i wonder what im missing here. how exactly can it look better if you take a bluray that was first upscaled by its manufacturer and crush it down to 720p and then have the viewer upscale it again to their screen? 1080p and above screens are the normal now so 720p is almost never going to be watched without upscaling
Upscalers are an algorithm that effectively just fill in details by adding pixels. Downscalers work similarly just in reverse. They remove details by removing pixels. So while a downscaler will reduce overall detail it doesn't matter if the source was already upscaled. The upscaler will resample the image and add more pixels to it. The pixels that the downscaler ends up removing are mostly pixels that the upscaler added. So very little of the actual image is lost because the majority of the pixels that were removed never existed in the original image to begin with. Anime blurays use off the shelf upscaling kernels such as bicubic, bilinear, etc. these kernels are fast enough that virtually any modern computer and most older computers can easily run them during playback. So you'll get an image very similar to the source even at a lower resolution when it gets upscaled during playback.
At least that's how I think it works. Upscalers are really complicated and the math behind them is way over my head.
interesting. maybe i should try to read more about this because i thought that this 3 step process would do far more harm than good. thought that it just gets converted to a lower resolution with all the flaws of the original upscaling intact
You're half-wrong, half-right. When dealing with upscaled sources, you ideally don't want to downscale them. You still lose out on detail then (yes, even detail that existed in the pre-upscaled source) and keep the flaws presented by the original upscale as well. Instead, you want to undo the math used to upscale it. We call this "descaling" in the encoding sphere. The idea is that you'd theoretically get the exact same picture out of it as you would before upscaling. Theoretical, because this only works 100% on lossless sources, which we as consumers don't have access to, but the effect is usually close enough to still be worth it. Here's some resources on it: [link](https://ddl.kageru.moe/kbz12.pdf) [link](https://guide.encode.moe/encoding/descaling.html) [link](https://silentaperture.gitlab.io/mdbook-guide/filtering/descaling.html).
While I don't necessarily agree with the take to downscale this (since iirc the lineart and grain were handled at different resolutions and then merged together or something to that effect according to SCY), with how much the grain generally messes with the image quality of this show, it shouldn't be *too* detrimental to the encode.
>how exactly can it look better if you take a bluray that was first upscaled by its manufacturer and crush it down to 720p and then have the viewer upscale it again to their screen?
it won't look better in this case. however, it'll look essentially identical, except the filesizes are much smaller.
technically it could actually look better if the encode was descaled and then upscaled back to 1080p with a better kernel than the studio used, but that's not possible here.
>720p is almost never going to be watched without upscaling
i watch 720p anime encodes on a 1080p screen without upscaling on playback. mostly because it's more than big enough already and it won't actually look any different.
>While I don’t necessarily agree with the take to downscale this (since iirc the lineart and grain were handled at different resolutions and then merged together or something to that effect according to SCY), with how much the grain generally messes with the image quality of this show, it shouldn’t be too detrimental to the encode.
i can't think of any "detail" less important to preserve at the native resolution than grain. it's literally just random noise.
Attempting to descale grain at the wrong res can cause it to look a lot sharper and distracting than intended. While it's usually not much of an issue due to how weak it often is, for this show it's so strong that I do think it requires a specific look at when descaling, if only to err on the side of caution.
@LightArrowsEXE Thanks I appreciate the correction and resources. So what I'm taking away from this is that I confused descaling and downscaling. I think I have it now so downscaling would basically just slash pixels with zero regard and then descaling would do more what I described in that it would kind of reverse the upscaling. So while downscaling should be avoided it doesn't really damage too much here because the only details really getting damaged is the added grain.
Yeah, that's largely the idea here. For most shows, you'll want to descale, but for something as grainy as this, most of the actual detail will likely already be smudged by the heavy dynamic grain during the original mastering stage.
Yeah, so from what I found, the line-art seems to be 675p while the grain is 810p. Descaling to 810p would yield the best result from a quality vs size standpoint, but you really don't save much space on the video compared to 1080p.
Also, there's quite a few shots in the show that have little to no grain, which get destroyed if your x264 settings are specifically catered to the heavy grain look. Either you gotta use zones, or you add dynamic grain to ensure the entire show has a grainy look from start to finish.
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