encoding? more like mux raws, rite.

maybe someone can explain this to me, but if you run a “japanimation” season consisting of three movies (eva, astro boy, sky bloggers), why are you only screening each one once? whatever.

lots of otaku piled into a small theatre at the barbican to watch eva 1.0 on a moderatly sized screen. there was a girl who was cosplaying as asuka, but she stood alone in a sea full of jeans and tracksuits. the next closest thing was some dude wearing a blade runner-esque trenchcoat but he was probably wearing it seriously and not ironically at all, god have mercy on his soul.

maybe two points of interest in the audience. one, otaku who brought their friends who are girls along. i hesitate to say girlfriend since we all know if you watch animu you will die alone etc. maybe 20% were also nerds and the rest just civilians who got dragged along for the ride. two, there were some older gentlemen who were doing a fantastic job of hiding their power level. the dude sat next to me was like 55-60 years old. there was another guy further towards the screen who was probably around 35, rocking a tweed jacket, and judging from the expression on his face and body language, was trying his best not to let his guard down and geek out. tip of my hat to you, sir.

before the flick starts, some elderly blogger (not joking) comes up and talks about the movie and her take and blah blah blah boring. she does the obvious lucas/anno comparison but it goes downhill quickly from there (”chibi eva is just breathtaking”, said completely unironically). blog over, the flick begins.

this is the moment where i was thinking of walking out. the point of going to the cinema over downloading evil nasty pirate copies is that it’s a superior expierence, right? let’s play a game. i will summarize the barbican screening, see if you can pick out the problems and why it was utter fucking fail.

• They were using Funimation 1.01 DVD.
• The audio was stereo.
• It was a shitty projector which had tons of vertical banding.
• CAN’T READ THE SUBTITLES, WHITE ON WHITE HOLY SHIT.
• YELLOW TINT. Also, blown out contrast.

Let’s work through these point by point, yeah? Any screen that uses a DVD as the source to project 100″ or larger is automatically fucking fail. The BD is available right? I can understand not using the Japanese one because obviously it has no subtitles and they just want an easy method. Fine. But the Funimation BD comes out on March 9th, which means it pretty much has to have been authored and pressed by now. Why not just get a review/screener copy from them? They had to get the rights to screen it in the UK anyway, plus the trouble of going through the BBFC etc, why not just get the highest quality source? I mean fuck, Funi could have done a custom BD for them in about five minutes anyway. Take the Japanese video/audio stream and just mux your subs which you already did for the DVD. Easy modo. But even the BD is irrelevant when IT’S A GODDAMN CINEMA. You have a film projector right next to the fucking digital one, get a print and use that. I mean Christ.

Obviously since it’s a DVD, there was tons of banding/aliasing and compression issues anyway, on top of projector issues which clearly was old and wasn’t calibrated properly anyway. Whatever player/scaler they were using also failed at candence since you could see shit on scene changes and on the subtitles. And the audio was stereo. I didn’t even check if they had back speakers but I am invoking the “IT’S A CINEMA” rule.

Aside from some pretty cool typos and errors and questionable translations in the subs (”Sorry about early.”, and some other shit that just didn’t sound right), they were DVD subs. Except they weren’t yellow/black (hurray!), they were white with A NON EXISTENT BLACK BORDER. Seriously, this is the thinnest fucking border you have ever seen. I want to actually find the man who though this would be an amazing idea and congratulate him on successfully sussing out how to do this. Now remember the fact the projector isn’t calibrated (contrast etc), and the movie has tons of white/explosions blah blah, you couldn’t read a fucking thing in some places. Bravo.

All in all, I got double trolled by Lance and the Barbican (that would be a cool name for a band). The price I paid for this privilege? £8 (or $13 for you Amerikkkans). To essentially watch a DVD on a shitty projector with lots of otaku breathing on me.

Sorry Animu Industry, I’ll stick to my evil pirate copies since they’re obviously a superior experience. I have tickets to EVA 2.0 at the Glasgow Film Festival but now I don’t even know if I want to go after today’s troll.

JAMES CAMERON REINVENTED CINEMA, THREEDEE IS SO FUCKING AMAZING BLAH BLAH I WILL SUCK YOUR PENIS IF IT’S THREEDEE ETC.

is what most of the internet is saying and as usual the internet is wrong.

sam worthington plays some cripple who is very sensitive about his CRIPPLE WAYS, his brother had some avatar but died so now sam worthington is going to pimp about as an avatar, blah blah blah, amerikkka/middle east war metaphor, blah blah sam worthington does dances with wolves/last samurai blah blah blah. this goes on for three hours.

it’s not a bad movie, it’s just one you’ve seen before. then again no one really seems to give a shit about the plot, only the cgi and the threedee.

about cgi: good.

about threedee: mixed.

threedee is always going to be a gimmick no matter which filmmaker uses it. people hail james cameron and this movie because he has essentially used it slightly more meaningfully… and with less WHOOSH THREEDEE THINGS FLYING AT YOU OUT OF THE SCREEN BE AMAZED MORTALS effects than with some other dumb movies. the fact remains he is still using dumb WHOOSH effects, and ultimately the whole affair is rather tedious.

let’s run through some shit in no particular order

• anything in the foreground (static or moving) during a multi layered scene totally fucks with your vision and will give you immense eye strain. this is especially true in the first 30 minutes when you need to be “sold” on the overall effect.
• anything coming from the edges of the screen sucks. maybe it’s just where i was sitting (barely off to the left from the centre of the screen), but it was blurry and jerky for a half a second then you would get the intended visual.
• all the navi threedee scenes look better than the human threedee scenes. frankly there shouldn’t have been any threedee in human related scenes at all to give emphasis to the navi etc but of course we have to be reminded this is a THREEDEE PRESENTATION AND IT’S THE WAY OF THE FUTURE via over 9000 floating displays and golf balls and depth of field trickery.
• there were some genuinely impressive scenes where you do get sucked in to the presentation then get taken out about five seconds later via something dumb (either plot or threedee related).

all in all, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks since it’s going to make a shit ton of money because HYPE HYPE HYPE and people like me who want to see if it’s really a trainwreck based on the trailer.

so thanks cameron + fox, cool troll that earns you lots of money in the process. kudos.

it would either be the worst or best depending on your point of view. i’ll try and keep this based somewhat on reality and the current state of the industry, let’s assume i had all the capital + staff to even get off the ground.

- eva movies, new and old: mangle’s strangehold on the old movies lapsed, because they’re obviously just as poor as everyone else (and anno probably wants even more than he did ten years ago). funi have the first rebuild flick, but let’s say i made an aggresive business decision to license the other three since they’re being slow fags about their entire release schedule. plausible? fuck no. the costs for the old movies is one thing, if you realistically acquired both the old and new ones at the same time you’d probably be bankrupt in a few months. let’s assume you did a brand new restoration and released a blu-rei double pack (this is Lots of Money spent in itself). catalogue title sales aren’t great as it is, factor in that it’s anime and that everyone saw the old eva movies already, you wouldn’t come close to breaking even. the new ones have money making potential, but you’d never release it fast enough (even on blu-rei) to capitalize properly since you have to deal with theatrical bullshit + anno breathing down your neck to avoid reverse importation (remember, he has to dick around with it five times and delay the blu-rei as much as possible).

- macross frontier. probably an automatic “fuck no” due to harmony gold bullshit relating to everything macross related in r1 land. so that would require Lots of Money to settle. could potentially sell a lot in a blu-rei boxset though.

- sayonara zetsubou sensei. probably a fucking terrible idea even if it’s a good show. first, you’d have to find translators who wouldn’t kill themselves just upon hearing the show title. lots of cultural references and injokes, not to mention LOL DVD SUBTITLE LIMITATIONS would mean a pretty shitty presentation. no matter how you handled this (subtitles, seperate notes, commentary tracks), you will be told You’re Doing It Wrong. you could solve one issue with blu-rei but since shaft are fags and it’s sd it would be delicious upconvert with prettier subs. but then that doesn’t stop the elevens, right? license would be cheap but then it wouldn’t sell anything even if you did a perfect adaptation.

- kaiba. artsy fartsy pretentious bullshit, at least that’s how 90% of the market will see it. cheap, wouldn’t sell. people don’t mind giving up 80-90 minutes on something like triplettes du belleville (closest western equivalent i can think of), but 12/13 episodes is harder to swallow.

- golgo 13. you could try to sell this as the japanese james bond or some shit but let’s be honest, it’s the same fucking episode 52 times over. easy to translate and release though. might sell ok-ish.

i can think of other shit but it all starts to fall into the mediocre to shit categories, which funi and cr already have covered. also my imaginary business wouldn’t dub whatsoever (this would probably save a ton of money, and the market is probably warmer to the idea of sub-only more than it was many moons ago), and release only blu-rei if the show was produced in hd (this is a great idea to speed up adoption for blu-rei, a terrible idea if you actually want sales + moolah at this moment in time).

tl;dr the western and eastern market needs to die so both can come back and make much smarter decisions.

anime nowadays sucks. the amount of stupid bullshit has grown expotentially, and the amount of kind-of-interesting-shit has diminished rapidly. and if there is something you’re vaguely interested in (manga adaptation, or just original idea), chances are the studio in question is going to fuck it up, or cast aya hirano has a voice actor. or both. so shows are out.

movies? there really hasn’t been anything to genuinely look forward to for an extremely long time. the grin laggin movie turned out to be shit. so did sky crawlers (mamoru oshii and judd apatow should make a fucking movie together so they can bore the east and west to death simultaneously). kara no kyoukai is firmly in the “not shit” category but a sporadic release timetable hardly instils enthusiasm. so really what’s left that is relatively high profile are the new eva movies. Read the rest of this entry »

Anonymous 05/07/09(Thu)19:46 No.21083096
>>21082983
This blog is nothing but trolling.

yes i love you too /a/.

orite i forgot i had this blawg.

one of the more amusing things to find on the internets is when leechers are talking about anime encodes and how “grainy” they are. and others think encoders are deliberatly adding grain to all their encodes for [reasons].

the first part is really just leechers not understanding what the fuck they’re talking about. if they see something like this:

then apparently that = grain. no, shut up. that’s blocking. japan likes to use shitty mpeg2 encoders that have to deal with whatever bitrate they’re set at (yeah 12mbit/s was such a great idea japan love how well it’s working out for you), and do it in a single pass/realtime. blocking is usually the most common misconception but i’ve seen people describe blurry video as “grainy”, youtube 320×240/whatever as “grainy”. again shut up.

when leechers aren’t mistaking dust on their 14″ CRT for grain, they’re complaining that subbers are adding it deliberatly (when they’re not). i can probably count the number of times i’ve seen AddGrain() in fansub encodes (that aren’t trolls) over the past two years on one hand, yet someone on anidb claims we’re grainan’ it up on eden 04. unfortunatly he didn’t give timestamps and i don’t really watch the series, but let’s randomly flick through the encode to see what the balls is going on.

see any grain? i certainly don’t.

just for reference, if i were to add grain to an encode, it would not be subtle at all. if i’m going to troll and cause leechers to hurrburr about added grain (see: torabora), then i go full force.

woah, the show looks much better already.

so remember folks, the moral of the story is: you’re wrong.

交響詩篇エウレカセブン Blu-ray BOX 1 (初回限定生産)
Starring: 三瓶由布子, 名塚佳織 Director: 京田知

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Highly amusing!

• That Tory bitch got what was coming to her. Incredibly satisfying death.
• Kara’s epiphany while spiralling out of control into a black hole to the guitar riff of All Along the Watchtower? Appropriately epic if predictable (actually they pretty much just told us that same episode she was given the sheet anyway). Everyone knows the sky is blue, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it awesome information with the right editing and music.
• About Gaius: Space Playboy -> Space Doctor -> Space President -> Space Jesus -> Space Farmer.
• The last three minutes were fucking terrible.
• The Caprica flashbacks were largely unnecessary, much like the majority of Season 4.
• Season 1-4 blu-reis where.

rumours on the internets indicate cuda is fast become the replacement for dxva. coreavc are taking it extremely srsly, as is neuron with not one but three cuda enabled projects (MPEG2/VC1/AVC). a few weeks ago i said farewell to my ati 4850 and ordered a gtx 285. Read the rest of this entry »

Torrents are done. Let’s check this shit out. Read the rest of this entry »