Instrumental Anime Project

[rose4emily]

...more than half of my narrative was left out. I don't think my narrative is that long (it's about the same length as Ararat's). And I believe that letting the audience know a bit of plot background before the video starts will enhance their enjoyment (or at least comprehension) of my segment. Its plot is rather esoteric, after all.

Here's my complete narrative. I would like it if at least the first and last paragraph were included in the project.

Love is freedom. [image 0a] Love can be hopeful, liberating, innocent, frail, and longing. Love threatens to break us apart but promises to build us into something new. Love lets us escape from our oppressors. And for these reasons, [image0b] love is often forbidden.

[image 1]She came into his life like a gently falling star and melted away the winter in his soul. She accepted him for who he was, even after she discovered [image 2] his secret. Through their love, he felt like he had finally been released [image 3] from his loneliness. But his freedom was not eternal. Fate [image 4] forced them apart, and all that remained [slight pause] were their [image 5] forbidden memories. [Fade to bumper?]

From the yearning lyrics of Jim Croce to Van Craven's haunting piano adaptation, the song "Time in a Bottle" carries with it a bittersweet message. Happy scenes accompany sad melodies, while happy melodies complement sad rememberings. This [very slight pause] is the story of a tragic, broken love.

Ummm... Song... was there some part of the "Forbidden Memories" narrative that you forgot to submit? I thought it was odd, at first, that you only submitted one file for that one, while most narratives came as sets of two or three files - but then I just figured that Helen wrote an especially succinct narrative. Looking at the one she just put up here, though, the rest of it does seem familiar from when I was making my first attempt at recording the narratives.

This also explains why I couldn't figure out quite where to place a couple of the images, despite the fact that I knew this narrative was one where they were specifically tagged to go with certain points of the audio.

The intro looks very good! I must say that it was rather amusing to see my name come up by itself after everybody else's. Will you be putting a bumper after my video that says something like "intermission"?

The "intermission" is going to be a separate (much smaller) file. It occurred to me that, while it serves a purpose when showing the film to a large audience - giving them a chance to get up and purchase some more vending-machine caffene and sugar - people watching this on their own might prefer to skip over it. So I'll be packaging it in a manner that lets the viewer decide whether they want the built-in "intermission" break when they're watching it.

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I'll try rebuilding the AVI indexes with a couple of different tools this evening, burn a few CDs with the current and post-rebuild versions of the preview, and see if I can duplicate your audio problems in WMP - and whether any of the rebuilt versions are free of similar problems.

I think the might be one of the many cases where Microsoft produced a media player that supported only their own tools' output, rather than the actual relevant standard (or even their own documented standard), and the developers of other players followed suit. Like perfectly valid HTML/CSS documentation that refuses to render properly in IE, I think this might be a case where a perfectly valid file isn't being read properly by a family of media players that are making assumptions about content and structure that they really shouldn't be making.

I can also try making a version using the Matroska container format, which is much better designed and probably more consistently implemented. The trap with this is that it might replace partial incompatabilities with total incompatabilities - forcing people to install new media players or plug-ins to view the film. I've only seen on AMV in this format ("Surfing on the Blocks", by Zarxrax, I believe), so I can hardly say it's as popular or as well-known in this community as AVI is.

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If any of you have a Windows-based tool that allows you to rebuilt an AVI index without re-encodeing the data streams, would you mind trying that to see if it fixes the audio problem on your computers. So far as I'm concerned, Windows Media Player compatibility is the key here, where it's the most popular media player out there, and both the Linux and Mac people have players at their disposal that can play practically anything.

[pen-pen2002]

I finnally got a chance to watch the whole thing through. The video quality was very nice on the whole, however, the was a lot of really ugly macro blocks, 3-5 per video at least. Is there some way to avoid this?

[NeoQuixotic]

I got the preview, watched it, loved it, but I too have had the strange audio problems. I've played it in WMP10, Mplayer Classic, and DivX Player. All but DivX Player give me the audio dropping out or sounding scrambled. On WMP10 and Mplayer Classic moving the progress bar helps usually. However, when I play it through DivX Player, some videos get some strange visual blocking. Both WMP10 and Mplayer Classic look just fine during playback. Here is an example: http://www.sighost.us/members/Akryin/blocky.jpg
I took this screenshot from Virtual Dub. Same thing in VdubMod. I saw things like this in many places throughout the whole video. I have ffdshow installed and set to decode DivX and Xvid so DivX Player forces itself to use DivX's decoder I guess; same with Vdub. I tried disabling all post-processing and extra settings in the decoder configuration and still the same. My assumption so far is that the decoder with DivX (I have 5.2.1 pro) can't decode the video you (rose) encoded properly. Maybe codec settings on your side? Or maybe the DivX decoder is not as good as ffdshow? As for the audio problem I only have one idea. I've heard that the .avi container doesn't handle variable bit rate audio and mp3 streams with a bit rate higher than 192 very well. I've had the same thing happen with several videos with a bit rate of 256 and 320. Maybe encoding it at 192 would help or possibly using the .mkv container; just a suggestion. I tried extracting it, converting to wave, and then placing it back on the video and it caused the video and audio to go out of sync.

Additionally, seeing "A Boy I Knew" and "Ararat" stretched to fullscreen seems like a strange choice. "Simplicity" looked decent, but why are they in the fullscreen portion. Was this for balance between the fullscreen and widescreen? It just seems wrong to me to take these great videos and make the characters and objects tall and skinny. I would rather see them in their proper AR than have devoted fullscreen and widescreen sections. I don't want to sound like I'm whining, but why did you do this?

On a good note, all of everyone's work looks and sounds great, the intro with the 3D elements came out spectacular, the monologues with the lipsyncing were amazing, and the video quality is very nice. We all put a lot of work into this, especially rose being the head of the project! I just hope the audio and video problems can be resolved soon. Excellent work ^_^

[rose4emily]

....However, when I play it through DivX Player, some videos get some strange visual blocking. Both WMP10 and Mplayer Classic look just fine during playback. Here is an example: http://www.sighost.us/members/Akryin/blocky.jpg
I took this screenshot from Virtual Dub. Same thing in VdubMod. I saw things like this in many places throughout the whole video.

And this gets stranger still....

I really don't get it. That stuff is definately not showing up for me when I play the video in MPlayer. I've yet to have a chance to test the video streams on a Windows machine (I've produced two new versions with indeces rebuilt in MPlayer and AVIDemux [something like VirtualDub], and would like to see if that solves the audio playback issue).

With the video playback, I have two theories. The first is that the file was somehow corrupted while I was uploading it, in which case we're dealing with a networking problem, not a codec issue. I hope this is the case, but will have to download the video from Kalium's webserver first to see if I can then reproduce these errors. The second is that some small implementation detail in the libAVCodec library's MPEG4 codec created some sort of special-case scenario where an uncommon but possible combination of input data and encoding settings createds a frame or two of video that some other players aren't able to properly encode. If that's the case, I can still try encoding using the XviD library directly, I'll just have to set aside some time to install it and translate all of my encoding settings into its own parameter set before I make another encoding.

Additionally, seeing "A Boy I Knew" and "Ararat" stretched to fullscreen seems like a strange choice. "Simplicity" looked decent, but why are they in the fullscreen portion. Was this for balance between the fullscreen and widescreen? It just seems wrong to me to take these great videos and make the characters and objects tall and skinny. I would rather see them in their proper AR than have devoted fullscreen and widescreen sections. I don't want to sound like I'm whining, but why did you do this?

"A Boy I Knew" wasn't actually stretched at all in any direction. It was originally a 4:3 video, that I had cropped into 16:9 before I had dropped the "all videos must be 16:9" reqiurement and decided to make a "Fullscreen" section of the project. The only spacial processing I did on that video was to crop the black borders (because they looked odd in the context of the film, even though they fit that single video just fine) and scale it to the same 768x576 output resolution as was used for the rest of the Fullscreen section.

Simplicity was also, I believe, 4:3 in the first place. It might have been anamorphic, I'm not sure, but I remember seeing it as 4:3. The trick with anamorphic is that it encodes 4:3 films and 16:9 films as if they were both 3:2 - and then marks the file to tell the player to rescale the video on playback. Unfortunately, most players ignore these flags on anything other than DVD streams.

Ararat wasn't quite 4:3, but it was closer to 4:3 than it was to 16:9 - so I scaled it to 4:3. No one looked "distorted" (which seems to require quite a bit of scaling, where anime is concerned, due to the abstraction of anatomical proportions), so I went with the scaled version rather than the cropped one (which cut the video off way to close to the text at points). I realize that Spriggan was originally encoded in a 1.85:1 widescreen format, but I think Otohiko did a little pan-and-scan work, and I only made minor adjustments to its dimensions.

As to the "tall and skinny" comment, it doesn't apply to "A Boy I Knew" - as that one wasn't scaled to change the aspect. With "Simplicity" I can't see it at all, even knowing that the characters in "Akira" were more of the "short and stocky" variety in the first place. With "Ararat" I'm really not sure, because I haven't seen Spriggan. I didn't think they looked "stretched", but this comes back to the incredibly wide range of anatomical proportions used for anime characters - ranging from the "chibi on steroids" look of the DragonBall characters to the ultra-tall-and-thin look of the adult characters in Card Captor Sakura. In short, I had a hard time judging whether the characters in Otohiko's video were more properly proportioned in 4:3 or 16:9 (after all, this was submitted as one of those 3:2 anamorphics that could go either way). I figured it was the 4:3 version, but I could be mistaken. Otohiko, any input here?

[Otohiko]

No, I haven't done any resizing with the Ararat source to be honest. I took it as is; perhaps it's somewhat non-standard by itself (maybe that's why some of the de-interlacing didn't come out exactly perfect, too). I thought it looked a tad stretched while editing, but I don't think it should be much problem in the long run.

As far as the current encode problems, I can't comment as yet, but I will be able to download large files again starting tomorrow. Perhaps I should wait for the next possible upload though.

[rose4emily]

Damn... I just took another look at the original "Ararat" video (encoded in a 3:2 anamorphic format, as I remembered), scaled to 4:3 vs. scaled to 16:9, and there is a single object in the video that really is a dead giveaway as to the correct aspect of the video - the sun.

See, while even the irises of anime characters have a way of not being circular - the sun is pretty much a circle no matter who's drawing it. And, in this case, the sun is pretty circular in the 16:9 scaled version, and slightly ovalish in the 4:3 scaled version.

Meaning I screwed up.

My question now is whether Otohiko wants it moved to the Widescreen section, and what I should do with the time-balance if I do move it. Actually, I can think of one video in the Widescreen section that's of excessive length and inferior encoding quality - but I'm somewhat attached. Still, this isn't the first time I've considered removing it, and doing so would restore the length balance of the two segments, at least. The real problem would be the further increase in the mood inbalance between the two halves of the film.

I don't know.

[Otohiko]

Oh, no no no! I'm not at all in favour of replacing 13'37", possibly the most unusual thing to come out of the whole project, with a much more typical video of mine.

Can you get me any screencaps of how it looks at the moment? If the stretching is no good... well - could we cheat, letterbox it, and still keep it in fullscreen?

[rose4emily]

Screencaps, in 4:3, 3:2 (original encoding, but probably not the indended display format), and 16:9 format:

http://www.thewired.info/screencaps.zip

[jasper-isis]

The problem is that some Fullscreen videos were submitted as Widescreen, meaning no real fault on Rose4Emily's part. I remember noticing the incorrect aspect ratio when I first watched "A Boy I Knew." Unfortunately at this point, there's nothing we can do without tipping the "balance" between the fullscreen and widescreen segments. Which I don't think would be that big of a deal anyway...

Personally, I'm still in favor of having smaller 512x384 and 512x288 resolutions. Having them any bigger is a bit of overkill and still takes a heck of a lot of time for broadband users like me to download. A smaller resolution would also increase the video quality of some videos that were submitted in relatively LQ. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Warrior's Dance segment encoded from a 352x240 MPEG-1 file? If it isn't, well, not to be harsh, but it certainly looks like it was. The original version looks great in terms of video quality, but the loss of detail in the beta file is definitely noticeable.

The bottom line: even with all of Rose4's wonderful filtering, final video quality is going to be dependent on the quality of individual submissions. My fault for not bringing this up earlier...

However, one thing that would help considerably is to decrease the distrubution resolutions to the two that I mentioned above. Especially since those were the resolutions that we'd originally decided upon (and, for some us of, submitted in).

Sorry, Rose4Emily, this probably means more work for you. xP

[downwithpants]

when you get a chance to watch the video on a windows computer, and if the audio errors pop up on that computer, trying encoding the audio on that computer. if you didn't get to read my last post (which got buried at the end of the last page).

a guess at the audio codec problem is that microsoft's directshow filters are having trouble reading the audio stream. maybe when you encode audio on a system that doesn't have microsoft's directx (i.e. your linux machine?), the encoded audio stream gets botched up when running through directshow filters on playback.

if you have access to a windows machine, try encoding the audio on that. or if you want to send me uncompressed wavs of the audio, i can compress it on my comp, send you back the directshow-compatible compressed audio and hopefully it should play on other peep's computers.

the "breathing space" seems fine as it is.

as for the macroblocks, i saw them in the divx player as well and vdubmod as well. hrm :/ (i have divx 5.0.5 installed)

and to add to the weirdness, when i try frameserving the video with avisynth, which automatically decompresses video and audio on running, i get the error:

Avisynth open failure:
Error initializing audio stream decompression:
The requested conversion is not possible.

Check to make sure you have the required codec.

so it looks like our theories now are:
- file corrupted while uploading (can be tested by downloading from rose's computer and comparing to original)
- libavcodec's mpeg4 codec is buggy (can be tested by using xvid), however this wouldn't explain the audio bugs
- glitch in directshow filtering from audio encoded from a linux computer (can be tested by encoding audio on a windows computer)
- buggy behavior when storing 256 kbps vbr audio stream in avi container. (can be tested by reducing bitrate to 192 kbps [which very few people can distinguish from 256] or using constant bitrate?)

as for the aspect ratio scaling, resizing ararat to widescreen would also create distortions. maybe letterboxing is the best choice. personally i don't mind the current fullscreen distorted version much.

as for resizing the entire project to 512x384, 512x288, it might make sense because resizing (e.g. from our submitted resolutions to 768x576) usually entails a loss in sharpness.