[MEncoder-users] High quality encoding of anime

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 04:31:24AM -0700, Jean Hoderd wrote:
> > 
> > And the reason the quality is so bad is because he's failing to
> > inverse-telecine it (which may not be possible if it was converted
> > NTSC->PAL in some of the usual ways..)
> > 
> > Rich
> > 
> 
> Hi everybody,
> 
> Thanks for letting me now about this "particularity" of Anime PAL DVDs.
> I have read the docs in www.animemusicvideos.org and I think I understood
> its contents.
> Unfortunately, its seems that my DVDs have suffered from this crappy
> conversion, and I reckon they are so messed up it is impossible to
> "unmess" them.  I feel robbed.

Yes. :(
That's why lots of us get frustrated with buying DVDs. You spend lots
of money, only to get something horribly broken that takes hours of
manual tweaking to fix, if it's even possible to fix at all. Whereas
the DVD-rips released on the internet have already been fixed
(volunteer "thieves" spent hundreds of hours of their own time to
release something non-broken) and are of vastly superior quality...

> Still, this leaves me with a couple of questions which I hope someone 
> will be kind enough to answer:
> 
> 1) Is one better off buying NTSC DVDs for Anime?  What about american
>    animation such as the Simpsons, or even non-animated american TV series?

You're always best buying all DVDs as close to their original format
as possible. For Japanese and American animation, this means NTSC,
since both these nations use NTSC. These have already been converted
once (from 24fps progressive to 60i telecine), but the conversion
process is reversible. (In theory it's also possible to do a
reversible process to go straight from the 24p master to PAL, but
studios are too cheap to do this and so they just framerate-convert
the NTSC instead.)

> 2) Is there any website that keeps track of these crappy DVD releases?
>    As a consumer, I would like to know.

Unfortunately I don't know. I live in NTSC-land.

> 3) Since the originals are 24fps, why are not the PAL releases just
>    slightly "sped up" versions of the original, like with cinema?
>    Is this an example of greedy and clueless publishers?

Yes, both. Remastering from the 24p is more expensive than just
running the NTSC through a broken framerate-converter made for
interlaced video, and the publishers are also too clueless to realize
how bad it looks (even on TV it will look bad if you know what to look
for).

Rich