Polemic:
There has been a lot of trash working on this title. Where fansubs are more worried on popularity and download count than making quality releases/restorations, I always keep humble on behalf of the project.
Part 1. My first course of action was to talk to the encoder of the last release available of this title on nyaa. This (link) was my first approach, you can see his snarky harshness at its best, and this the second (1st page), or maybe I got the order wrong... Anyway I made my way through tests and self-learning and made a release that was well received. The guy had me stuck in his craw and despite his no English ability he was brave enough to trash talk in my upload comment section. This is part one of the story.
Part 2. After the Perfect Blue restoration got some coverage, I got this title offered to BakaBT by someone else. Many people agreed and supported the offer (all the four that commented on the offer and the at-the-time BakaBT release). Soon after, the offer was put down in its most ridiculous form. Please, just let me upload a screenshot of the situation.
Me thinking loud: "It's funny that my colors are worse than the old one when the old ones weren't even addressed...Also now the "richer" colors seems to be a "poor" approach to color correction, since it removes so much detail (whatever he meant with "detail").
Oh! the houses, the faces. Now I understand, the guy is talking about the negative ringing you get when overshooting (oversharpen). The source (and old release) have this so I guess that's what he refers to "details". On the other hand it's funny he doesn't spot REAL detail loss on sky, ground, and rock textures on the old release. I wonder... /ironic."
The critic was so trolling and infuriating that I had at least to make a post on it. So I had my last thread from part one, and there I put all things in place. Soon all the troll friends showed up like rabbits, without arguments. It just goes to show what is BakaBT all about, a very well designed web/tracker for anime which its purpose doesn't hold up to its design. In reality its just a place for some kiddies or maybe in their early twenties that don't even know what goes on restoring an animation work as it clearly shows in this thread. Their mouth is full of terms they don't even have a grasp of. Oh, why such a blunt statement, you ask? Just read here ;)
Part 3. Damn, this is like going to the cinema without leaving home, fuck it, this is way better! Because of this, this time the "Kaze wo Mita Shonen" polemic section is worth its own blog post.
If in part 1 and 2 ranting about quality restoration work wasn't trolling enough, we got a newbie (but you know... a staff colleague newbie) in the party. It wouldn't be nothing to call home about if this noob wasn't the one that provoked my ban on the BakaBT forums, "der richter" (aka "Judgment" -uh, I bet the guy has complexes-). He decided that this was a great -trolling- moment to offer his crappy version, the guy seems to don't pour any love to his works, it's a matter of quantity over quality. I found his web where his main task seems to do typsetting (some snob subtitling task), his first touch with avisynth is as recent as October 2013, less than 2 years in which he seemed to stick with tools that I created like SMDegrain (basically an advanced but entry friendly denoiser tool), yet he is careless enough to spit things like "1 hour filtering + 1 hour testing encoding", "lazy mode encode", or "hopefully i will be spared with possible upcoming drama", as if he was calling me out to cause some stir where it could be easy for his "lover" Chiya to ban me again (yeah, that pathetic). Later one guy gave him some constructive critic but it was in vain, his offer was ready to be blindly pushed up to legible and replace the sono1998 release in just a matter of days (FYI, that's rare, I have seen offers wait well 6 months or more, common is weeks).
Let's talk about the quality, SMDegrain is scalable, that is as great for newcomers as for more advanced users, what this means is that you will see many noobs like "der richter" misuse it (and hence give bad impression about the filter). I myself used SMDegrain for my release with better results, as you can see hims lacks stabilization and the temporal denoising isn't strong enough so it gets that disgusting swarming worms effect, processing things with Dehalo (for the ringing) doesn't help the image look less like a moving oil-paint. It doesn't seem he did anything else, other than sharpening (bundled inside SMDegrain). It *can* look fine in screenshots due to his conservative approach (other than strong dehalo), but the crappy truth comes in the moving medium.
Kaze wo Mita Shonen [Judgment] Kaze wo Mita Shonen [Dogway]
Other issues besides lack of stabilization and temporal denoising, is lack of color correction, either levels/colors/saturation, everything is practically untouched. Also the strong Dehalo produced a very soft look of the lineart which gives it an even thicker look, the bounce back ringing is not handled either. Dehalo also caused some dimming of bright spots and highlights reducing the detail richness of the original and some smearing of low frequency detail. To make things worse, he used a PAL source (always an awful idea) as depicted by the 576 width size, and to give a false impression of quality not only he encoded at 10-bit to preserve the beautiful swarming worms effect of the above image but ensured to grant it with a generous and at the same time wasteful 720p-worthy 3200kbps, so you don't miss ever a worm.
Overall it looks very poor and lazy, and I feel bad for the sono1998 release which at least was half good.
1 comment:
lmaoooooooo this is gold
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