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Chagen46



Joined: 27 Jun 2010
Posts: 4377
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 8:30 pm Reply with quote
Echo: Cels have to be drawn at the resolution they're going to be filmed at.

Shoot in 1080p and all of a sudden you have to request your animators to draw these MASSIVE cels, something which would take forever AND screw your budget to pieces. For something that doesn't even look THAT much better.

Please at least try to educate yourself on these matters before making absurd rash statements.
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Fencedude5609



Joined: 09 Nov 2006
Posts: 5088
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 8:41 pm Reply with quote
Chagen, you are both right and incredibly wrong.
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Chagen46



Joined: 27 Jun 2010
Posts: 4377
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 10:21 pm Reply with quote
Wrong about what?

As you increase the resolution, you increase the size of the cels, making each one take longer and more capital, driving up costs.
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luffypirate



Joined: 06 Oct 2006
Posts: 3186
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 10:23 pm Reply with quote
Cptn_Taylor wrote:
luffypirate85 wrote:
When Eva TV does make the jump to BD, I'll be ordering my box from Japan to sir along side my imported rebuild films. I'm not going to wait through the whole new licensing process that it will have to go through. Rather pay than wait who knows how long. The frustration of waiting to own 3.33 finally made me snap and buy up the import copies on Amazon (even brand new I ended up getting all three for quite a sweet deal). As soon as the option of importing became a reality to me I became a lot more impatient.


It's only an option insofar that :

- you collect for the sake of collection and don't care for the dialogue
or
- you speak fluently japanese and don't need a localized US version.

The second option I can understand, the first one no. It's not as if you are collecting art pieces.


I DO collect art pieces. That's exactly what these purchases are to me. Every single Studio Ghibli film, Jin Roh, Honneamise, OVAs like Gunbuster, Blue Submarine No 6, and Macross Plus, etc.
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Fencedude5609



Joined: 09 Nov 2006
Posts: 5088
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:25 pm Reply with quote
Chagen46 wrote:
Wrong about what?

As you increase the resolution, you increase the size of the cels, making each one take longer and more capital, driving up costs.


You do understand that anime is not made on cells, at all, right?
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Galap
Moderator


Joined: 07 Apr 2012
Posts: 2354
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:28 pm Reply with quote
Alright, Chagen46 let me give an explanation that's long enough to go past my avatar and be actually informative and helpful:

Cels don't really have a 'resolution', nor do the douga pencil drawings they're based on. They're physical dyes arranged on the cellulose, and thus aren't quantized or pixelated in any way. The anime drawings (both key and inbetween animation) are drawn on normal 8.5 x 11 white paper in pencil, and the painted cels that are made from them (well not anymore but I'll get to that later) are the same size as well. The cels were then shot on film (actual chemical photography), and while they don't have a resolution per se, their detail is limited by the focusing capability of the camera and the nature of the film itself. This is much higher than any TV resolution.

Nowadays the drawings are scanned and traced over in photo editing software. During this process and/or the compositing process they are set to a certain resolution, be it 720p or 1080p or whatever. The reason that it's not done at 1080 is that it takes longer to encode, and the file sizes are larger, so it's just faster to do it at the lower resolution. Also, drawn animation doesn't really have details that are small enough to need 1080p or more.
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Fencedude5609



Joined: 09 Nov 2006
Posts: 5088
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:29 pm Reply with quote
Also, it takes more computing power to work on larger images, all down the line. That costs more, of course.
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Chagen46



Joined: 27 Jun 2010
Posts: 4377
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:45 pm Reply with quote
Okay, I messed up, I'll admit, but:

Quote:
Nowadays the drawings are scanned and traced over in photo editing software. During this process and/or the compositing process they are set to a certain resolution, be it 720p or 1080p or whatever. The reason that it's not done at 1080 is that it takes longer to encode, and the file sizes are larger, so it's just faster to do it at the lower resolution. Also, drawn animation doesn't really have details that are small enough to need 1080p or more.


If the "cels" are all the same size, then what is the point of setting them to a higher resolution? If animation rarely has details that minute, why even do it? So it looks better on large displays?

Quote:
and while they don't have a resolution per se, their detail is limited by the focusing capability of the camera and the nature of the film itself. This is much higher than any TV resolution.


So basically, they're so detailed that "blowing them up", for lack of a better turn, to a high resolution (720p and above) doesn't make them blurry (unless you go crazy-massive of course)? Ah, naru hodo I see.

So anime in both 720p and 1080p are drawn on the same "cels", just scanned in at different resolutions. Okay.

I should research animation and how it's made soon, I want to know more about it.
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filmftw1



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 6
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:51 pm Reply with quote
Oneeyedjacks wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Fate/Stay Night blu-ray was HD. I haven't seen it, so I'm not sure.

The Blu-ray is in HD, but the original source that it was based on was not. (when HD wasn't fully popular back when the show was made.) The initial Japanese Blu-rays sets were upscales, but generally Japanese company's upscaling would be better than American distributor's upscaling. Sentai's release, assuming otherwise, were based upon the HD upscale masters used for the Japanese release. (and yeah, I'm guessing, too, that it's the end credits to blame for making this release 1080i. Could've just reduce the framing to 24fps with deinterlacing to make it 1080p)
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filmftw1



Joined: 22 Dec 2013
Posts: 6
PostPosted: Sat Jan 04, 2014 11:54 pm Reply with quote
Wait, so we're going to wait a long time, if possible, for Anno and Gainax to agree on creating new HD masters for the Blu-ray? ... Uh-oh. ... oh wait, I have the Rebuilds in HD! Silly me!
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Galap
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Joined: 07 Apr 2012
Posts: 2354
PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 12:11 am Reply with quote
Chagen46 wrote:


If the "cels" are all the same size, then what is the point of setting them to a higher resolution? If animation rarely has details that minute, why even do it? So it looks better on large displays?


That's what I was saying. Not much point going past 720. 480p is noticeably low res, but I'd say 720 is good. There is a marginal improvement in seeing a 1080 source on a 1080 TV, as opposed to a 720 one (or at least I think there is), but it's barely noticeable to me.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4563
PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 12:18 am Reply with quote
Echo_City wrote:
Small screen or large screen, Full HD is too low a resolution IMO but watching anime-especially modern anime-that has been either in part of in full upscaled just exacerbates it.

Uh...just how close are you mashing your face to your display that 1080p is "too low" a resolution? I mean, maybe if your eyeballs are literally less than a foot away from a very good computer display running beyond 1080p, or if you somehow had a 12-foot diagonal digital projection setup in your own house. But in the vast majority of everyday viewing situations, even true 1080p content is somewhere beyond the law of diminishing returns. There's a good reason a lot of HDTVs in the 30-something inch range only output at 720p: at normal viewing distances, you just wouldn't be able to resolve the extra pixels enough to matter. Hell, I'll admit I'm a bit nearsighted, but I've had times where I'm watching an upscaled SD broadcast on our 46" TV from across the room, and I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between it and native HD content off Blu-ray. (It really cracks me up when smartphone manufacturers keep cramming more and more pixels into a dinky little 4" screen, and pretending like it's that much of a difference.)

This all goes double for most anime productions, where you're generally dealing with large, solidly-colored areas with no real gradients present; so long as you properly take care of aliasing on outlines, the majority of on-screen content isn't very affected by decent upscaling. The one place native HD truly shines is for a production with particularly-detailed background art, since you can certainly have a lot of details fade into fuzziness if it's not HD in the first place. But beyond that, the amount of videophilia in the anime community over a medium which is pretty much the best-suited out there for content scaling has generally left me scratching my head.
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reanimator





PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 1:04 pm Reply with quote
luffypirate85 wrote:
Cptn_Taylor wrote:
luffypirate85 wrote:
When Eva TV does make the jump to BD, I'll be ordering my box from Japan to sir along side my imported rebuild films. I'm not going to wait through the whole new licensing process that it will have to go through. Rather pay than wait who knows how long. The frustration of waiting to own 3.33 finally made me snap and buy up the import copies on Amazon (even brand new I ended up getting all three for quite a sweet deal). As soon as the option of importing became a reality to me I became a lot more impatient.


It's only an option insofar that :

- you collect for the sake of collection and don't care for the dialogue
or
- you speak fluently japanese and don't need a localized US version.

The second option I can understand, the first one no. It's not as if you are collecting art pieces.


I DO collect art pieces. That's exactly what these purchases are to me. Every single Studio Ghibli film, Jin Roh, Honneamise, OVAs like Gunbuster, Blue Submarine No 6, and Macross Plus, etc.


Blanchimont wrote:
And I disagree. Sometimes those boxes can almost be like pieces of artwork.


I wholeheartedly agree with Luffypirate85 and Blanchimont. Those Japanese boxes have excellent designs and some of them are featured in Japanese graphic design periodicals (IDEA magazine) from time to time. It's no wonder collectors treat them as work of art.

http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc175/reanimator999/CowboyBebopDVD.jpg

http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc175/reanimator999/GhostintheShellDVD.jpg

http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc175/reanimator999/Moyashimondisplay.jpg

Those Japanese graphic designers don't screw around when money is given to them from their clients. They just don't slap on graphics on cheap cardboard and call it a day.
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UrQuan3



Joined: 05 Jan 2014
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 7:27 pm Reply with quote
[quote="Galap"]Alright, Chagen46 let me give an explanation that's long enough to go past my avatar and be actually informative and helpful:

Cels don't really have a 'resolution', nor do the douga pencil drawings they're based on. They're physical dyes arranged on the cellulose, and thus aren't quantized or pixelated in any way. The anime drawings (both key and inbetween animation) are drawn on normal 8.5 x 11 white paper in pencil, and the painted cels that are made from them (well not anymore but I'll get to that later) are the same size as well. The cels were then shot on film (actual chemical photography), and while they don't have a resolution per se, their detail is limited by the focusing capability of the camera and the nature of the film itself. This is much higher than any TV resolution.

Nowadays the drawings are scanned and traced over in photo editing software. During this process and/or the compositing process they are set to a certain resolution, be it 720p or 1080p or whatever. The reason that it's not done at 1080 is that it takes longer to encode, and the file sizes are larger, so it's just faster to do it at the lower resolution. Also, drawn animation doesn't really have details that are small enough to need 1080p or more.[/quote]

Let me add a bit more info there. It has been some time since cels were painted and photographed with a camera. Probably some time in the early '90s. If it is, there is normally some form of "barrel distortion" as well as other flaws. Miyazaki's "Conan" is a good example. As Galap said, some studios draw the source sketches on paper, then scan them in for inking and coloring. More recently, many studios have moved to an "all digital" pipeline where the entire process is done on computer using drawing tablets. This saves on material costs as well as scan time.

You would think that using an all digital pipeline, you would just set your source to 1080p, all your drawing would be in 1080p, scale down to 480 if needed, and you would be done. Well... 1080p images are bigger than 480 images, but it's only 6.75 times bigger. That's trivial, right? In RAM one 480 image is 1.2mb while a 1080 image is 8.3mb. The thing is, that's per layer in an art program. A skilled artist might use 100 layers. It gets out of control fast. Or how about real time encoding? No studio is going to use lossy compression on a work-in-progress, so: 8.3mb * 30fps is about 250mb per second where 480 is about 36mb/s. The average hard drive is about 35mb/s. You just need a (huge) SSD, right?

One last bit of insight: When registering an Autodesk product, Autodesk will tell you the stats of other users of that product much like Steam will. When registering 3DS Max two years ago, I saw that most users had 4-core or 6-core machines, the latest or near latest video cards, 8gb-32gb RAM, etc. 3DS Max is used by many US and European game and movie studios including Universal, Disney; many of these people have money. I also use Softimage. The lion's share of Softimage users are in Japan. Something like 80% of the user base and the majority of 3D game/movie work in the islands. People like Capcom, Square-Enix, Konami, etc. What where their stats last year? Win7 barely edging out XP64, with XP32 at 20%. More that half the machines are single core (where do you *find* a single core machine?). About 45% had only 1GB RAM. Most where running whatever cheap 3D card would cut it. Wow. Now, I can't promise this applies to anime as well, but if I extrapolate and say that this is the equipment that most low-end studios have to work with, small wonder we don't see 1080p anime. It would take years to render.

I have heard that many anime studios operate on a knife edge budget. Hope this sheds a bit more light.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4563
PostPosted: Sun Jan 05, 2014 9:00 pm Reply with quote
UrQuan3 wrote:
More that half the machines are single core (where do you *find* a single core machine?). About 45% had only 1GB RAM. Most where running whatever cheap 3D card would cut it. Wow.

I'd assume they're like me and relying on an antique machine that they're desperately hoping doesn't decide to keel over and die one of these days. Razz But those stats are a real eye-opener.
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