Encoding anime

[prnoct90]

Let's try this again, and hopefully this is alright. And if it isn't, I'm sorry.

I would like to work with R2 anime dvds. My goal is to create advanced, "professional" encodes, so I want to work with all of the hard stuff. I would like to use megui or avisynth because I heard from an encoder whose work I very much respect that this is a good combination.

This person said they use a filter chain. This way they could change the filter per scene. These are placed in a text file i think. He said not very many people use his method, but that's how he get such good results. He also said it takes a very long time. One of his filter chains might look sort of like this...

avcSource("e:\VIDEO\BDMV\STREAM\00000.dga")
p1 = trim(0,5770).filter1
p1 = trim(5771,65343).filter2
etc...

Anyways, I don't really understand much of what he said, but he also said to browse the stream with vdm and a huff. And, that he just "knows" what filter to use after looking at it from experience.

He also said he has his own modified filters specifically for anime, but I don't have access to those. He did also recommended the following: limitedsharpen and gradfun2db.

Anyways, if you read all of this, thanks so much for your time, and I really appreciate any time you take to write a response.

By the way I'm just encoding for myself and practice. Just to clarify.

[manono]

My goal is to create advanced, "professional" encodes, so I want to work with all of the hard stuff.

Walk before you run. Start with easy stuff and work your way up. Most anime doesn't even need advanced filtering. Read everything at http://avisynth.org/

[redwudz]

Anyways, I don't really understand much of what he said, but he also said to browse the stream with vdm and a huff. And, that he just "knows" what filter to use after looking at it from experience.

AviSynth is probably the best setup for what you want to do, but a bit intimidating for beginners. I would start with VDM and some of the filters here: http://www.thedeemon.com/VirtualDubFilters/ I use ColorMill for most simple corrections. You may also want to install Audacity for audio cleanup.

As to the 'huff' reference, he may mean using the lossless codec HuffyUV. I prefer Lagarith, also lossless. These let you work on the video frame by frame if needed, and since they are lossless, after filtering, you can convert them back to a more compressed format with minimal quality loss from the filtering. After you get some idea how the filters work, then you can write a AVISynth script and speed up and streamline the process quite a bit. It does take a bit of practice to properly use filters and end up with an improvement over the original files.

And welcome to our forums.

[SatStorm]

I do some anime funsubbing (with unlicensed material in my area). This is how I do it:

I use virtualdub, even for HD sources. I have enabled the mpeg2/vob support off course, using the correct plug in. Then, I resize and de-interlace smart or inverse telecine. The next step is to do some filtering: I filter with neatvideo for random noise, I fix the colour or/and the white balance (necessary on older anime or anime captured from LD/VHS/Whatever), and if it is needed I enhance the lines with some specific filters. I finalize with a 2 pass H264 encoding.
The result is an avi file in the size I wished to have it. Then, I remux it with MVKtoolnix and I add the soft subtitles. That's it.

With avisynth you can do the same "automatically", with the correct "script". But I prefer the virtualdub way, because I can monitor and preview the whole process.