Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[goku83]

The noise reduction here is very bad, and exposes a lot of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. In future, don't do any noise reduction; it simply doesn't work with DVD-compressed footage. The CC itself is pretty nice, though.

it's not my cc i am unable to do cc myself but i would like learning to do it, the left is from genjosanzo8 i can't talk to him he seems banned and the right is from a youtube user i talk and he is a very good with color

[lansing]

The noise reduction here is very bad, and exposes a lot of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. In future, don't do any noise reduction; it simply doesn't work with DVD-compressed footage. The CC itself is pretty nice, though.

What MPEG2 compression artifacts did you see?

[Robo4900]

The noise reduction here is very bad, and exposes a lot of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. In future, don't do any noise reduction; it simply doesn't work with DVD-compressed footage. The CC itself is pretty nice, though.

What MPEG2 compression artifacts did you see?

All over the sky area, there's a really blocky look to it.

[Jinzoningen MULE]

The noise reduction here is very bad, and exposes a lot of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. In future, don't do any noise reduction; it simply doesn't work with DVD-compressed footage. The CC itself is pretty nice, though.

What MPEG2 compression artifacts did you see?

It's very obvious along all of the lines.

[lansing]

The noise reduction here is very bad, and exposes a lot of MPEG-2 compression artifacts. In future, don't do any noise reduction; it simply doesn't work with DVD-compressed footage. The CC itself is pretty nice, though.

What MPEG2 compression artifacts did you see?

All over the sky area, there's a really blocky look to it.

Do you mean banding? Yeah I saw them, with the help of 400% zoom...
And it was not cause by MPEG2 compression but the lack of bit depth, as we can still see them in modern anime.

[Robo4900]

Do you mean banding? Yeah I saw them, with the help of 400% zoom...
And it was not cause by MPEG2 compression but the lack of bit depth, as we can still see them in modern anime.

No, we're talking about the awful blocky texture over the sky.
You must have a pretty poor monitor if you can't see it... >_>

Anyway, it's probably present in the original DBox footage too, but it's unnoticeable there because it's hidden by the film grain. Reason #252 why DNR is an awful idea.

[lansing]

Do you mean banding? Yeah I saw them, with the help of 400% zoom...
And it was not cause by MPEG2 compression but the lack of bit depth, as we can still see them in modern anime.

No, we're talking about the awful blocky texture over the sky.
You must have a pretty poor monitor if you can't see it... >_>

Anyway, it's probably present in the original DBox footage too, but it's unnoticeable there because it's hidden by the film grain. Reason #252 why DNR is an awful idea.

Well you may need to point them out then because I don't see the "blocky texture" that you talked about, and I have a very good 24 inch monitor.

[Jinzoningen MULE]

Well you may need to point them out then because I don't see the "blocky texture" that you talked about, and I have a very good 24 inch monitor.

Is your monitor properly calibrated? In any case, I can definitely see them. Maybe you'll notice the blockiness we do if I sharpen the image a bit enough to make me cringe:
[spoiler]Original:

Sharpened:

Further Sharpened:
[/spoiler]
Notice how that even with the extreme sharpening, the blockiness doesn't show up in the original.

[Metalwario64]

It doesn't look so much like MPEG2 artifacts to me, rather it looks like the noise removal didn't perform an even job throughout the sky, so portions where the grain was "darker" were left darker, so the sky has uneven blobs all around it. in the before image, you can kind of see the same portions of the sky are slightly darker (but the grain is intact, so it looks fine).

It also wasn't denoised enough to begin with, since the grain was just blurred, but you can still see patches where it once was, which is especially noticeable on Silver's skin.

[lansing]

Well you may need to point them out then because I don't see the "blocky texture" that you talked about, and I have a very good 24 inch monitor.

Is your monitor properly calibrated? In any case, I can definitely see them. Maybe you'll notice the blockiness we do if I sharpen the image a bit enough to make me cringe:
Further Sharpened:
[/spoiler]
Notice how that even with the extreme sharpening, the blockiness doesn't show up in the original.

That is banding, which is exactly what I said...

It was not a compression artifact but the lack of bit depth to store all the image information. It occurs often on gradient or flat area when you go from a high bit depth source into a lower bit depth medium. For example, storing a 10 bit video onto a 8 bit blu-ray. It has nothing to do with MPEG2 compression and it's not a problem on the noise reduction filter either.

What we can do to combat this is call dithering, that is putting some noise on top of the "edges" of those areas and try to smooth them out. Some complicated noise reduction filters will have this function bundled as well.

[goku83]

the point of the picture wasn't to show off degraining. it was the amazing color correction that i showed you guys for. notice how the kid goku one doesn't have any degraining. the sloppy degraining isn't relevant

[Robo4900]

I think we know how Super got its new look.

the point of the picture wasn't to show off degraining. it was the amazing color correction that i showed you guys for. notice how the kid goku one doesn't have any degraining. the sloppy degraining isn't relevant

Indeed. And the CC is very good. It gets across the bright, fun atmosphere in its colour palette, which I very much like.

[Vorige Waffe]

Guys, those are undoubtedly compression artifacts and macroblocking in the image with Colonel Silver.

No offense, but if you're gonna color correct, learn to encode first. And the DNR isn't helping.

[Kokonoe]

This is completely off topic so I hope an exception can be made here as I can't find a place on the internet with people who are knowledgeable about things like this outside of Kanzenshuu.

Recently The Pokemon Company released "HD" versions of the original anime digitally through iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. When I'm watching said video, it doesn't really seem to be HD as it's very blurry, but at the same time, it does look clearer/cleaner in ways so maybe it is HD. Below are screenshots of releases of the anime alongside a 1080p screen from the HD release.

Could anyone assist and tell me if this release is actually HD or isn't? Thank you.

Original Japanese Release
[spoiler][/spoiler]

English Dub Release
[spoiler][/spoiler]

English Dub HD Release
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Imgur Gallery Link
http://imgur.com/a/4NtNT

[Metalwario64]

Looks like a straight upscale to me. It's technically HD, since the video's resolution is now 1080p, but there are no new details gained from it, and one would be just as well off watching the DVD and letting the TV or DVD/BD player do the upscaling. Also, in the case of buying DVDs vs BD upscales, the DVDs are both cheaper and have the same picture quality. That upscaled image seems just a tad better than the SD ones (are they all from streams? They all look very compressed and smudged), but in this case it's probably that the SD images have a ridiculously low bitrate.


Someone will tell me that I'm terribly wrong and that it's not actually an upscale, and also upscales are actually good and they're almost always preferable to the source SD footage, since these days I have a lot of people always telling me I'm wrong in my posts on most other sites I visit. In case I'm wrong here too, I just want to toss that out to save face or something...

[lansing]

No anime produced between 2000-2005 are HD, because that's the phase when anime production changed from film to digital. They were all original produced in 480p, such as the early episode of Naruto, Bleach and One piece, Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny, Death Note, Initial D. All HD version of these anime are upscales.

[Metalwario64]

Pokemon started in 97, so the first few years ought to be cel-based animation.

[Robo4900]

Pokemon started in 97, so the first few years ought to be cel-based animation.

The cut-off point isn't concrete. Pokémon was animated on cels, but these cels were scanned onto digital or tape, which is standard def.

If you want a HD version, you'd have to re-scan all the original cels, re-composite them onto all the backgrounds, recreate all the movements and pans, sync up the soundtrack...
Basically, it's not happening. It will always be standard def.

As a side-note, GT was in an odd position for a while; it ran from '96-'97, and was animated on cels, which were put to film, but the final output was D2 tape, despite all the film negatives being essentially complete copies of the episodes. So, GT is quite fortunate to have been produced in the middle-ground between the end of film, and the beginning of tape.
(The one oddity that comes from this involves the fact that Toei scanned the film masters for the Dragon Boxes(Except for the GT TV special); the one thing missing on the film masters of GT is the credits scroll in the #64 ending montage. That scroll was added in the tape version, and Toei never realised it was missing, so it's missing in the Dragon Box masters)

[Metalwario64]

I see, I'm still learning about these things.

[Puto]

No, early Pokémon was scanned onto film. There was a remaster of episode 1 airing a couple years ago on Pokémon Smash that was very much not an upscale.