Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Much Anime Can REALLY Fit On A Blu-ray?
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Rogueywon
Posts: 252 |
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Some of the nastiest BD encoding I've seen has been on discs which have had a very "civilized" episode count. I recently re-watched Higurashi: When They Cry Kai on BD, which has 4 discs for 24 episodes. Except two episodes on the third disc have visible interlacing artifacts and frame-pacing issues. It's an old show, so I'm guessing there might be problems with the source (and the other episodes looked fine, occasionally janky art aside), but it was still disconcerting.
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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I think that probably is the reason, but it might also just be because they tested it out and it didn't meet their standards. So far, it seems like they only really do the "12 on 1" thing if the series is super low in action, or has pretty limited animation in general. Which is how I hope it stays. Somewhat of a follow up question: Is it significantly more expensive to replicate a BD50 versus a BD25, or is the pricing pretty similar? |
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Zendervai
 Posts: 197 |
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I am the pickiest person ever when it comes to video quality and, I'll be honest, the only releases I have a problem with are the ones where something is clearly wrong with the video or it's an upscale that really shouldn't be an upscale. Shakugan no Shana was like that. The show looked really muddy to start with and the upscale just made it look worse. It didn't help that there were occasional shots that clearly weren't upscaled.
And yeah, since Blu-rays are really expensive to make, a tiny little dip in quality isn't going to make me upset. The only time I notice that is if I'm watching on our big projector screen, and even then the only way it's visible is if the quality changes from shot to shot, which is probably an issue with the source material, unless it's a bad upscale. |
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CooperRC
Posts: 22 |
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I just remember the infamous case of BGC 2040 on DVD where a lot of people were saying that the Japanese release looked so much better than the US release, then it was discovered that both releases used exactly the same disk that would bring up a different menu depending on the region of the DVD player. The reality is that a lot of those supposed videophiles are just deceiving themselves into thinking that they see something better.
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NJ_
 Posts: 3021 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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Correction, the episodes in question were episode 10 on Disc 2 & 16 on Disc 3. I knew about this before getting my copy of Kai and once I saw it, I was immediately reminded of FUNimation's 2011 DVD re-release of the Dragon Ball movie box set because they produced new discs of movies 2-4 for that set (which was needed due to seamless branching & alternate angle-related issues on their original discs) and the second movie, Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, had the exact same framerate problems. Thankfully in that case I still had my 2005 DVD of that movie so I kept that disc instead. As for Sentai & Higurashi Kai, I wonder if those 2 episodes look as bad on their DVDs as they do on the BDs? If so then that could very well be a source-related problem. |
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MoonPhase1
Posts: 492 |
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Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't Tears To Tiara Blu-ray using VC-1 encoding which they no longer use? The Sentai Blu-ray I have with 13 episodes on 1 disc is Leviathan -the last defense- Subtitled-only version. But the episodes are shorter than normal. 20 minutes and 30 seconds per episode with the 1 minute and 30 seconds of English translated credits. |
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Ggultra2764
 Subscriber Posts: 3889 Location: New York state. |
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From what I've seen of Blu-Ray anime releases, 8-9 high-def episodes a disc seems to be the norm for many distributors.
With SD on the other hand, it looks possible to cram an entire 50+ episode series on a disc if Discotek's SD Blu-Ray release of Samurai Pizza Cats is anything to go by. |
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NJ_
Posts: 3021 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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Yeah, all of their early BDs were VC-1 but that was the only set at the time to have that many episodes crammed in BD50s.
Oh right, I forgot about Leviathan, all I remembered was it getting dubbed & re-released in a 2-BD set 8 months later. 
Anyway, I just checked my Qwaser of Stigmata set because I forgot about that show's OVA and I can confirm that the first disc has 13 episodes with the normal 23-plus minute length in each (25-plus if you count Sentai's slow as hell credit scrolls). |
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Kalessin
 Posts: 931 |
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I've noticed a definite problem with anime Blu-rays and banding in the video - even with 9 episodes per disc. I don't know how much of that has to do with the bitrate though as opposed to what the other settings are. With x264, aq-strength and psy-rd seem to really matter if you want to avoid banding - even when you have a good crf - and the defaults for those settings that get selected with --tuning=animation definitely have a tendancy to result in banding (e.g IIRC, it makes aq-strength be 0.6, when from what I've seen with my personal encodes, if you want to avoid banding, it really needs to be at 1.0, which would be the default without --tuning=animation). I have no idea what the critical settings would be with other encoders though, and encoding for Blu-ray has got to make things more interesting (e.g. I always encode with crf, never a fixed bitrate, but I'm not targetting Blu-rays; and Blu-ray requires a lower profile than you can get away with with just straight video files, and some of the fancier encoding settings wouldn't be allowed on a Blu-ray, because they require too much CPU). I have no idea how easy it is to avoid banding with the restrictions placed on Blu-rays. I have yet to see it on any releases that have a small number of episodes per disc on all of the discs (as opposed to the cases where the second disc in a set has a few but the first disc had 9 episodes, and they clearly used the same encoding settings on both discs), but that doesn't mean that it's never there when the discs have a small number of episodes, and it doesn't necessarily have to be there when the dics have a lot of episodes. But I have yet to notice banding on an Aniplex release or the few releases that I've imported from Japan, whereas Funimation and Sentai seem to have it frequently.
So, anyway, my big pet peeve is banding, and I see it quite frequently in anime releases, and it's the big reason that I'm often annoyed with their lack of video quality. But I also pay really close attention to video quality, and I watch anime on my computer monitor which is only a few feet away - if that. Unless the banding is really bad, no one is going to see it when watching on a TV; they'll be too far away. So, it doesn't surprise me at all if not many folks notice it. The really bad stuff like macro-blocking just doesn't happen even on the releases that cram the episodes in (whereas plenty of encodes that folks upload online use settings that do have problems like that). I suspect that the releases that end up with banding could have avoided it with different encoding settings that wouldn't necessarily reduce the number of episodes on disc (and even if it did, in the case where the first disc has 9 episodes, it would be easy just balance the episodes between discs to fix that problem). But I'd have to mess around with the actual tools used by the folks doing the professional Blu-ray encodes to know what you really can and can't do with them - especially with the encoding restrictions placed on Blu-rays. It may be that the encoders that they use just suck at avoiding banding. Regardless, I'd certainly be leery of shoving 12 or 13 episodes on a disc. Even if you can get them on there at the appropriate quality level, the risk is higher that you won't. But I can easily get better compression than is typically on a Blu-ray without losing quality. It's just that it requires encoding settings that aren't legal on Blu-ray. So, the question isn't really what you can do with h.264 so much as what you can do with h.264 that's encoded in a way that's allowed on a Blu-ray. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13566 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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I like how this article's thumb pic is the article following "Spice and Wolf Author Hasekura to Appear at NYCC" since Ami Koshimizu and Jun Fukuyama play love a couple in both shows.
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NJ_
Posts: 3021 Location: Wallington, NJ |
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Though in FUNi's case, they have had no problem cramming 10 episodes in some of their BDs (see DBZ, Yu Yu Hakusho & Future Diary).
Yup, Capcom did something similar with their Street Fighter 25th Anniversary box set since one of the things it came with was a 2-SD BD set which had a 70-plus minute documentary & the PG cut of the Street Fighter II movie in the first disc with all of the American cartoon (26 episodes) and both Street Fighter IV OVAs in the second disc, all in SD. Japan has also started releasing more SD BDs in recent months. It started with God Mars in 2011 and has since continued with Onegai My Melody, Ghost Sweeper Mikami and re-releases of Higurashi & Umineko. |
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Desa
 Posts: 285 |
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I've seen a really high quality encode of Eva 3.33 compressed down to 8.6 GB. The size of the untouched Blu-ray mux straight off the JP R2 disc is just over 30 GB (that's just the movie sans extras). That's about 100 min of high-quality (high-bitrate) animation condensed to less than a third of its original size, and comparing side-by-side I'd challenge anyone to see if they can actually notice a significant difference between the fan encoding and the original disc encoding.
Granted this is a highly-customized encoding using x264 and would most likely fall a tad out-of-spec for standard disc encoding the point remains that there is a LOT of headroom available for compressing anime footage. (The exception being high-grain sources which H.264 does not handle well unlike a codec such as SIF1 which processes grain in a more "analogue" fashion, but that's a different topic.) If you use all the available space on a Blu-ray you can easily fit 500 minutes or roughly 24 episodes that are 21 min. each, and this is assuming each of those episodes has an average quality similar to that of the Eva 3.33 movie, which I highly doubt is likely with TV anime having very different standards (lower) than theatrical anime. For many sources even 600 minutes is totally doable. Of course this all hinges upon the skill and experience of the encoder to bring out the best quality while remaining within spec and unfortunately there aren't many such talented encoders working to encode anime discs for the North American market, which is why many "pixel-pushers" prefer R2 discs over R1 citing superior quality. While it's certainly possible that Japanese disc encoders work with higher quality masters, this is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. Most plausible explanation for the quality gap is that Japan's anime disc industry has a higher number of experienced encoders on payroll. |
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Lighthalzen
Posts: 1 |
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Could that be because cartoons are a lot flatter than even anime, and the original resolution of the source (which is vector so I guess it's exported in 1920*1080) is bigger than anime (that is from what I've read, 720-900p at best). |
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configspace
Posts: 3717 |
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Yes, same here. Banding is the biggest most perceptible difference between Japanese and US releases. I'm sure everyone will notice too if it's pointed out to them or you do an A-B comparison. Sometimes macroblock noise can occur too, mostly from too low bitrate on grainy scenes, but that is not as common as banding. Anyways, regarding x264 settings, I found that tune=film is the best and is the most suited for anime ironically (the "animation" tuning is best for American cartoons), but results in gigantic sizes for all but the flattest scenes when used with CRF. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4471 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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The one issue I have with the single disk 12-episode Non Non Biyori Blu-Ray is that there is a layer change (or possibly some other obscure issue) that causes my player to freeze at a certain point in episode 8, during the scene when Komari, Renge, and Hotaru are doing "art in the autumn". I can get it to continue by "rewinding" (well, "reviewing") a few seconds and I presume that the Blu-Ray player playing the video that's already in the buffer gives it time for the laser to switch layers.
It's not a deal breaker for me but I still would have preferred it on two single-layer disks if I had known in advance about that single problem (especially since it's one of the prettiest scenes in the first season because of its crisp background art of detailed autumn foliage and I hate it having to be the exact scene where I experience the annoying interruption). |
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