high definition anime primer
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HDTV was invented by a bunch of standards fanboys. More correctly, a bunch of system engineers who view and debate about encoding as we do Mai Otome… and thusly they created too many views, too many formats, too much confusion for the consumer. It didn’t help that Europe, Europe without France, France, Japan, and the US all had different ideas for HDTV. I was browsing through Wikipedia’s entry about HDTV, and it was much ado about nothin’. I’ll just go through one thing… “What does HD mean for anime viewing?”
A lot of shows airing in Japan has been HDTV for a while… analog HDTV. They adapted a standard long before America started defining theirs. Older series presented in 16:9 are most likely analog HDTV. For purposes of this blog, because I live in America, I’ll refer to HDTV as American digital HDTV standard, which incorporates not only image quality but sound as well. American HDTV is mostly 1080i with 5.1 surround. 1080i translates into 1024 x 576 on a computer. When I turn on the TV and watch something like the Super Bowl or PBS, it’s 1080i with 5.1 surround.
There’s two HD formats “hipper” right now, 720p and 1080p. The “p” is for progressive whereas the “i” was for interlaced. Progressive has two big advantages over interlaced: no flickering of narrow horizontal patterns and slightly larger vertical presentation. 720p is 1280 x 720 on a computer– in other words, 720p has more pixels than 1080i. 1080p is the king thus far at a whopping 1920 x 1080 pixels.
The problem, of course, is how the heck do you transmit this information?
In Japan, it’s a combination of their satellite stations and standard over the air (OTA) stations. Nowadays, most HD anime shown in Japan are either 1080i (Fate/Stay Night, REC) or 720p (Kamichu!, Ergo Proxy). There’s also not a huge abundance of 1080i or 720p anime anyway… not that HD would have helped GSD‘s plot. The Japanese TV stations like to pimp when they show HD content, so look for a HD 5.1 or HV 5.1 logo next to a show if it’s going to be shown on HD on that station (i.e. WOWWOW’s Ergo Proxy site). Generally, the normal resolution version of a show will run a week or two in advance of the HD, which completely perplexes me since in America, HD and SD content run side-by-side.
Unfortunately, we don’t get access to channels like WOWWOW HD in America. This basically makes it that our only way to get HD anime is through Share or through fansubs.
DVDs are designed to only hold 480p, 720 x 480 ish, so it’s not up to task. HD-DVD is designed for 1080i, but for 1080p, only Blu-Ray has the space to hold two hours worth on a single layer. Of course, neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray will be available in America for a few more months, and even then, prices for players will not drop below $500 until after the PS3 comes out in the US. The question is how soon companies are going to crank out HD-DVD or Blu-Ray anime? I have no idea, but guessing from the first batches of anime DVDs, it took the major R1 distributors over two years to really get rolling on them. I can see it now… ADV offering Eva Platinum HD in 2008 thus causing a thousand fanboys to rebuy the set for like the fifth time.
For a show like Fate/Stay Night and Ergo Proxy (which has GENEON USA explicitly mentioned as a funding source), I would speculate that it most likely will see a normally DVD release before it ever sees a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD release. The only other way to get HD content in America is for an OTA channel like PBS or something like HBO HD to broadcast it. I get the feeling PBS isn’t going to be showing FSN anytime soon. I’ve been looking forward to HD anime for sometime now, and it’s still not here. Because of the seemingly expensive players and non-existant media, I think it’ll still take another year and more likely two before we start seeing real HD anime in the states.
But for HD anime to be effective, it has to be drawn with extra detail. Most shows that are in HD don’t really encompass the detail that makes HD truly enjoyable. Ergo Proxy and Kamichu are two shows that made good use of HD. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to how anime evolves and embraces HD… though a part of me hopes that the studios won’t get caught up with the animation and forget about the plot (*cough* Beyond the Clouds *cough*). Hopefully, they will put good storytelling first (yes, I’m looking at you Sunrise) with flashy animation as a sweet bonus (Ka-mi-chu!).
Here’s a fairly incomplete listing of what has aired in HD thus far… if anyone knows of more shows, please feel free to add:
- Angel Heart
- Beyond the Clouds
- Binchou-tan
- Black Cat
- Ergo Proxy
- Kamichu
- Fate/Stay Night
- Guyver the Boosted Armor
- Ichigo Mashimaro (???)
- REC
- Tide Line Blue
- To Heart 2
22 Responses to “high definition anime primer”
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I’m pretty sure you got some of your stuff wrong. 1080i and 1080p are both the same resolution (1920×1080, hence the name, otherwise you would think that 1080i would be called 576p) the difference is that 1080i can only produce 30 frames per second while 1080p can produce 60 frames per second (with interlaced only half of a frame is drawn at a time, with progressive the whole frame is drawn). For the most part the only things that would need that 60 frames per second would be video games.
Plus DVD is not really considered 480p (which resolution is actually 640×480 which is the resolution a typical non hd tv can display in) PCs can display DVDs at it’s full resolution while your typical tv can’t.
One Piece has aired in HD since episode 207 in late 2004, but I don’t know what resolution. Don’t have an HD set, so I don’t really know how to go about checking.
Kamichu was broadcast at standard resolution and then upscaled to 720p by the encoder. That’s why the Kamichu subs by adtrw were listed as fake hd
So much for Kamichu making good use of hd
I seem to recall somebody mentioning that Ichigo Mashimaro was shown in HD, but I can’t recall where, and I have no idea if it’s true or not. Just mentioning it since you asked.
>> So much for Kamichu making good use of hd
Well, it would. You have to admit that there’s more detail in Kamichu than in most other anime series. :/
I don’t think we need a new medium for HDTV at all. Just look how great a 30min show looks encoded with H.264 and compressed into less than 200 MB. Sure there’s some color-bleeding but it’s not blurry or blocky at all. A DVD has a capacity of about 4 to 9 GB. With that much space you wouldn’t see a difference between the original picture and the encoded one even if you looked closely. DVD still uses MPEG-2 which is about a decade(!) old. Just remember for a moment what kind of PCs were available 10 years ago. Before MP3 was inventented, digital audio was a pain because it was simply too much data. With MPEG-4 video codecs nowadays it’s a very similar situation. Keeping a whole DVD on the disk or transferring it over a network is a pain. Older codecs have been acceptable for quite some time now but I think the newest codecs have now reached a stage where you don’t have to compromise quality for size anymore.
There are probably other reasons behind introducing a new medium. For example, a saturation in the DVD market but also the desire for a better copy protection of course. Similar could be said about HDTV. Sure a higher resolution is always great but the real reasons are: a saturation in the TV market, LCD make large screens affordable in contrast to CRTs, analog HDTV had also bandwidth issues and IIRC some HDTV satellite was damaged right from the start. Last but not least, again copy protection. Newer HDTV sets support HDMI/HDCP which will be a requirement for most HDTV devices and content. Bye bye, analog output.
This is more or less like a trojan horse. You could really get HDTV for “free” by just using a better codec for DVDs. Of course unless you want to watch them on a computer, you’d still need a new DVD player but the whole thing would be much cheaper for everybody. There are many DVD players which can already play DivX and other MPEG-4 encoded videos anyway.
I’ve never understood why eveyone complpains about the plot of Kumo no Mukou, Yakusoku no Basho. You had to pay attention, but I was able to follow the plot just fine on the first viewing, which is something that not all anime can claim. And isn’t one of the great things about anime that it challenges us?
>> 1
Yes, so progressive makes use of all lines, hence if something is 1080p or 480p, it has 1080 and 480 lines vertically respectively. For any given frame, interlaced always has half the # of pixels for the same number because it draws only half out at once.
>> 2
I have yet to find an One Piece raw in HD. 16:9 yes, HD no.
>> 3
There are Japanese raws for HD Kamichu. I have no clue what fansubbers do or did.
>> 5
Never found a raw for HD Ichigo Mashimaro…
>> 7
Actually, what do you think is the standard for HD DVD? h264. But the HD DVD players can decode both h264 and mpeg2… something my DVD player can’t do. I can encode a DVD with h264, but the dumb thing won’t know what to do with it. I’ll have to buy a new player anyway!
>> 8
It wasn’t about following the plot… the plot was just a bit bland.
>>There are Japanese raws for HD Kamichu. I have no clue what fansubbers do or did.
The original encoders in Japan upscaled Kamichu to HD, not the fansubbers. It was not broadcast in HD thus it does not have any extra detail.
Just because it’s using half as many pixels doesn’t automatically make it 1024 x 576 on a computer, it still has 1920 horizontal lines of resolution, interlaced or not, a field doesn’t magically disappear if it isn’t being drawn to, its just that no data is being sent to it.
Why then are 1080i anime raws usually 1024×576? 1. Because it would be too much of a burden on most people’s cpus if it was at full resolution. Especially if its H264 format 2. The file size of a full 1080i anime would be huge in order to look half as decent as it’s smaller resolution comrades. and 3. Almost no one has a monitor that can display full 1080i, however there are plenty of people who have monitors at 1024×768 resolution, so the raw folk go for that.
>> 11
Here’s an article about this. And another.
Okay, let me get into some gory details… interlaced is 2x at half rows while progressive is 1x at full rows. For progressive, every 1/30th of a second, the whole screen is redrawn. For interlaced, every 1/60th of a second, 1/2 of the screen is redrawn (every other line). This works great for CRT because the residual light from the previous scan is still somewhat visible during the next scan, thus tricking the eye. For LCD and plasma-type displays, because they don’t have the leftover glow that a CRT leaves, so they must draw out everything and at once. Hence why progressive is preferred for LCDs and plasmas.
So what happens when you play an interlaced video on an LCD? Like if I want to watch a DVD on my 21″ LCD screen? There are a few ways to deal with this, as explained here.
In very simplistic terms, they can’t just toss out the missing info every frame and just smush it down– it would look awful since the rows are juxtaposed and the resultant video would look like it is bouncing. Instead, they merge the two frames into one through interpolation. The 1024 x 576 size is the result of an interlaced video interpolated to be full framed video.
Progressive has no such limitation. 720 rows is 720 rows for progressive.
In summary… interlaced is 60 frames with only half the rows drawn each frame. To convert it into something smooth, the frame info is interpolated by a variety of methods. The preferred of which produces the 1024 x 576 size.
Finally, 1024 x 576 is not resized– that is the native resolution. Resizing interlaced video has huge drawbacks, as you can read here.
That’s why those fansubs are in 1024 x 576– that’s the native resolution. Plus, if your CPU can decode 1024 x 576, it can decode 1280 x 720. I just did a little test averaging CPU cycles for 1 minute of watching a 720p raw for Ergo Proxy (50% CPU use) vs. 1080i raw for REC (50% CPU use) vs. 480p raw for REC (24% CPU use)
For all the sources you put up, NONE of them say that 1080i will come up as 1024×576 on a computer.
I believe by what you meant by interpolation is what is called de-interlacing, it is what is used to convert a interlaced source to a progressive one so THEN it can be smushed down with out the resultant nastiness that you speak of.
There are several ways of performing this deinterlacing, the method that you speak of most likely the bob method obvious the bob method would NOT reproduce the 1024×576 you speak of as it doesn’t reduce the horizontal resolution, yep, it stays 1920 no matter what.
So how did they deinterlace these animes? They pretty much used a combination of techniques, in this case, Bob+Weave, also called progessive scan or adaptive deinterlacing. Either of the two techniques alone would produce a pretty poor image but together they produce an image that nothing other than expensive equipment can at EXACTLY the same resolution as it’s source. After it has been deinterlaced, it can be resized to any size you wish, in this case 1024×576.
Since you know how much cpu usage a typical video can do (did you turn on post processing? try turning it on and see what happens) think of how much cpu power it is going to take to display a 1920×1080 image…..
Alright I shall counter your sources with one of my own, http://www.100fps.com/ which shows all this. Even though the site talks about divx encoding, its information is also correct about h264 as well
Okay, let’s try to agree on these points:
1. 1080i is 1080 vertical lines, but only half are displayed per frame. This is great for CRTs, not great for basically everything else.
2. To make it great for everything else, the signal must be deinterlaced.
3. There are various methods for deinterlacing, and whatever you choose, you can end up with any size ranging from 540 to 1080 vertical lines.
Fate/Stay NIGHT, Ichigo Mashimaro, Binchou-tan dont look like hdtv. They are ugly ugly ugly ugly. Mashimaro and Binchou-tan aired on BS-i, and they dont do much HDTV (if at all – go to their website and check, they have a seperate ‘image’ for HDTV content in their programme). Just cause the widescreen encodes are big rezolution doesnt mean the source was hdtv (say both seasons of Rozen Maiden airing on BS-i, that was no hdtv quality).
GITS SAC aired in hdtv afaik; Paradise Kiss did too; Mushishi has H.D.Vision in the 1280×720 encodes I have as well so Im guessing its hd too. Honey and Clover seems to have aired in high quality as well (much better than the dvds anyways)… nothing else comes to my head atm.
Commenting on:
“Finally, 1024 x 576 is not resized– that is the native resolution. Resizing interlaced video has huge drawbacks, as you can read here.”
If youre talking about Beyond the Clouds, then the PSNR/manhole encoder used a 1280×720 BS-hi raw for it… (got that raw if you must know :p)
And why was Tide-Line Blue not included in the list after all? It looks hd no matter how you look at the 1280×720 raws. :|
Ok, im blind (TLB is there) and sorry for the maddd replies, i just cant figure out how to edit, lol….. Black Cat for me is also in the Mashimaro, F/SN, Binchou-tan, To Heart 2 (believe it was BS-A?) unpretty bin.
both hddvd and bluray support 1080p.
and 1080i loses resolution because of the kell factor. interlacing loses detail and introduces artifacts, so its resolution is lowe r than 1080p.
Few details here:
1. One Piece has broadcast in “Hi-Vision” which is just generic Japanese code for HD. Want proof? Check Share or bt for “one piece 1280×720” and you will find an honest-to-god HD raw. A fansubbing group for One Piece (I will leave them anonymous out of respect) is currently planning to release secondary copies of their weekly subs to favor the HD-viewing community.
2. A good rip can easily cram 400-450mb with AVC and AAC at 720p. A 720p movie with AVC and AAC can easily cram 90-130 minutes into a perfect dvd-r package. 1080i currently stands at 8-13 gb per movie due to the fact that they are rarely ever re-encoded, and thus left as TS (mpeg-2 transport streams, an inferior format on the verge of death) files. I have also seen 1080p copies around. If you were expecting it to be more than twice as large as a 1080i file, I must tell you to go back to sixth grade math. As has been explained here and can easily be researched elsewhere, interlaced scan punches two frames into one to save bandwidth, whereas progressive shows them all in full. As such, a common 1080p master will be (you guessed it) a 25gb TS. Yes, HD-dvd can handle it, thanks to the power of dual layers.
3. Hachinko to Karoba (excuse my romaji) did not run in Hi-Vision, as far as I can tell, but H&C 2 probably did. Samurai Champloo, as well as Samurai X, has run in HD. Don’t bother trying to find either though, unless you’re proficient in Japanese or Spanish. Zegapain and The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi both run(ran) in HD.
4. Hi-Def is not a strict term, but it is also not loose. 576p, even if it is higher than 480p, just isn’t Hi-Def. High definition follows standards, but I believe the accurate definition, if you’re not going by the books, is simply a resolution beyond EDTV (a maximum of 493056 pixels, roughly). 1024 by 576 qualifies as HD, if done right. I personally recommend 720p, since I watch many movies and anime on my living room projector.
5. When all else fails, the best way to qualify HD is just by looking at it. If you see blurring, blockiness, or other obvious defects that result from low bitrates or resolutions, it’s just not HD. It can be 3200x1800p300 for all I care, but if it looks like someone took a dump on my projection lamp, it’s not high definition. It’s low definition posted over a high area, which is nothing more than taking a pixel and stretching it thousands of times. If your high-res anime is less than 380mb or so, don’t touch it. It may look feasible, but the blockiness will speak for itself.
Darker than Black has 720p releases on the net so it shoulde added.