Stick Theory: How To Use x264 Like A Pro, Only Pro’s Can’t Legally Use It For Production Work
Just as String Theory attempts to govern the universe, Stick Theory governs how x264 works. Stick Theory is the theory that when choosing x264 settings, even if you have no idea what anything does, as long as your keep throwing shit at a wall, you’ll see what sticks, resulting in quality video.
A trend I notice is that very few people can really use x264 properly. Everyone expects wonderful magical GUI’s and automated shenanigans where you just set a preset and leave it, and your video comes out looking reasonably non-crap. The thing many people don’t know is that CLI is good for you, and not as scary as one might think. Additionally, x264 has presets now, and soon, a –device flag for incredibly simple encodes for PS3 or Windows Mobile or whatever else. This makes basic x264 usage really simple. Just read x264 –help, or if you want more comprehensive info, –longhelp or even –fullhelp.
I lurk in a lot of IRC channels. More and more often now, I am seeing people asking in places like #Archlinux how to encode. The channel is for linux discussion, not encoding. At the same time, the guys in #x264 don’t really like handing out tailored settings for every random lazy guy that drops into the channel. Spending two minutes on a quick google search will give you most info you want to see. http://mewiki.project357.com/wiki/X264_Settings should be one of the first results, and it has more info than pretty much everywhere else on the entire internet besides for possibly the musty halls of Darkhold, or inside Loren Merritt’s head.
I also see a lot of users calling Random Distro X crappy just because it doesn’t provide a crappy tool like Handbrake to transcode their porn with. The thing is, x264 is really easy to use. It’s simple, can be installed or compiled in seconds, and with the preset system you can do pretty decent encodes as long as your source is good. There is no real need for a GUI or for people to think encoding is hard. x264 is practically made for the lazy man now. Stop filling up my 119 IRC channels with useless shit about why you suck at encoding people.
The other problem with x264 users of course is that they often don’t know what different settings do, and mess with them anyway. This is where Stick Theory comes in. While throwing random shit at a wall DOES eventually give you a good result, what is significantly faster and more informed is to learn what common x264 settings do, especially things like the vbv-buffer, crf, aq, psy-rdo, trellis, bframes, b-pyramid, subme, motion estimation, rc-lookahead, and a few others. The above linked wiki article is a very good repo of x264 info mostly written by some very talented encoders (look Dae, I called you talented!)
Knowing what you’re doing will let you write out a full x264 command string in less than a minute to have a very well tuned encode, tailored for your content, resulting in VERY nice results. Of course this isn’t strictly necessary, but knowing it always helps. That does however sound tedious. Luckily, with x264, you can use both the presets AND the main flags, allowing you to choose a preset, autotune it with the –tune flag, and then override as necessary for a very easy yet customised encode string. And all in the space of a minute.
Now, stop being lazy and get off my lawn and out of my IRC channel. x264 does all the work for you, it’s MAGIC I say! (Some might argue that the AI in things like AQ and CRF is sentient, but Dark_Shikari assures me it isn’t, yet)
This Is Not An Elaborately Large Quote I Am Just Writing Some TL;DR About Subtitle Formats To Explain Things As Requested By The Masses
While speaking to Eric over at Siren Visual and my bro Shadow Wolf at Supanova this weekend, the topic of various subtitle formats and how they impact visual typesetting and typography came up. Today, I’m going to be writing about the three main ways you could classify subtitle formats and how they work; namely, text-based subtitles, DVD IDX/SUB format, and the two (yes two!) BD subtitle formats, PGS/SUP and TTXML.
I’m super lazy and there is so much variation in test-based subtitling that I’ll sorta skim over this. Text-based subtitles are formats such as SRT or SSA. They are common in the ripping and fansubbing communities mostly for their ability to be turned on and off at will. Some are more complex than others. ASS (SSA V4+) for example is capable of rendering full text effects as well as vector graphics and with a container like Matroska, it can be packaged with fonts and used for full typography and visual effects as well as the subtitles themselves. SRT on the other hand is a much more basic format, it just stores lines with their times. There are many formats like this and they are used in many places and so I leave further research to the reader as this post is mostly aimed at DVD and Blu-Ray.
DVD uses a format that can be referred to as either IDX, Sub, or VobSub after the horrible renderer for Windows it used to have. DVD SUB uses 4 colours in a raw bitmap storage format. That said, the way your DVD player displays each of those colours is up to the manufacturer as the palette has 16 colours, and there are a further 16 contrast values, also with only 4 that can be used. The four colours are for the background, foreground, outline, and shadow. The background colour is generally an alpha field and so your sub-picture will overlay onto your actual video with transparency, and not covering it. Common ‘fill’ colours are white, yellow, and pale blue, while black is the most common outline. Most players have a transparent shadow, although black is fairly common too.
Blu-Ray on the other hand is a bit better. It uses 24-bit colours in its sub-picture format. This allows for a rather unique ability on a Blu-Ray, if anyone was to take advantage of it (Siren Visual I am looking at you.) Given a BD disk has so much space on it, yet most times that space isn’t utilised even CLOSE to fully, one could take advantage of this 24-bit colour (+alpha) to render full ‘soft’ typesetting onto the video. A studio could open up their compositing application of choice, do their thing, and then output a PNG sequence. Convert that to SUP, mux, and you now have full soft-sub typesetting on a BD release. I have yet to see ANYONE in the industry typeset at all, regardless of method, so this would be a real bonus on release quality.
The second format Blu-Ray has, and it seems a lot of people don’t know about this, is TTXML. TTXML shouldn’t be confused with the MP4 format’s Timed Text, which is usually referred to as TTXT. TTXML is a format mostly defined by Adobe, although barely supported by any software I have seen including Adobe’s own Flash player. It is a text-based format similar to Ogg Kate or SSA, only using XML. It is rather basic and from what I can tell (limited spec) it has no vectoring capability, but I assume SVG incorporation isn’t too difficult. It is capable of the general font selection, bolding, styling like outline and shadow, stretching, and basic text animation effects like karaoke by it’s time function, quite similar to the ASS \t flag if more basic. I have no idea if many hardware Blu-Ray players support this format, but I’m just putting it out there that it exists.
This concludes me writing walls of text about subtitles, it’s 11:48PM and my fingers are freezing. We’ll see if anyone takes interest in the Australian Blu-Ray Industry.
I’m Not Saying Ironman 2 Was Shit But That Framedropping Thing Was Kinda Annoying
I went to see Ironman 2 tonight. I REALLY enjoyed it besides for a few hurfdurf technical moments, and one thing that really irked me concerning framerate nostalgia. As an aviomechatronic engineer, flying robots are kinda my thing, so I had a lot of fun at how crazy a lot of it was. I was a bit wtflol at the whole particle accelerator in a house, and then refracting the particle beam through the prism? What was that about? I like movies being outrageous like that though so it was enjoyable to see. What WASN’T enjoyable however was what appeared to be a bit of framerate history gone wrong.
Movie cameras have been using 24fps since the 20′s (although a 1% slowdown in the digital age because people in the US are dumb) while the non-FILM cameras went with 30fps, broadcast interlaced as 60i if need be. I’m not going to pretend I know what camera the film used for all those scenes of Howard Stark, but I’ll take a guess that it used the cheaper TV type cameras that used 30fps. So we have 30fps footage being played in a 24fps movie, what is commonly called hybrid. The problem with that is that 1 in every 5 frames is gonna be dropped by the 24fps camera used by the studio, making it jerky, which was REALLY annoying.
I did say earlier that it was done wrong, when it really wasn’t, and I meant that in the sense that Stark had money and could afford a movie camera and thus get 24fps and not make my eyes hurt. Hybrid video isn’t really rare, especially in movies that show video in another display, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Other than that though, I found the film really enjoyable, even more so than the first one. You guys should go watch it. Tony reminded me a bit of myself, only further down the track, and with a cooler rig at home. That and he was a good student and I am not a narcissist, hurf. Here’s to the Thor movie being good.
Occasionally I Too Can Be A Dirty Consumer Whore Although My Brand Choices Are Significantly More Obscure Than Those Of Kids These Days
I was originally going to write about the broadcast system but I haven’t completed my tests yet and I happened to visit my favourite audiophile headphone store the other day, where I tried out some closed headphones for prospective use in the noisier environments where my AD900 set aren’t as useful. The three I tried out, with limited access to content in store and a small section of my collection I had on hand in MP3 form, were the Shure SRH840, the Beyerdynamic DT250, and the Ultrasone Proline 550. All were tested with the Meier Audio Corda Cantate amplifier.
Now that I’ve actually written that down, I realise I didn’t do any real testing here either, especially not with my amp or the content I normally play for long periods of time, but given how non-powerhungry these cans are (besides the beyers) I think my decisions reached are fairly understandable, besides for some oddities with the DT250. Also I totally wanted to blarg about headphones for a change.
So the first set I tried were the Ultrasone Proline 550. The first thing I noticed about these is that they were collapsible, although they seemed quite sturdy. The other aesthetic thing I found odd besides the colour was the lack of any clear indication of which was the left and which was the right cup, although close inspection revealed a very small L and R on each. After actually putting them on, they were very well fitting around my ears and sounded fantastic with the triphop and dnb I tested, as well as a bit of metal. Bass was very much there but not overpowering and the midrange was really clear for quite a bassy headphone. Unlike the other closed models I’ve tried over the years, these sounded very airy and open, which was a nice surprise. Treble was clear if a little under-powered but that was quite possibly due to MP3 being stupid.
These were quite possibly my favourite of the day if it weren’t for the damn headband. Ultrasone have put a large-ish pad right in the centre of the headband. It’s made of some kind of SOFT foam, and as soon as it sat on my head, it completely depressed into the plastic, resulting in the hard plastic of the headband being in direct contact with my head, which was not at all pleasant. While these sounded fantastic, and they fit well over my ears, the headband discomfort is just unforgivable and I can’t say I would like to wear them again. Maybe I could buy some and mod the headband right out but I don’t know if I’m willing to put in the effort for something that’s already over $300.
The next set for testing were the beyers. I have heard a lot about the DT250 and the DT770pro, and although I was quite wanting to try both, however the DT770pro wasn’t in stock. I was testing the 80ohm version. My very first impression of the sound was that it was a bit dull in comparison to the Ultrasones. This may be because of Ultrasone’s S-Logic magical sounds-like-open-cans feature, or because I wasn’t getting proper isolation due to the cups being more supraaural rather than circumaural. Whichever the case, these were a bit of a disappointment as far as the sound went. I know that these beyers in particular are not particularly bass heavy or strong on the treble, unlike say the DT770pro, however they are very smooth overall and perform evenly across most sound ranges. I have a feeling my lack of impressment was due to trying the fancier Ultrasones first rather than any defect in the beyers themselves, and when I head back with my amp and a stack of FLAC I’ll give them another shot.
As far as comfort goes, the DT250 far exceeded the Proline 550, especially on the headband. I found them to have a stronger clamping force as well on the cups, but seeing as the cups didn’t fit my ears as well this wasn’t all that beneficial. I do wonder if they have larger cups, and I’d like to try the 770pro, both for being bassier, and the different shaped cup which looks like it would give me a better fit.
The last set on my list was the SRH840 by Shure. I already own and love a set of Shure canalphones, although that didn’t stop me from getting some VSonic’s for my 21st birthday from my grandad, and I had rather high expectations from Shure. The SRH840 is a lot bulkier than most other headphones I have used, it felt like some chunky Bose or Senns as far as the look/feel went, with a strong clamping force, solid design, and rather taut pleather? on the pads. They looked like they were meant to impress people, but also like they could take a bit of a hammering for travel. When I actually listened to them, I found them to be very isolating, significantly moreso than the Proline 550 or DT250, which I guess is good for a closed headphone, and they weren’t boxed in at all like other closed headphones I have used at around the same price.
These were actually one of the sets I was highly considering so I’m quite happy that I tested them. As far as the sound goes, these focus almost entirely on bass and midrange, and while not exactly the most pounding of bassy cans, they had a very strong mid/low range that almost completely drowned out the few finer treble points that remained in my test tracks. Being quite bulky, I expected them to be heavy, and that they were. I would like to try these again with more of the music I listen to commonly, just to get a better feel for them, but I don’t think I can see myself purchasing these. The lack of treble focus just puts me off too much when it comes to the dubstep I listen to, and the work of artists like Alstroemeria Records or Lix, which is the sort of tracks I listen to a lot while working, and work is where I am looking for some closed headphones for.
As far as sound goes for these, I would have to hands down pimp the Ultrasone Proline 550. For comfort, probably the DT250 if only it was a bit bigger around the cups. The SRH840 were just too heavy and this isn’t something I want when I’ll be listening for 6-8 hours solidly. I think I’ll have to go in again with my collection, my Creek OBH-21SE, my AD900, and have a go at comparing them and see what I like. I will probably end up getting the Ultrasone’s and rebuilding the headband at this point, which is kinda not what I’m wanting at all. I guess time will tell.
NB: Shameless pimping of my favourite store is completely intentional, they’re excellent for getting/testing quality headphones in Australia and have some great staff who really know their stuff, unlike most retail stores. I also realise that my lack of real testing is somewhat misleading in this post, especially as I didn’t use the sort of things I listen to most often or my own amp, but the Cantate is a better amp anyway and as I said earlier, I wanted to write about expensive headphones.
Sly Marketing Is Probably Not The Best Way To Sell A Product But I Guess It Works When Your Audience Is Retarded
A while ago, one of my fellow soldiers in the war against the industry had a chance to talk to Sly, from Madman Entertainment, about their upcoming Bluray releases. After our numerous points about them screwing over the video in DVD releases by standards conversion and a few other things, Sly made several assurances that the BD releases would have the video unchanged from the Japanese masters, including the lack of English typesetting. The company reps have mentioned this to quite a few people as I understand it.
The other day, Madman announced the title Claymore as one of it’s upcoming BD releases. I know a lot of people would think that video being unchanged by a shitty licensing and localising company is a good thing, and it SHOULD be, except that not all Japanese video is perfect either. I would like to see Madman releasing Utawarerumono as a BD title, with it’s terribly delicious 1080i MPEG2. Except I wouldn’t. The Claymore BD in Japan is a known upscale, and a terrible one at that. We’ll see how Madman shoot themselves in the foot this time.
On the side, to clear up some confusion, I do not have anything against Sly. He’s a nice guy and has always been courteous when ever I have spoken to him, although apparently he thinks I’m a dick, which is somewhat understandable. I only have a problem with the company he works for. Just sayin’.
Grain Is Not A Defect: How Eugenics Improve Video Quality
“Way to grainy/noisy for a 1080p… I’ve seen better BRRips @ 2gb…”
As the above quote shows, a lot of people are under the impression that grain is the same as noise, and is a defect. Not just in the scene, which is already known for being incredibly dumb, but also in the AMV and fansub communities. Over the past few months, fansubbers have slowly come to terms with grain (with a few notable exceptions) and at times have gone a little too far such as adding grain for no good reason. Granted adding grain is at times necessary but trolling with it is a bit much. Before the community even thinks about how much grain is necessary though, I think the various video scenes need to get over the fact that it is NOT a bad thing.
This might come as a surprise to some but grain makes up a large amount of picture quality. Most video is encoded with DCT codecs which break things into macroblocks. Without grain or anything else detailed and small, the quantizers the various codecs use will smooth out the blocks and produce solid colour bodies, something x264 overcomes with it’s adaptive quantizer. On content such as animation, large flat colours can be how it’s meant to look, but that is certainly not the case with live footage. Another problem is that where there are large solid blocks, a quantizer might be a bit over active and smooth out a very minor gradient, often seen as grey/white blocks and lines in the sky on a clip. Something like an adaptive quantizer really helps with that, but so does the minor amount of grain often present in sources.
Noise on the other hand is usually the product of poor capturing and is an issue in the source. If a source is noisy, then naturally you denoise it. Grain however can be reduced, added, or left alone, depending on how much there is. One simple way to tell if your clip has noise or grain is by the shape, size, and distribution of it. Grain tends to be uniform and rather fine, except for in flashback scenes in anime where it is significantly larger, and it almost always covers the entire picture. Noise often just impacts a small part of the picture, is usually bigger than grain, and the noise ‘chunks’ are irregular. Paying close attention to grain will show that it appears quite regular. Digital grain is often static as well, so it doesn’t move between frames. It’s easy to spot if you look at a slow pan, the image will pan under the grain. Noise however will move in every frame. Noise also sometimes shows up as a colour aberration.
Dirt is a type of noise, and is quite rare in modern content. It is usually found in analogue content transferred to digital, mostly on older things, and sometimes in video that has already been compressed badly. I have seen it almost nowhere in live content but in anime it’s often present around hair edges. Usually edge cleaning will fix it, and if you have dirt but no other noise there is no reason to denoise your entire clip, just mask it and clean it, or use a dedicated edge cleaner filter.
To get back on track, grain is not bad. Complaining about grain makes you look dumb and blind, and getting rid of it makes content look sterile as hell. Fine grain actually looks good, is rarely even noticed, and makes a picture look significantly more natural. There is absolutely no need to remove or tamper with it. The problem is that people are stupid. I’m not going to actually talk about selective breeding but I think the title gets the point across. There are lots of good uses for grain, such as debanding without resorting to dither, which gets banded at the quantizer anyway, and overall it does look better. Now stop fucking with it.
Contrary To What Vivid Wireless Seem To Think Not All Of Australia Lives In The Stone Age
This might shock the folks over at Vivid Wireless but there are people in Australia that aren’t living in what most of the first world would consider the stone age of broadband and video, at least as far as usage goes. I had a brief look at the collective circlejerk on Whirlpool just now after seeing an advert for Vivid on TV while making my lunch and all I could think of was ‘lol’. Ok, so Vivid clearly hasn’t got 4G yet even though they advertise it, but the claims that when it happens it will blow ADSL2+ out of the water? I’m not seeing what appears to be 10mbit coming even close to blowing 24mbit away.
I’m going to shy away from the speed issue seeing as it’s well known that Australia has shit speeds no matter what. What prompted this post was the traffic restrictions they seem to impose, and more specifically their bullshit calculator. For starters, I cranked their usage calculator dials until I got my current monthly usage (if it wasn’t for my pesky lack of HDD space anyway.) The calculator then told me I was best suited for their 40GB plan, about 200GB short of what I actually use. This irked me a bit, how can an ISP that offers home connections not have a plan bigger than 40GB, given it costs $100 monthly.
I decided to take a look at what they consider average use. For starters, a TV episode for Vivid is about 1.3GB and is watched on ABC iView and YouTube, as opposed to downloading something that’s actually worth watching. Streaming is NOT the answer, everyone is a dirty pirate and a real ISP would know that. I was also a bit put off by what they consider the size of one movie. At first I suspected 700mb for an average shitty XviD encode but it turned out to be worse, but unsurprising. 3.4GB, the size of a common DVD online download. Hi guys, welcome to the age of bluray, where a single movie is usually 45GB if directly pulled from the disc, or if you had some cool compression going and properly encoded audio it’d be around 12GB. It’d be nice if HD movies were made available intelligently but that’s a pipedream for now.
I don’t understand how an ISP that’s supposedly done so much research has NO FUCKING CLUE about their own target audience. They rabbit on about having the latest technology and knowing what the market wants but when it comes down to it, a regular user is going to go with something far cheaper like Telstra’s 3G with it’s superior coverage. They don’t notice the speed difference or even care about it, Telstra is a name they trust. On the other side, the more technologically inclined users wouldn’t ever go for plans that are so restrictive.
Obviously my own ISP has silly rules regarding copyright and what a user downloads, but they aren’t stupid about enforcing them (having a few servers in Europe really helps) and I haven’t had any problem from Amnet yet concerning my huge and blatant copyright violations. Probably not the smartest thing to write about on the internet when I think about it. I don’t see the police here giving a shit about a few hundred grand worth of software, music, and video content though. (This is where I go “lolitrollu”)
To wrap up, Amnet recently upgraded all their plans up until the one just below mine, so $200/mo gets you 100/150GB while $99/mo gets you 70/140GB. For 40GB less the price difference is huge, but it’s mostly stripped from the peak. I might consider switching though, who knows.
Linux Was Clearly Never Made For Audiophiles
I am not an angry man. I have absolutely no discretion and I am almost always correct in whatever it is I am saying (disregard all previous posts here and that statement remains mostly true) but rarely do I really lash out, until I come across the topic of sound in Linux. It’s not like the situation is bad enough with sound servers (OSSv4 is awesome but doesn’t support the card I want, everything else can go burn for all I care) but what REALLY shits me off is that lack of good media players.
My current media player? mplayer-uau. It has no support for tags in FLAC or TTA but otherwise it’s by far the most stable player I have, and it’s not even that inconvenient to use it from CLI either. I recently picked up an album by one of my favourite artists, Alstroemeria Records, and was a little sad to find it so flat in mplayer, because I’m pretty damn sure it sounds excellent on the Cambridge Azur 650C. I decided to try some Qt based media players and see if any of them could make me happier, but I figured a player wasn’t going to make much difference, I really hate equalisers but something told me to try anyway.
My first step was Amarok2. My last experience with Amarok2 left me with an intense hatred of the thing. It continually crashed, it’s media collection and tag reading/writing system is worse than WMP7′s (yes really), and it has on more than one occasion permanently deleted tracks from my harddisk. This sorta gave me a bit of “don’t go near amarok2 ever again” vibe but I decided I had all my shit backed up and it would be worth a shot. For once it didn’t crash, and has only done so once in the past 72 hours. It seems to be fucking up sending things to last.fm but otherwise fairly ok. Seeking is shitty in FLAC and TTA somewhat refuses to seek at all. I did try using different phonon backends and none of them made me any happier. mplayer, xine, and gstreamer for anyone that cares. Seeing as this gave me no advantage over mplayer, I moved on.
My next try was Clementine, the Qt4 fork of Amarok 1.4. The UI was familiar enough but the complete lack of features pissed me off, so I didn’t really get much real testing done here. I did take the opportunity to try configuring a library in it to which is stalled for 20 minutes and eventually crashed. After this somewhat half-assed attempt at a media player, I decided to stick with the theme of doing half a job and tried Prismriver. I actually intended to use this name myself elsewhere and may still do (that or Alstroemeria, so I can name something after what I intend to use it for) but regardless, my first 4 attempts at compiling the thing failed. Eventually I got it to go, and had some nice segfaults. Not even able to test the player’s fabled cuesheet reading which is a feature I really need when I’m too lazy to split and tag my stuff manually.
7 shitty players later, I realised I had qmpdclient and ncmpc installed so I promptly decided that GUI’s for media players in Linux are all terrible and went with CLI. Working fine for the moment. ncurses is an excellent invention and makes the best GUI’s I guess. Before people ask why I didn’t try GTK+, it’s because GTK is a horrible piece of crap and every developer that uses it is a retard that deserves absolutely no recognition for their work which nobody should even use anyway. Qt has Phonon too, which I bet could be implemented into GTK but that would give people a reason to keep using it, and that would be bad.
ITP: I make my own media player using phonon and a backend that isn’t a load of cancer inducing shit. Except it would take forever because I suck at anything not on embedded chips.
On a side note:
Dear Open Sound System Developers,
Please support the ASUS Xonar Essence STX in OSSv4 so that I may use it with my sexy amp and DAC and headphones and be a huge audiophile dickwad.
Love,
Emess
I’m Sorry Madman But What The Fuck Is This Shit
i am 12 and what is this
Above is Madman’s March 2010 Anime Newsletter email image. It seems Sly is now the quite literal ‘face’ of Anime in Australia.
My only thought is “At least he’s cooler than Lance, when he isn’t doing Madman work anyway.” To be honest I actually like Sly, he’s a nice guy. But jesus fuck do I hate the company he works for. Not much else to say here, the image really says it all. Move along.
FLV+VP6 Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time But Now It’s More Like That Trip To Vegas
I think everyone who actually reads this is aware that FLV is one of the worst containers ever used in the history of pretty much anything. For starters it absolutely abuses timecodes, so when I take a timecode v2 dump and look and see lots of numbers around 30fps, it’s pretty much guaranteed to actually be 30fps.
Another thing FLV likes to do is give itself some random as hell resolutions, such as 583×437, when using H.264 which is generally a YV12 codec, that is, chroma subsampling is done at 4:2:0 which would force the resolution to be divisible by 2 (mod2) although VP6 allows pretty much whatever you want to do.
The video I was asked to deal with today was VP6 at that resolution at 30fps in FLV. The problem I actually had on it was that there was some luma blending. Now I figured a simple MergeChroma(last.Trim(1,0)) (cut the first frame of the chroma so that it’s no longer a frame behind the luma, for those non-avisynth using people) would do the job however it turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
See, Japan has this love of REALLY BAD framerate conversions, and one of the worst framerate conversion methods blends the luma and chroma channels to interpolate motion and whatnot. This was most definitely the case here, and eventually I decided to just freezeframe some really bad bits and leave the rest of it as is, seeing as 30fps is hardly going to make a single frame noticable to the regular human eye.
After messing around a bit more and with the help of Kuukunen, it was found that the blending was in a 4:5 pattern: Definite proof of blended interpolation framerate conversion from 24fps to 30fps. I think this is where I would like to give P.A. Works and whoever else worked on this a big warm FUCK YOU. Naturally I shouldn’t be ripping things but it’s available for free on their site and I happen to be involved in an English translation project for it.
Now, as I’ve been speaking about this on IRC to a few people, some of them commented “Just decimate the 5th frame seeing as that’s the bad one.” The issue with blended interpolation framerate conversions is that they don’t just blend 2 frames to make an extra one, they mess with ALL frames to preserve smoothness of motion, albeit introducing blending as well. That means that there is effectively nothing one can do about it, although Kuukunen suggested the following, which basically takes the 2 worst frames in any set of 5 and blends them to get back down to 24fps, with some funky 3-way blends.
s = last
s0 = s.selectevery(5,0)
s1 = s.selectevery(5,1)
s2 = s.selectevery(5,2)
s3 = s.selectevery(5,3)
s4 = s.selectevery(5,4)
interleave(s0,s1,s2,s3.overlay(s4,opacity=0.5))
assumefps(24000,1001)
I can’t say I liked the result of that, but either way Japan has proven once again that it knows nothing about quality video mastering. The industry strikes again I guess. I could maybe write a letter to the studio informing them of how they’re Doing It WrongTM and they might even send me really low res lossless clips and ask for 1080p upscaled H.264, but I don’t see that happening here.
On the side, I happen to be turning 21 today, and if anyone feels like contributing to something they should message me on Rizon ( ´∀`)