I need a review of WINGS OF HONNEAMISE.
12-31-00, 12:06 AM
#2
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www.animeondvd.com has a running report on what went wrong with WOH...here's an analysis from the discussion in their forum.
"WOH analysis"
After hearing about all the video problems with this disc I was very anxious to get my hands on it and see what the real story was.
DISCLAIMER: I am no expert. I am simply programmer and DVD enthusiast. I obtained this information using tools that are probably illegal to use in USA (I myself am not a US citizen and do not reside in the USA).
First of all, I watched the disc on my Sony 27" Wega with a Pioneer 525 DVD player. The video quality wasn't as bad as I have heard some people describe it, however, it was nowhere near DVD quality. Still, it was watchable.
Next, I pulled off the original VOB files and proceded to walk frame-by frame through various spots in the movie. Right off, some things were readily apparent.
Problems with the source:
A lot of people have speculated that this DVD was created from a laserdisc master. After viewing a dozen different sequences on the disc, it is quite obvious that whatever the source material for this release was, it most certainly was NOT any kind of original film (24 fps). What we see on frame-by-frame analysis is that the entire movie is interlaced. BADLY interlaced. The source was clearly either VHS or laserdisc-based (30 fps). There are obvious telecine artifacts all over the place. Worse, this source was captured incorrectly.
So now you've got an interlaced capture of an interlaced source. You can see this if you try to perform an inverse-telecine on the mpeg-2 stream. No matter how hard you try, you won't end up with the original 24 frames-per-second -- the source is just too badly garbled.
This isn't the first time that I've seen this. Some ADV titles like Slayers TMP and the first Eva disc have the same problem. Why then does WOH look so much worse than these mediocre-looking discs? Well, while Manga botched the original video capture, the authoring house TOTALLY botched the video mastering.
Problems with the master:
There are two different methods of encoding an NTSC DVD. The first method is standard 30fps interlaced. This is what most OAVs and TVs shows are captured and played back at. This is a requirement of NTSC televisions. The second method is 24fps progressive encoding. Most (99.9%) of all movies (by movies, I mean widescreen movies shot on 35mm film and designed to be shown in theatres) are encoded as 24fps progressive with some special flags set on the stream so that it plays back at the required 30fps on our TVs. This process is called 3:2 pulldown or telecine.
So which is WOH? Well, it's both. Or neither depending on your point of view. An analysis of the MPEG2 stream shows that the movie is encoded as 30fps progressive. So what does this mean and why should you care?
Well, there's no such thing as 30fps progressive. To understand why this disc plays back so horribly, you need to understand a bit about how NTSC displays work...
An interlaced 30 frames-per-second video stream isn't played back the way one might think. Your DVD player doesn't just display one frame after another at a rate of 30 per second. Instead, it breaks each frame up into 2 fields. A field is made up of either the odd or even lines of a particular frame. 30fps x 2 = 60 fields per second (or 60hz which is the standard for NTSC video). Now when you have a properly encoded 30fps interlaced stream, the dvd player is told to first display all the odd lines of frame 1, then all the even lines of frame 1. Then it goes on to frame 2 and repeats the process. Actually, sometimes it starts with all the even lines first. The process for determining which lines get processed in which order is called "field order" and is encoded as part of the MPEG-2 stream as well.
Still with me? I hope so, because it gets a bit more complicated now. If you've ever looked at the 30fps interlaced output of a DVD in a program like FlasK MPEG or MPEG2AVi or DVD2AVI, you'll notice that most of the frames have interlaced artifacts in them. Namely, you see half of two different pictures in a single frame. Why then don't you see this on your TV? Because of the playback method described above. The odd and even lines are extracted seperately and played seperately. So you never see the entire interlaced picture. If WOH had been encoded this way, there probably would have been WAY less complaints. The problem is that that the whole 30fps stream was encoded as progressive.
Again, there's no such playback standard. So instead of weaving the interlaced stream together properly and playing it back at 60 fields per second, your DVD player happily displays all 30 frames in their ORIGINAL INTERLACY GORINESS. For those of us not gifted with 16 screens, our DVD players resize the image to 4:3 for us and instead of downsampling 60 solid fields, it resizes 30 progressive (but really interlaced) frames. When you reduce the vertical size from 480 to 360 you lose the sharp interlaced edges and end up with ghosts all over the place. Also, because the stream is progessive there is no field order encoded into it, so some sequences are overly-jerky as your DVD player hasn't been told in which order to play things.
Bottom line:
This DVD is broke. I can live with the fact that Manga had a bad master, but the fact that this DVD was authored out-of-spec really bothers me. This is a VERY amatueur mistake and can be relatively easily corrected. Let me say this a little more clearly -- "THIS DISC IS DEFECTIVE." It is just as defective as the missing subs in BGC or the out-of-phase audio problem with the Slayers box set. Sure, there are some setups out there that will mask the problem (ie: HDTVs won't introduce the ghosting issues because the image doesn't have to be resized) but the simple fact remains that this disc should probably be recalled, remastered and reissued.
------------------
Inching ever closer to the 1000 post club...
[This message has been edited by Foole (edited December 30, 2000).]
"WOH analysis"
After hearing about all the video problems with this disc I was very anxious to get my hands on it and see what the real story was.
DISCLAIMER: I am no expert. I am simply programmer and DVD enthusiast. I obtained this information using tools that are probably illegal to use in USA (I myself am not a US citizen and do not reside in the USA).
First of all, I watched the disc on my Sony 27" Wega with a Pioneer 525 DVD player. The video quality wasn't as bad as I have heard some people describe it, however, it was nowhere near DVD quality. Still, it was watchable.
Next, I pulled off the original VOB files and proceded to walk frame-by frame through various spots in the movie. Right off, some things were readily apparent.
Problems with the source:
A lot of people have speculated that this DVD was created from a laserdisc master. After viewing a dozen different sequences on the disc, it is quite obvious that whatever the source material for this release was, it most certainly was NOT any kind of original film (24 fps). What we see on frame-by-frame analysis is that the entire movie is interlaced. BADLY interlaced. The source was clearly either VHS or laserdisc-based (30 fps). There are obvious telecine artifacts all over the place. Worse, this source was captured incorrectly.
So now you've got an interlaced capture of an interlaced source. You can see this if you try to perform an inverse-telecine on the mpeg-2 stream. No matter how hard you try, you won't end up with the original 24 frames-per-second -- the source is just too badly garbled.
This isn't the first time that I've seen this. Some ADV titles like Slayers TMP and the first Eva disc have the same problem. Why then does WOH look so much worse than these mediocre-looking discs? Well, while Manga botched the original video capture, the authoring house TOTALLY botched the video mastering.
Problems with the master:
There are two different methods of encoding an NTSC DVD. The first method is standard 30fps interlaced. This is what most OAVs and TVs shows are captured and played back at. This is a requirement of NTSC televisions. The second method is 24fps progressive encoding. Most (99.9%) of all movies (by movies, I mean widescreen movies shot on 35mm film and designed to be shown in theatres) are encoded as 24fps progressive with some special flags set on the stream so that it plays back at the required 30fps on our TVs. This process is called 3:2 pulldown or telecine.
So which is WOH? Well, it's both. Or neither depending on your point of view. An analysis of the MPEG2 stream shows that the movie is encoded as 30fps progressive. So what does this mean and why should you care?
Well, there's no such thing as 30fps progressive. To understand why this disc plays back so horribly, you need to understand a bit about how NTSC displays work...
An interlaced 30 frames-per-second video stream isn't played back the way one might think. Your DVD player doesn't just display one frame after another at a rate of 30 per second. Instead, it breaks each frame up into 2 fields. A field is made up of either the odd or even lines of a particular frame. 30fps x 2 = 60 fields per second (or 60hz which is the standard for NTSC video). Now when you have a properly encoded 30fps interlaced stream, the dvd player is told to first display all the odd lines of frame 1, then all the even lines of frame 1. Then it goes on to frame 2 and repeats the process. Actually, sometimes it starts with all the even lines first. The process for determining which lines get processed in which order is called "field order" and is encoded as part of the MPEG-2 stream as well.
Still with me? I hope so, because it gets a bit more complicated now. If you've ever looked at the 30fps interlaced output of a DVD in a program like FlasK MPEG or MPEG2AVi or DVD2AVI, you'll notice that most of the frames have interlaced artifacts in them. Namely, you see half of two different pictures in a single frame. Why then don't you see this on your TV? Because of the playback method described above. The odd and even lines are extracted seperately and played seperately. So you never see the entire interlaced picture. If WOH had been encoded this way, there probably would have been WAY less complaints. The problem is that that the whole 30fps stream was encoded as progressive.
Again, there's no such playback standard. So instead of weaving the interlaced stream together properly and playing it back at 60 fields per second, your DVD player happily displays all 30 frames in their ORIGINAL INTERLACY GORINESS. For those of us not gifted with 16 screens, our DVD players resize the image to 4:3 for us and instead of downsampling 60 solid fields, it resizes 30 progressive (but really interlaced) frames. When you reduce the vertical size from 480 to 360 you lose the sharp interlaced edges and end up with ghosts all over the place. Also, because the stream is progessive there is no field order encoded into it, so some sequences are overly-jerky as your DVD player hasn't been told in which order to play things.
Bottom line:
This DVD is broke. I can live with the fact that Manga had a bad master, but the fact that this DVD was authored out-of-spec really bothers me. This is a VERY amatueur mistake and can be relatively easily corrected. Let me say this a little more clearly -- "THIS DISC IS DEFECTIVE." It is just as defective as the missing subs in BGC or the out-of-phase audio problem with the Slayers box set. Sure, there are some setups out there that will mask the problem (ie: HDTVs won't introduce the ghosting issues because the image doesn't have to be resized) but the simple fact remains that this disc should probably be recalled, remastered and reissued.
------------------
Inching ever closer to the 1000 post club...
[This message has been edited by Foole (edited December 30, 2000).]
12-31-00, 09:52 AM
#3
gamer for life
On an RCA, Sony, and Samsung played on a 27, 31 and 35 inch TV, I thought the movie looked good. A little soft, but I saw none of the problems listed over at animeondvd, and feel that you should try it at least to see if it plays on your player. If I would score the picture quality, I would give it a B-...and most of that is specks and softness, and not digital problems. Bottom line, get it if you love the movie, and if you do have problems, return it.
