After a bit of though, ef is a standard definition show. Normally, we’ll release upscales of shows because they’ll look good. But you all saw what the transport stream looks like, and the demand for SD only is a bit higher than for HD. As such, we’re going to only be releasing 704X400 for both h.264 and XviD.
As our encoder said, the 720p issues were all my fault, because I was the one who asked that we tried doing it. We may try doing it at a higher definition if we decide to do DVDs later on, but for now, we’ll be doing SD only. Sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.
No way, 704×400 will do no good to the show, for it’s so beautifull.
One request if i can ask? Will you guys release the Subs file by itself also. So that if better quality raw comes out later, i can watch high quality video with subs?
The transport stream was horrible to begin with, actually Chihiro shouldn’t even have thought og releasing in upscale. It scales up to seem horribly blurry and not focused, it does give me a bad headache following it. So 400p will be fine, be it in H264,mkv or Xvid, avi.
And btw, I must comment that Chihiro did a great job with the release on the whole, it was decent and translations were able to flow well.
I love Chihiro~ ! ! ! ^^
400p would be fine as a HD.
Standard sucks.
As one can expect from Chihiro-Subs and their follower.
I wonder if they’re all blind… myself included, I think. 🙁
As you can tell…Chihiro at it’s best!
Rest assured, the show just begun. 🙂
Upscaling is very bad(and a waste of time), and its impossible for an upscale to look better than the original(assuming you use the same source), at best they can only be identical. IF its not animated in HD and there is no native HD raw its best to just go with SD, upscaling it your just wasting extra time encoding something that a player does during playback.
A quick pointer on some subs on the first ep, during Mizuki’s dream in the middle of the episode, the first voice is actually calling her Miki, not Mizuki. I’m not sure how important this is in the grand scheme of Mizuki’s story, but in the game Op for ef – the Latter Tale, it starts with young Mizuki(?) telling Yuuko that her name is Mirai Miki.
Animeruko:
is ef not animated in 720p?
Memories was, so why wouldnt they with melodies.
Or conclave-mendoi can do magic that is.
Can you guys plz sub One Outs & Skip Beat!
Memories was not. It is SD. You may want to get your eye checked. Conclave-Mendoi’s ef-memo was 704×400.
@Sacchin: no, she said “written as “Mirai (??) “, read as “Miki (??)””
”???”?????”??”?????????
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot20081010215303mp6.png
FYI – the DVD version of memories is being done right now by another group if anyone is interested (niizk). Using Conclave-mendoi subtitles.
Visual eye candy!
Chihiro are best subbing group i have to say 😀
I always wondered why “400p”? The native SD resolution is either 480p or 576p. Why do so many people crop video material? It makes SD look worse than it actually is.
Because Widescreen SD is usually brodcast with borders so they probably crop to 720×360 and then resize to 704×400.
Animeruko speaks the truth… in both his comments.
ITT people have very little clue.
480p is only for fullscreen: 640×480
for widescreen we use 400p: 704×400. It SHOULD be 396p but h264 encodes way better when the the resolution is devidable by 16
480p isn’t 640×480, it’s 720×480. You seem to refer to 4:3 video as “fullscreen”. 480 and 576 are both multiple of 16, too. Not that it matters as much as people seem to think. It’s just some odd little rule that people are fond of because it makes them look like experts, I guess. On a NTSC DVD 16:9 and 4:3 both use exactly the same resolution (720×480 aka 480p). 16:9 video is simply stretched during replay to correct the aspect ratio. PAL DVDs use 720×576 (aka 576p) instead. Of course there are many crappy DVD releases that don’t use anamorphic video.
When I want to re-encode HD video for SD playback, I’d always use 480p or 576p. Anything less isn’t standard definition but low-resolution. It’s ridiculous that many people think 16:9 as letterbox is better than 4:3. You could just as well glue black bars over the screen and fool yourself into thinking that’s a good idea. It’s not surprising that 720p which is just a minor advantage over PAL sells so well, when SD is articially crippled. That’s one of lowest and cheapest marketing tricks.
Especially with H.264 there’s no reason to be cheapskate and reduce the resolution to increase the signal-to-noise ratio for some arbitrary target size because the advantage of H.264 over Xvid shrinks along with the lowered resolution and H.264 just becomes a waste of CPU.
Animeruko:
“Upscaling is very bad(and a waste of time), and its impossible for an upscale to look better than the original(assuming you use the same source), at best they can only be identical. IF its not animated in HD and there is no native HD raw its best to just go with SD, upscaling it your just wasting extra time encoding something that a player does during playback.”
I used to think that way too — but now I prefer a 720p or 576p upscale, provided the source is good and *IF* there’s a lot of work put into it. That’s because a nicely filtered upscale carefully done by the encoder with hours of offline processing WILL definitely look better than any realtime simple scaling done by your player. Using filters during playback will just increase the cpu load and you might as well have gotten the encoder’s upscale in the first place.
again to be clear I’m comparing sdtv -> 720p upscale by encoder vs. sdtv -> 720p by your player
I don’t know much but i’m pretty sure H264 will always be better than Xvid at the same bitrate. . . IF 640×480 or 704×400 h264 video is making your computer chug .. its time to upgrade. There is no real reason not to use h264, just excuses.
# Animeruko Says:
I don’t know much but i’m pretty sure H264 will always be better than Xvid at the same bitrate. . . IF 640×480 or 704×400 h264 video is making your computer chug .. its time to upgrade. There is no real reason not to use h264, just excuses.
—-
Um some can’t afford to, and even so I prefer xvid over h264.. :/
the source is BAD already. And hours of processing in wrong way gives even worse eyecancer.
And my pentium 3 800mhz can play h264 704×400 and 640×480 just fine.
There’s lots of reasons not to like H.264. To start… they don’t play in a DIVX player unless you convert it. Given the choice between easily downloading the AVI or booting a virtual PC and converting I’ll take the AVI.
Anyway, thank you, Chiriro team for the lovely show and all your hard work. Last night I watched ep1 and about 3 minutes into the story I had a flash back to the first series and damn near cried. What a lovely story!
Damn, wtf is this shitty release?! I don’t need to bother myself talking what everybody knows. Do your work properly or don’t even try ‘couse even my grandmother do better. And i will ask her for it! =P
wow, op (anonymous@3:47). next time yr mother comes over to fellate me i’m gonna kick her in the throat for using the money i gave her to pay for your abortion on crystal meth instead. chihiro is doing the best it can with really crappy raws. you lose 3 internets. kthxbye.
“Quality” GIVE US QUALITY CHIHIRO THIS IS YOU SHOW DO U EVEN HAVE A RAW PROVIDER OR NOT THEIRS A BETTER RAW OUT!!! (NOT IN TT)
are all thse anonymous afriad to to put there name down while shouting abuse lol
“Chihiro are best subbing group i have to say :D” lol
(off topic) chaos head raw been out for quite some time and btw 2 fansubbers beat you, aoshen and D-R dark-rebirth xd.
Chihiro Drop it!
When source quality is SD and everything you could do is upscale the stuff -> So what?
definitely a good decision to go SD-only.
Yes there are maybe some people watching the stuff on newer flatscreens that will eventually suffer from an inferior upscaling-algorithm in their devices. But honestly: interpolating things simply doesn’t make things look better in any way – at least not better than a descent software-upscaler can put out on your average laptop / flatscreen PC-monitors.
However a good SD-file will always be of more viewing pleasure even on low-spec systems than a higher-bitrate HD-upscale because it simply doesn’t ask for as much processing power.
Hence even on my not-so-recent laptop ( > 4 years old) it will look good and play smoothly.
And that’s a good thing!
Also please keep up the softsub-packaging. They are so way more readable than anything hard-screwed into the video.
looking forward to watching episode 1 of ef, now…
Cheers
&
thx4allthefish
/me needs to learn English
*Kristen*
CPU usage with H.264 is much more spikey than Xvid. Your P3 may be able to play most anime SD videos with only 24 fps but I’m sure it stutters during high-motion scenes with high quality encodes. Maybe you have frame dropping enabled and just don’t notice it. H.264 makes sense for HD content but as said for SD and below it is not much more efficient that Xvid but uses much more CPU. Notebooks are typically much slower and higher CPU usage means the battery is drained much quicker. Many people don’t seem to understand that more CPU usage means more power (eletricity) is required. You don’t have to study thermodynamics to understand that.
Just compare current SD encodes using Xvid and H.264. Xvid has come a long way and looks by far better than what Xvid encoded videos from 3 years ago. It’s EXTREMELY rare that H.264 anime at SD resolution is smaller than the Xvid equivalent. Either it’s simply not possible to reduce the filesize a lot or maybe the encoders just don’t know how to achieve it. Most of the time the H.264 is even 10-20% larger. H.264 is also very good to fool the human eye by its built-in deblocking filter. Instead of artifacts, you get blurred areas which looks better and is less obvious. However, good players (like MPlayer) achieve pretty much the same with Xvid if you enable post-processing which still requires far less CPU than H.264.
So if you use H.264, at least use it properly and either improve quality or reduce the filesize compared to an Xvid encode. Cutting corners such as cropping widescreen instead of using anamorphic video is two-fold nonsense because first, you unnecessarily reduce the quality and second, H.264 gets less efficient at lower resolutions.
*Kristen* and the tls here needs to learn any language. I prefer to watch raws then your releases. I understand much more. =P
My english is even better than yours, but i need to talk like this to you understand. =)
And don’t be a coward, respond to the questions like a rat that you are.
Censorship is a fag thing. =P
This is not a post to defent chihiro in any way for releasing that 720p crap, but since they said they had a Transport Stream, this means their content was most likely 1440×1080 interlaced(so chihiro probably didn’t upscale it themselves) , as most (not all) japanese TV airs as. Meaning they have to IVTC it then filter/downscale/filter( depending on the source ). From the looks of it, this anime had dotcrawl in it while it was converted from 480i to 1080i by the studio ( this is mostly a guess judging from their release, I haven’t seen the TS ). This means they had to get it to 480p to properly handle the dotcrawl, keeping it at 720p would only make the thing unwatchable. There isn’t a lot of reason to do 400p, but it may end up easier to filter it at that resolution, or maybe there were not enough details at 480p so they had to go lower, or they were ignorant.
For those that said they’d prefer a 720p upscale because it’ll look better on their screen than a 400p or 480p release. There probably isn’t a way to remove that dotcrawl,rainbowing and ringing at 1080p or 720p, they’d have to downscale to remove it, then do a crappy upscale/filter, which is pointless. The reason some upscales look good to you is because people use studio/station upscales in making their encodes ( example: mastered at 480i, upscaled for the station at 1080i, ivtc’ed by the capper or encoder to 1080p, downscaled to 576p with filtering ), and those upscales came originally from a good source, but ended up at 1080i mpeg2(YV12). Doing an encoder upscale from 480p YV12 to 720p is usually stupid.
@Mirai:
“It’s EXTREMELY rare that H.264 anime at SD resolution is smaller than the Xvid equivalent.”
Like filesizes mean anything. Ratefactor/SSIM/PSNR/Quants are what matter. If a h264 encode was done aiming at the same quality as the xvid, and was encoded using of all the features, it will generally be at least 25% smaller. The reason why h264 releases are bigger than the xvid ones tends to be for one reason, that the encoders don’t really care about the xvid release and just do a target bitrate, knowing that most viewers downloading xvid don’t care much about the quality, and they’ll do much better quality h264 encodes at even higher bitrates for those that care and are willing to download bigger files.
How do I retarded?
The quality of ef – a tale of melodies sucks and the translation sucks as well…
you don’t have the right to call yourselves Chihiro…
ITT: Lots of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. (though some do)