[Princess Aurora]

I was watching the Utena movie (anime) on my Toshiba XA2 the other night, and I noticed a lot of judder during certain scenes that I've never seen before. The judder was particularly evident during scenes like this: there's a pan upward to show all of a castle. It looks like the entire castle was drawn beforehand, and the camera was moved upward to avoid having to draw the same thing 50 times. There were other instances of judder, but all were in scenes similar to that. There weren't any issues during the entirely animated portions or during anything that involved CG.


Would that content have a different cadence? The animated portions are probably 15 fps (so 8:7 is the cadence), since I doubt they're the full 24 fps that the "filmed" portions probably are.


I know that anime films usually have all sorts of bizarre cadences, and that tons of video processors stumble all over them. The XA2 has the HQV Reon in it, which is really quick at locking onto cadences and detecting changes. However, it does trip over the rare cadences, and doesn't have detection for the really rare ones (the ones that the ABT VRS and HQV Realta can nail).


So I'm wondering if the judder I saw was caused by poor cadence detection. I know about jaggies, but I'm not really sure how to spot improper cadence detection otherwise in the absence of newsticker scrolling words or obvious moire, like on the HQV benchmark disc.

 

[narkspud]

That being a theatrical feature of fairly recent vintage, there shouldn't be any monkey business going on with abnormal cadences unless the MPEG encoding was REALLY screwed up. It should be a straightforward transfer from a 24 FPS source. No 15 FPS anything. At worst there would only be breaks in the cadence from bad edits, which the Reon should recover from almost instantly.


And if it's a steady camera move, it would have to be a pretty dumb deinterlacer to not figure out the cadence after at most a second or two, regardless of what was going on. So I'm going to diagnose that either the XA2 is in forced video mode, or else the outlines on the buildings are just too thin to be resolved in standard definition, or else the camera moves really are that juddery on the original movie.


If it's only happening on architecture and other setting-type items, it is possible that those *are* CG buildings, and you're seeing some sort of resolution issue with the original graphics, or else some ugly interaction between the resolution of the graphics and the resolution of the DVD.


Without a copy of the DVD in front of me, it's hard to say what's going on. You might want to try the disc on a standard def CRT TV to see what it looks like on a genuine interlaced screen. If it looks jittery on that, then you have your answer.