Goddamnit, Siren, Madman, AUSTRALIA IN GENERAL: FUCK
I have grown sick and tired of shoddy products in the Australian DVD market. I have been a long time advocate of supporting Madman for the most part (the anime club at my university frequently works with Madman) however I always suggested people stay the fuck away from their DVD’s. I am of course talking about PAL conversions. OH NOES PEOPLE STILL USE PAL BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE FANCY LCD’S OR PLASMA’S? YES, INORITE? I LOL’D TOO.
Recently, Siren have licensed two series over here, The Tower of Druaga, and Genius Party. When Jon first approached me about Siren being interested in doing their PAL conversion right, I was pretty happy, “Finally,” I thought, “someone is doing it right!” Turns out I was dead wrong. About a week ago, I got an email from Jon, with a link to this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of the page as it was last week, however since I replied to the email, it’s been changed drastically. I was informed last night that I have now royally pissed off Siren’s authoring house, to which I just lol’d. Here are some of the gold statements that the page had up, as quoted in my email.
We could use clever software and hardware to merge the frames, keeping the overall fps speed. This method, technically called field interpolation, is best used when the original source is a ‘true’ NTSC original and the picture motion is present in ALL the frames (relatively rare in anime). This can give very good results when handled carefully.
Well, I guess if the original source is 24fps and you like ghosting, it’s not too bad. I don’t see how this works at NTSC though, as you’d be DROPPING frames, not interpolating, what?
Another, more preferable way would be to re-create the 24 fps version and then play this, sped up, to PAL frame rates. Although speeding up might sound like a horrific thing to do to your film it is actually the best looking method, an industry standard procedure for motion pictures and can often end up being better than the original! It’s worth noting you have to handle the audio very carefully to correct the pitch (our authoring house uses high quality DIRAC processing).
Speeding up is better than ghosting fo’ sure, but it’d change the runtime. I guess if you fix the sound it’s not too bad an idea.
Finally we could use last method, called ‘Inverse Telecine’, but only in the event we are working with true true 24 fps originals.
Wait wait wait wait wait WHAT? So, telecine involves taking a video, and interlacing it with successive frames in a pattern to artifically simulate a higher framerate. So, for example, with 24->30 fps conversion (2:3 pulldown) one would be duplicating 1 frame in every 4 to make it 5. There is an excellent graphic on Wikipedia of it that I can’t be bothered linking here. So, if I understood Siren’s authoring house here, they are planning to INVERSE telecine, the process of matching the fields and decimating the duplicate frames, in a way to UP the framerate? Does that sound retarded to anyone else? I thought so.
Apparently, I am a noob that needs to read wikipedia more, which is awesome as my email QUOTED wikipedia for like 1/3 of it. So, for anyone in Australia that wants quality anime, or any international films really, I urge you, BOYCOTT SIREN AND MADMAN. Demand Blu-Ray 1080p24, demand no upscales, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE RELEASES AT THE FRAMERATE OF THE ORIGINAL ANIMATION. It’s NOT hard to do, and these companies are fucking you over with inferior products. Anyone with a TV capable of playing anime/film at this resolution will have an LCD or Plasma, which are all capable of multiple framerates, so there is nothing to stop releases at FILM rather than PAL or NTSC. With DVD’s, it’s a bit harder, but I see no reason to not release at 24FPS, unless people have ancient TV’s, in which case some sort of soft telecine could be set up or some shit.
So, how do other people think we should be getting PAL from FILM/NTSC? Keep in mind the material these companies get sourced from Japan is telecined NTSC, so it’s 30FPS after pulldown, and 24FPS natively. Speedup is one way, 2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 pulldown is another. One could interpolate as well I guess. There are a few ways, what do the 4 people that might actually read this think?
DISCLAIMER: almost all 24/30FPS mentions in this post are referring to these rates with 1% slowdown, that is, 23.976FPS and 29.970FPS. I also would have pasted my entire email but didn’t feel it necessary, given it was sent to Siren.
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6 Responses to “Goddamnit, Siren, Madman, AUSTRALIA IN GENERAL: FUCK”
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Your link is wrong
http://http//sirenvisual.com.au/News/200905/131.php
lol
lol fix’d <3
I completely agree with you. Australian DVDs…. urggghhhhhh.
Every once in a while, I would go to the library and borrow myself some newly released Madman DVD, hoping that they finally learned something… Each time, I ended up more dissapointed than before.
Heh, the shittiness of Madman DVDs was what actually taught me how to encode. There was a time in the past when I liked Madman DVDs. At that time, I was also like “get video, stick into AutoGK, click button, woot, I mastered video encoding!!!” (yeah, laugh all you like, whatever)… Then, at some point later in time, I decided to analyse and compare my encodes a bit with other people’s… “Why is this shit blurrier than what I download?” “Why all the blending when the downloaded one is clean?” “Why does mine look so much worse when the file size is the same?”… And everything began from then onward…
Actually, I sort of miss those days in the past when I look at stuff, however bad, and would think “that’s an awesome fight” rather than “that’s a goddamn upsize, cut down on the fucking denoise and warpsharp, look at your video before you decimate – this shit is true 29.970 not telecined 23.976, and your x264 settings really fail” (refer to Chihiro’s Sekirei).
The major issue with madman dvd’s I found in most cases most of the issues with playback faults is associated with the media the reps use to burn with causes the most fault, given my own testing I found doing a 1:1 dvd rip kind of fixes the playback issues..
And madman wonders why piracy is so ripe in Australia, they should should look at their production methods 1st which I doubt they really do..
as for fansubs once you start changing aspect aspect ratios don’t be surprised if you get a hit in frame rates…
Nothing in film has a 30FPS frame rate, to do 30fps from 24fps you have to telescene the image for ntsc transfer, the problem when converting ntsc-pal they forgot to remove an half image which creates the telescene in 1st place this is why ntsc-pal conversions always look shithouse..
even if they ship things to blueray I doubt that will fix the ntsc-pal thing so much because you still have the hertz feq cycle of the mains power to contend with which cycles at 50 hertz…
people please don’t use Wiki as a technical document, while things may have truth in it there is also alot of hearsay and is usually quoted out of the context it was really intended for, given the prime examples in the previous statements and I think what you say has merit, in the context you give it however is wrong, in relation to conversion rates between ntsc-pal…
I think while Siren listens to you they only do so to shut you up, because they are only in it for the money and don’t give a flyhing fuck what the public say’s..
while you have technical merit in some cases, given the state of the hentai releases they did I very much doubt Siren is going to be doing ntsc-pal conversions with the new anime releases i’ll surprised if we get a pal r4 release from them…
Actually given the state anime industry as a whole in Australia internationally we must be seen as the biggest joke in a commercial sense…
Both Siren and Madman need to dice their dead weight soon if they don’t they will cripple the industy given all the issues with anime on dvd both companies had in the past, they need to do something fast cause both are going to go bust, I’m waiting for the day somebody files a class action lawsuit against them due the shoddy dvd’s they have made…
>>Demand Blu-Ray 1080p24, demand no upscales, DEMAND PROGRESSIVE RELEASES AT THE FRAMERATE OF THE ORIGINAL ANIMATION. It’s NOT hard to do, and these companies are fucking you over with inferior products
Picture this, you’re a company with 50 titles or so a month, many requiring these changes. It all adds up and takes a lot of work. Factor in having to pay for it (time is money in a company) will your title make enough money back to cover the extra cost of speeding the video up? Will you even be able to do it? (some masters can be really dodgy, but it’s all that can be obtained)
Look at some madman titles, and they will be fantastic (or great, Hellsing OVA is a good example, as is Code Geass) but then some lower budget titles are unforunately not given as loving treatment.
It sucks from an encoding point of view, but sometimes there’s not a whole lot that can be done.
People really need to get off their horses some times.
Actually it’s easier for them to leave it as they are provided it than to fuck around with it. So it’d be faster, cheaper, and easier to NOT fuck it up.
I refuse to label ANY madman title as being fantastic let alone watchable. Having jerky motion is not a good thing and I don’t see why I should pay for an inferior product when a free BETTER alternative exists.