Does CGI animation require more or less bitrate than Hand Drawn animation?

[killerteengohan]

I know cartoons/anime hand drawn animation or movies with things like grain in it require a higher bitrate as the amount of grain increases when encoding to h.264, but what about CGI material.

Does 100% CGI animation require more or less bitrate than Hand Drawn cartoon/anime animation to keep details in tact?

[jagabo]

There's no definitive answer for this. Hand drawn animation usually has little detail but a lot of noise -- grain in the paint and film. That eats up lots of bitrate. Pure CGI usually has (never been on film) usually has no grain but more detail and more motion. The lack of grain makes it more compressible but the additional detail and motion makes it less. Use CRF encoding and you won't need to worry about it.

[pandy]

Codec after transformation see only energy distributed in particular spectrum range - amount of energy depends on many factors and CGI may require higher or lower number of bits to store approximation of energy envelope (distribution) over block.
Source may use some techniques to reduce overall entropy and improve compressibility, those techniques may be applied to both types of animation or only to one of them. This very large area.

[Atak_Snajpera]

CGI will always require higher bitrate simply due to increased number of unique frames per second. On other hand modern cartoons are very static. For example when character talks you only see lips moving. Rest is static. Not to mention about flat backgrounds filled with solid color.

[Aludin]

It requires more. CGI is more complex than oldschool animation. Any mitigation in entropy the "perfection" of CGI offers is cancelled by the huge increase in detail.

[jagabo]

CGI is more complex than oldschool animation.

Not necessarily. It ranges from simple 2d cartoons to full blown Hollywood A list movies. So there's no definitive answer to the question.

[pandy]

Motion analysis may be better with CGI - this is tricky part - not always more motion leading to higher bitrate... I would avoid such claims.

[Cornucopia]

Lots of old school cel animation (hand drawn) didn't even have good pin registrstion, so the whole frame is jiggling around in addition to the drawn objects and the grain.

@Atak, that is a poor generalization: I could think of scores of both normal FR and low FR cel stuff as well as scores of normal FR and low FR cgi. It's much more varied and complicated than that assumption.

Scott

[Atak_Snajpera]

Lots of old school cel animation (hand drawn) didn't even have good pin registrstion, so the whole frame is jiggling around in addition to the drawn objects and the grain.

@Atak, that is a poor generalization: I could think of scores of both normal FR and low FR cel stuff as well as scores of normal FR and low FR cgi. It's much more varied and complicated than that assumption.

Scott

That's why I mentioned "modern cartoons" which are 100% made on PC. Whole frame is super stable and clean (no noise/film grain and so on) . Basically there is no shacking like in old disney animation.
Modern animations (japanese cartoons) will always compress better than modern CGI (like for example Shrek and so on). CGI has much more details and motion in scene!
End of story!

[pandy]

That's why I mentioned "modern cartoons" which are 100% made on PC. Whole frame is super stable and clean (no noise/film grain and so on) . Basically there is no shacking like in old disney animation.
Modern animations (japanese cartoons) will always compress better than modern CGI (like for example Shrek and so on). CGI has much more details and motion in scene!
End of story!

Noise and grain can be easily removed thus this is very weak argument. Overall stability can be also improved (or may have reduced impact if motion analysis works in optimal way). All without affecting core part of source and perceived quality.
Motion (CGI) is usually finer and less random this most of motion search algorithms may and usually perform better on CGI than on hand drawn (CGI deliver finer, smoother and less uncorrelated motion).

To be able write

End of story!

you should deliver valid analysis - perform tests how MOTION tools (within codec) working with particular type of content and compare various sources (how much motion blocks is used, vector length etc). Properly anti-aliased CGI should be compressible same or better than hand drawn animation (it will be good to compare spectral characteristic as i think that hand drawn are bandwidth limited due nature of tools (pencil provide Gaussian like pulse response when analysed, same for brush, CGI can be considered as Dirac pulse if not antialiased).
There is many factors involved in final "bitrate" and story is endless (this can be at the same time good and bad)...

[Atak_Snajpera]

Blablabla...

CGI
http://atak-snajpera.5v.pl/images/CGI.gif

ANIME
http://atak-snajpera.5v.pl/images/anime.gif

You really believe that modern CGI is easier to encode than modern anime?!? You must be trolling, right?

[pandy]

Blablabla...

CGI
http://atak-snajpera.5v.pl/images/CGI.gif

ANIME
http://atak-snajpera.5v.pl/images/anime.gif

You really believe that modern CGI is easier to encode than modern anime?!? You must be trolling, right?

Behaving immature doesn't prove anything, in fact it is counter-productive...
Show me spectral energy, motion vectors, something more scientific to support your claims not 256 color GIF's...
Truth is: you have nothing to support your claim - in fact this can be interesting topic for some scientific work.

Btw both your sources are CGI (your anime is also CGI only using different artistic approach - layers and 2D vector).
There is substantial difference between hand drawn and manually composed from splines and other primitives.
https://youtu.be/yyCepAM7Ftc?t=293

[killerteengohan]

Well the CGI source I am using is very highly detailed 3D and also moves/animates quickly, so I will just use more bitrate on it. I usually use 8,800 to 12,800 for 1080p animation, so I just went with 12,800 for this source. If I reduce it by even 1000kbps I can see the difference and degradation of the image when comparing. The difference is even more apparent than when using 2D cartoons/anime.

I guess the fact of it being CGI or not doesn't really impact the bitrate it needs. It's how much detail, frame counts, and how much motion is in the source that seems to matter.

Thanks everyone!

[pandy]

I guess the fact of it being CGI or not doesn't really impact the bitrate it needs. It's how much detail, frame counts, and how much motion is in the source that seems to matter.

Animations require usually more bitrate than average video from natural source - artificial images usually require higher bitrate - this is unavoidable in all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transform_coding#Digital codecs.