Just Watched Dryl On A 110" Screen...impressions..

[isamu]

Hey guys.

Well I just watched my favorite film of all time on my BenQ 8720 1280x720p DLP front projector. Macross DYRL official import R2 verison. What a religious experience. Nothing like seeing the big battle at the end on 110" screen.

Although the overall experience watching the film was sublime, I was slightly annoyed by the picture quality suffering from interlace "lines" and "jaggies" on my HTPC. I read Hurin's review before watching the film and pretty much blew off his comments regarding the interlacing issue being a problem. Well unfortunately Hurin was right....I can confirm that this dvd has major interlace problems when played on my HTPC using Zoom Player and FFDshow even with Avisynth's Limitsharpen codec enabled. Even checking the "deinterlace" box and trying all the various filters did not help and in some cases make the picture worse!

The funny thing about it is, I used to watch this film all the time on my 7yr old Toshiba 3109 DVD player(which is NOT pro-scan by the way) with my 7yr old 65" Toshiba CRT RPTV via component and the picture was almost flawless.

Anyway I took the disc out from my HTPC and popped it in my Oppo dvd player. Although the Oppo upconverts dvds and is said to be one of the best bang for the buck stand-alone players out there, the PQ on this particular film did not quite hold up to how I remember it on my Toshiba 65" RPTV/3109 DVD player combo via component. Don't get me wrong it still looks pretty much outstanding in other areas like colors and contrast, but the image tended to be overly soft in certain parts of the film and that was quite annoying when you're expecting to see the finer details on characters, Valkaries, etc.

It seems the newer players now a days are not good at upscaling interlaced material and what ends up happening is that the dvd player tries to deinterlace and upscale an interlaced dvd but the result is a picture that suffers a bit from occasional horizontal lines, slight jaggies and a bit of softness in some scenes.

I so wish Bandai/Emotion would've encoded this dvd in progressive scan. No doubt it would've made a WORLD of difference in the overall PQ.

Oh well, here's to hoping they re-release it in either Blue-Ray and HD-DVD

I'm going to watch Flashback 2012 now and see if it suffers from the same interlace problems....

Someone please tell Macross Plus OVA is encoded in progressive!?

All connections are through HDMI by the way...

[TheLoneWolf]

Someone please tell Macross Plus OVA is encoded in progressive!?

407817[/snapback]

R1 or R2 version? IIRC, someone on AOD ran a test on the R2 Mac Plus DVD's and they were somewhere around 80% to 90% progressive. I have no idea where the R1 DVD's stand, but I'm not optimistic as they look noticably worse than the R2.

[Hurin]

I read Hurin's review before watching the film and pretty much blew off his comments regarding the interlacing issue being a problem. Well unfortunately Hurin was right....

Well, it's always nice to know that I'm not just making it up!

[HWR MKII]

Shoot i have been watching my macross like that for 3 years now. My projector doesnt leave jaggies in the image though

[Hurin]

It's not the projector, it's the computer (HTPC) he's using.

If you are feeding your projector from a "table top" DVD player, you won't really see it (unless you really look for it).

H

[Renato]

I saw this on DVD a while back and I was astounded at the interlacing problems when I played it on my DVD player. Flicking through the settings made no change. I was very disappointed because it was a no-win situation: the VHS is blurry but moves well, while the DVD looks crystal clear but turns to bollocks when it starts moving.

Then I watched it on a top of the range Epson projector and big screen... I dunno, I don't remember noticing that many problems then. That was last year, though.

I recently purchased the R2 MacPlus Movie Edition recently and that doesn't seem to have any interlacing effects so I think it's just DYRL that's really bad. Then again, I didn't finish watching it to the end because MPlus is just really bloody boring to me now. I was literally falling asleep... "I'm not the same girl anymore!" Bloody melodrama left, right and centre.

[Skullsixx]

The bigger you blow things up, the more idiosyncracies you see. That's why comic artists draw big and shrink down the size of comics. One of the 1st rules in art class... draw big, display smaller. I went from a 37" HDTV in my bedroom to a 50" HDTV in my living room. Now I'm not sitting right up on it. I'm about 6 ft away in a theater chair, so it ain't bad for me.

[Hurin]

The bigger you blow things up, the more idiosyncracies you see. That's why comic artists draw big and shrink down the size of comics. One of the 1st rules in art class... draw big, display smaller. I went from a 37" HDTV in my bedroom to a 50" HDTV in my living room. Now I'm not sitting right up on it. I'm about 6 ft away in a theater chair, so it ain't bad for me.

408081[/snapback]

Well, the mastering problems with the Bandai/Emotion release of DYRL are bad enough that I notice them at any distance from just about any size screen. But again, you won't see the crappiness unless you're playing it through a computer. Most tabletop DVD players do a decent job of adjusting for the bad 3:2 pull-down flags and garbage frames.

H

[isamu]

Watched Mac+ and then Ghost in the Shell 1 the movie.

Hurin....DYRL may have interlace problems of its own, but I can tell you that interlaced sourced dvds in general do not match well with HTPCs period! They simply don't like them. Mac+(OVAs) had pretty pathetic interlacing, as did(much to my surprise) GitS the movie. WTF??? I thought GitS was film released in theaters!!! How come it's interlaced??? And why was it running at 30fps using Zoom Player, as opposed to 24fps like a standard film should run? The hell did Manga do to this film?

Man...anyway I popped in GitS II: Innocence for only like 5 minutes and thankfully it appears be encoded in progressive. What a relief! I'm going to get an HDMI switcher, so that I can switch between my standalone player(for anime) and my HTPC(for films). Make no mistake however....HTPC blows away any progressive live action film with a good transfer. Colladeral looks absolutely STUNNING on my HTPC for example.

[Hurin]

Well, interlaced material can be mastered correctly to look right on progressive displays. . . . they just need to have proper pulldown flagging done and it needs to be consistent.

It seems like Anime and animation in general seem to cause confusion when they are mastered. Most animation is actually done as film because they then only have to draw 24 frames for every second rather than 30 (for video). . . and that's an appreciable savings of labor by the end of an hour or two. But when they master it to DVD, something gets confused or screwed up and they don't get the flagging right.

For DYRL, to me it looks like someone just dumped the Laserdisc into a video capture device, converted to MPEG-2 and said: "Here's the DVD". . . it's attrocious. If you actually take the MPEG-2 stream apart and look at the individual fields, they are themselves mangled (they actually show interlacing artifacts. . . which should only appear at playback when the fields are combined improperly).

Yet, the fx bootleg DVD plays back fine on a computer. It is interlaced and is flagged consistently as interlaced. . . so no problem there. The sound is worse, and the picture is a tad less vibrant, but it sure does look better on a computer!

H

Edited June 15, 2006 by Hurin