anime and smart smoother hiq

Hi midiguy- I agree with you completely. I think Sh0dan must have been referring to American style cartoons like the Simpsons with big areas of solid color when he recommended Ave. Pixels for animation. You get the finely detailed backgrounds of anime and Ave. Pixels just kills them. So I also believe thet Wt. Ave. is the one to use for anime (even if it's slower than usual).

FUNimation has done excessive edge enhancement for their DBZ DVDs, I saw some french DBZ DVDs and they don't have that noise at all, the original image is indeed quite soft. So you'll need indeed a very high diameter to get rid of all noise, so 7 is good. But I think , it's not really necessary, BilinearResize is sufficient. May be you get amused now but after a while you'll get bored, because SmartSmoother is slow like hell.

Well, burning and such stuff isn't annoying for me, I rarely notice it. I don't have time to clean those small fishes anyway. I ripped that particular #118 episode with BilinearResize & TemporalSmoother(2,1) only and it looks very good:

that looks pretty good, but there is still a significant amount of noise around edges and what not.. also, if you get some fast motion scenes, the noise levels are very extreme. with dbz particularly, spatial and temporal smoothing is good to do.

What you're talking about isn't noise anymore, but compression artifacts. For these you'll need SmartSmoother of course. As said, I don't use it mainly because of lack of time (and other small fishes), SmartSmoother is indeed damn damn slow. little bit off-topic: Just wondering about the perfect DBZ DVD: 1) Digitally Remastered 2) FILM encoding instead of 29,97fps interlaced 3) Higher bitrate in the range of 9xxx kbps on double layer DVDs Man, that would be nice :rolleyes:

Well, it may be true that the masters aren't thaaat good, but: 1) it's funi that is sharpening the videos => much more noise, much harder to compress videos At least after sharpening, they could remaster a bit (see movie 1 to 3 done by pioneer, almost perfect image quality) 2) it's funi that is encoding them, not only interlaced but also with a rather low bitrate (not even 5Mbit/s avg) because they are too stingy to use DVD-9 discs. Even the DVD-5 discs they are using now have most of the time over 600MB free space -.- And the movies DVDs are the last: about 2GB free space left! why? because they're too dumb to encode it CBR at full bitrate -.- And not only that, they encode the japanese track in 2.0 instead of 1.0 and the last Movie5 DVD, english is encoded 2 times, one time in 2.0 and one time in 5.1, as if the Dolby Digital decoders can't downmix the 5.1 tracks to 2.0... the spanish track was also done in 2.0 instead of 1.0 What a waste of bitrate! But I should also thank god that they are properly telecining the videos, because if they were like Trigun or Evangelion, I don't know what I would have done!!... and that we could have DBZ on DVD uncut in japanese :D And... yeah, the subtitles are excellent! especially that they use the whole -sama -san -kun and stuff, really cool from FUNi!

there are supposedly some very rare official japanese DBZ DVD... I know that some chinese company mastered some DVDs from some crappy laser discs but the video quality is really stinky and the colours are very dull (I got a teeny bit of a VOB of it..) but, the rumor is, that there are in fact some OFFICIAL japanese DBZ DVD out there, they are just very rare... I wonder if that is true..

No, there is no official japanese DBZ DVDs. There is only the DBZ movies & TV specials on VHS and LD, but not on DVD. The Series aren't available in any format.