How good is good enough for conventions?

downwithpants · Post by **downwithpants** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 4:38 am

mandisaw wrote:Er, I've had a rude awakening after checking out my vid on a higher-end system. The problems are worse than I thought, and a fair amount of it seems to stem from the original source. (Did I mention that this is an Escaflowne video? *sigh*) I'll try filtering the hell out of it, but I don't think I'll use this for my con debut. Thanks for the advice, though.

Oh yeah, is there a list anywhere of series to be wary of, as far as the quality of the source goes? I figured that older series might generally be tricky, but I didn't expect this much glitchiness.

filtering suggestions for various anime titles:
http://www.amvwiki.org/index.php/User_c ... uggestions

for escaflowne i used mfrainbow on most scenes. in some scenes mfrainbow turned low chroma areas into pure grays, so for those scenes i lowered the strength parameter of mfrainbow and compromised between rainbow reduction and ruined areas of low chroma.

AquaSky · Post by **AquaSky** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 5:50 am

mandisaw wrote:Oh yeah, is there a list anywhere of series to be wary of, as far as the quality of the source goes? I figured that older series might generally be tricky, but I didn't expect this much glitchiness.

Well, there are a few companies that generally seem to have more visual issues in their releases. Central Park Media and Manga Entertainment usually have some significant issues with visual quality. RightStuf's releases have a bit of rainbowing and occasionally also dot crawl. And for some reason, I've found ADV's releases to be more difficult to cleanly IVTC. Also, as you had guessed, older series are generally more difficult to clean.

Infinity Squared · Post by **Infinity Squared** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 6:13 am

Illia Sadri wrote:If I see someone submit mpeg2 format and I can tell they were editing from dvd's, I get very happy.

Oh so very very happy... mpeg2 are an AMV coordinator's best friend... well, usually

A lot of cons accept lossless footage too, however I personally prefer it if you did some smart compressing already (saves me the bother of doing it myself because most lossless codecs are on the slow side, regardless of the specs of your computer).

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 7:52 am

IcyCloud wrote:And for some reason, I've found ADV's releases to be more difficult to cleanly IVTC.

Are you using DVD2AVI? If so, try DGIndex instead.

I always try to clean the footage as much as possible, or better said until I'm satisfied with it, no matter if it's for a con or not. If I would submit it for a con, I would try to figure out what equipment they use to show it and submit it in a format and resolution that suites best, so that they don't have to do any conversion. And of course I would only compress it that far that no artifacing shows up.

mandisaw · Post by **mandisaw** » Fri Mar 03, 2006 4:33 pm

Good suggestions all around. (Although the avisynth Wiki page doesn't have anything posted for Esca, unfortunately.) I picked up Smart Smoother & Smart Smoother IQ for the rainbowing, and I'll try to track down & snip out those ghost frames.

Illia Sadri wrote:Remmeber that many contests now are burned to a dvd and played from that and it should be 720*480 resolution. A high end system may use 1024, 1280 or 1600 resolution monitors.

Good point. The graininess doesn't show up at that resolution, except for some sharp edges (not sure if I want to risk blurring the detail just for the edges, though).