog=3:ssim -o movie.avi[/code:1]
(note: adjust dvd://1 and movie.avi to whatever applicable, dvd://1 is the title number of the dvd and movie.avi is the output filename)

Step 3) Do the second pass. The first pass is a very quick, unintensive encode whose sole purpose is to generate a statistics file. This file is used by the codec on the second pass for making encoding decisions (P frame vs B frame, macroblock sizes, frame weights, etc...).
[code:1]mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts pass=2:qcomp=0.8:keyint=5000:brdo:mixed_refs:bime:bframes=50:weight_b:b_pyramid:crf=25:frameref=4:subq=7:me=2:direct_pred=3:bitrate=800::partitions=alllog=3:ssim -o movie.avi[/code:1]
This pass will take a LONG time, on my core duo under linux, I usually get about 2 or 3 frames per second. So a 2 hour long movie takes about 14 hours. The upside, you're going to get a near DVD quality encode for a filesize anywhere between 1G to 300Megs.

If you don't want to bother with a 2 pass encoding (although it results in the best quality to size ratio) this is what I do for a 1 pass encode:
[code:1]mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts qp=25:subq=7:brdo:trellis=2:bime:frameref=4:bframes=50:direct_pred=auto:weight_b:me=umh:mixed_refs:partitions=all:log=3:ssim:keyint=5000 -o movie.avi[/code:1]
Adjust the qp= option to increase/decrease the overall quality. Higher values is less quality but smaller encodes, lower values is better quality but larger encodes. Anything less than 20 is useless.

If you want to get rid of interlacing, try viewing first with mplayer and use any of the options I listed above until you find one acceptable. Then just add that option to the mencoder line. Beware that the "dint" option requires suboptions for detecting interlaced frames. These require MUCH tweaking, but will give the best results because you're dropping interlaced frames outright, instead of running the entire video through a deinterlacing filter.

I recently re-encoded my platinum (after discovering the amazingness of h264) set using the above 1 pass option and the "-vf pp=lb" option with very good results. Some episodes were as small as 80M, others around 150M. All without interlacing.

I found for the region 2 platinium titles, i.e. UK edition, that mplayers pp=fd option was best at removing the frankly horrendous interlacing. I've gotten some good results with pp=ci on other films, but pp=fd seem to outperform the other when it came to removing "ghost" images.

I used pp=fd and an outrageously high noise filter of hqdn3d=7:7:7 (only use this on anime). x264 did the rest. The episodes came out at a consistent 100MB each (~150MB for the npc ones), and I dare say that the quality of the encode is higher than the original DVD material(which was abysmal anyway). Encoding took about 4 hours per episode though.

If anyone's interested I can post the script files used. They'll be of most use to people with the region 2 titles, but would need only a little tweaking for any other titles.

I scrutinized many of Reichu's screenshots for higher crispness in the Renewal version than the Platinum version, but I don't think either one looks any crisper. The Renewal version certainly has fewer compression artifacts, likely a result of the increased bitrate the lower frame count allows, but it doesn't look any clearer. You're also getting slightly less image per frame, as the edges along the sides are further in.

As for the interlacing, while it can cut the vertical resolution of individual frames in half, the quality can be reconstructed by taking the odd fields of the first interlaced frame and the even fields of the second interlaced frame, so there's no need to lament over lost screencap opportunities.

Did all that code break the thread?