Ripping Problem

Doosu · Post by **Doosu** » Sat May 17, 2008 6:35 am

Hi, I'm new here and been studying up on how to make a AMV. I've been following the A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video. My problem is I go to rip a DvD from the series from Berserk, I go into VDMod and load it up with AVS and then I see these distortions at the bottom of the screen, and only at the bottom. They seem to appear when the picture changes, right before or after usually. There is no order to it, shows up in random areas in the clip. When I load the DvD into my DvD Player and watch it on the TV it's fine, no distortions at all. I'm just wondering if I'm doing something wrong here or something.

Here is a example of it-

Kalium · Post by **Kalium** » Sat May 17, 2008 2:37 pm

Try watching it on your computer. TVs have overscan, which could easily be hiding this from you.

Doosu · Post by **Doosu** » Sat May 17, 2008 2:49 pm

I watched it on my computer directly from the DvD and after studying it, it also has the same distortions on it as well. What should I do about it now, just crop the pixels off at the bottom or is there some way to clean it up?

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Sat May 17, 2008 5:33 pm

crop - those are errors on the video stream itself - they were there when the disc was made.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Sat May 17, 2008 7:25 pm

Yeah, that's the result of aged, low budget, poorly stored cel animation. Either crop, or discard the frames (unless they aren't repeated and you need them). All the Sailor Moon and Utena DVDs are the exact same way. Though strangely enough, the LDs aren't.

Doosu · Post by **Doosu** » Sat May 17, 2008 8:49 pm

Thanks for the help and information everyone. I'm going to try and delete each frame that has it, shouldn't be too hard, and hopefully it won't look bad because it usually dose it when the pictures changes to something different. If not I'll just crop it. Thanks again.

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Sun May 18, 2008 6:47 am

devilmaykickass wrote:Yeah, that's the result of aged, low budget, poorly stored cel animation.

That's not necessarily true.

Lots of vintage anime exhibit this problem, but it's due to primarily one thing: cost. Age is a factor in when it was produced, but "garbage" like that on the bottom of the frame is not due to improper film storage. Scratches (like the one on the bottom) and if the sides have signs of degradation then storage is a factor. But since most film is run with the frames one after another vertically (the exception to this is Imax, photo film is a different case), storage degradation is likely to happen on the sides of the frames where the most exposure to the elements is possible.

The usual reason you see this in cel-based animation, especially those from low-budget TV series (and not necessarily restricted to vintage stuff too), is that it takes time and money to animate the full animation frames. Animators, knowing that TVs have overscan (typically between 5 and 10%), will draw and/or color everything but the extreme edges of each cel which won't be seen on most normally calibrated sets. If you actually need to draw only 97% of the frame, that 3% you save can eventually mean another frame of animation you will finish faster. You will also typically see this on places where the scene changes, due to some of the film being spliced (aka. cut and pasted), along with a slight jump or shift in the frame.

Modern computer-based animation can have "blank space" on the edges (typically the sides), but these are usually the result of padding the video to maintain correct aspect ratios.

The usual work-arounds are avoiding the first and last frames of scene changes and cropping or masking the edges of the video.