Any advice for encoding cartoons ?

[scottb721]

When making SVCDs, what are peoples experiences and advice for encoding cartoon DVD's using TMPGEnc.
Thanks

[macleod]

check under my user idea for some other posts that have to do with this as some people gave some answers....

As far as cartoons, I'd need to know what kind of cartoons (newer/older). If you are doing newer cartoons like Monster's inc., hercules, and stuff like, standard CVD templates look just fine. If you are doing older cartoons, I have had better luck going VCD rather than SVCD or CVD. They are a nightmare to encode and never look right. There are always little mosquitoes and pixelation and stuff on the older cartoons.

[dphirschler]

Most important piece of advice:

Inverse telecine then encode film-SVCD. I use the excellent AVIsynth filter "Decomb" by Donald Gaft.

Also, make use of temporal cleaner filters and chroma noise reduction filter. Also, I found that using the "lanzcos3" resize filter is best for preserving the lines.


Darryl

[WeedVender]

Lanczos3?

isnt that the same as LanczosResize(x,x)?

Well cartoons have the pleasure to be saturated with noise reduction and still look good, sometimes even better, so add some noice reduction...

[dphirschler]

Also, I forgot to meantion the "smart smoother" filter in Vdub. It is quite nice for cartoons. Lately my Cartoon Network feed has these horizontal interference lines in the signal, and this filter does wonders to reduce it.


Darryl

[Vejita-sama]

Cartoon or live action doesn't matter. However if cartoon = anime, then expect problems. The short answer is that a lot of nerwer anime is a composite of 23.976 telecined, 29.97 true interlace, 60fps digital, and 10fps stop action film. Making it a mess to encode (sort of like PAL -> NTSC).

A good example would be Gasaraki or Crest of the Starts. Lots of digital effects super imposed on 20fps telecided to 30fps people

[SatStorm]

This is for the encoding part, not for capturing/proccessing the avi.

Target format: xCVD, 352 X 576 (I use PAL, change to 352 X 480 for NTSC).
Encoder: TMPGenc 2.59plus
Settings: 2 Pass VBR, motion estimate search mode. On Setings > Quantize Matrix you activate "No motion search for still picture part by half pixel". It is more than neccessary to do this!
Bitrate: Min: 1000, average: 2000, maximum: 3000.
If you are a totally quality freak, also try 1000 min, 2500 average 4000 max)
With those settings you have perfect Cartoon encodes. Don't use sharpness filters with Toons, this always ad noise.

For even better results, you have to kill the TV overscan. So, you resize (settings>advance) to 320 X 544 (for NTSC I think is 448) using video arange method as: "Center, costum size". You can experiment vertically with this. Lowerint the vertical lines more than 544/448, destorts the correct aspect, but on classic cartoons (Merrie melodies aka Looney Toons, Tom & Jerry, Pink Panther, Popay, etc) it is better to have a bit of aspect distortion than 4:3 cropped picture. It gives a more "cinema" feeling, neccessary for those cartoons.
Don't de-interlace if your source is interlace. Expecially for PAL users

[dphirschler]

I agree that deinterlacing is a bad idea, but inverse telecining is a MUST. It is very important to preserve the progressive frames of these cartoons.

I should point out that ANY blocking artifacts in an animated cartoon is unacceptable. It is just unacceptable, even in the fastest action sequences. If you get blocking, then you need to do some more cleanup. There are just too many great filters out there that can greatly improve your video, espically for cartoons. And cleaning the video is step number one in getting a great efficient encode.

If you perform the following steps, you should not see any blocking.

1. Inverse Telecine (AVIsynth Decomb)
2. clean up using chroma noise reducer, temporal cleaner, smart smoother, vertical smoother, duplicate frame remover, resize using Lanzcos
3. encode to film VCD (24 fps)


Darryl

[Nelson37]

I don't know if this is an artifact of my process or what - I cap hi-bitrate MPEG-2 and re-encode - but I have always had great success with cartoons such as Buzz Lightyear, etc, mostly Disney Chaneel.

TMPGenc noise reduction does wonders for the analog channels, but for the Digital channels I don't filter at all. Even on close inspection these look excellent, I keep hearing cartoons are difficult. I guess I'm not doing any of the anime stuff, those variable framerates do sound tricky.

I agree IVTC helps dramatically. One thing I have noticed is that at least the Disney stuff seems to be originally more like 14 fps, I see about 2 of 5 frames, or 2 of 4 after IVTC, duplicating but with a slight variation so it's not exactly 12fps. I enocde as 23.97 with pulldown and they work fine, and since the duplication does not involve interlacing I guess the compression deals with this pretty well.

[dphirschler]

I noticed a similar thing with the Batman Beyond cartoon. Except that the characters are animated every other frame (12 fps), but the backgrounds and camera moves (panning) are done full 24 fps.


Darryl