Why do cartoon DVD transfers have so many "aliasing" problems?

A

adamlambert

New member
Live action DVDs virtually NEVER have these, at least for anything made in the last 10-15 years (some DVD sets of old 80s shows have had some issues).

Do the studios just not bother to take the time to do a high quality transfer, or is there something about animation that makes it especially succeptable to the problem?
 
From what I've been told, animated shows were usually shot on film, which was then converted to videotape for post-production.

I would suspect at least some alising in pre-digital animated shows comes from that, combined with age.
 
What do you mean by "aliasing?" Aliasing when talking about DVD is usually used to refer to how fine details can shimmer when in movement. If I understand it correctly, it shouldn't be a problem on an non-interlaced display like an HD television.

If you mean the effect where it looks like there is an extra, much lighter line when there are dark lines on a light background. that's probably mostly your TV.

If you mean digital artifacting and general ugliness, it might just be that they're stuffing more cartoons on per DVD resulting in more compressed video. Those issues would look more obvious on cartoon DVDs where the might be spread across a large area of flat color.
 
Mostly the former. Forcing the "bob" on interlacing usually minimizes the effect when I'm playing dvds on my computer, but there's not much I can do about my dvd player, which has the same problems (maybe a little less though).
 
Even with post-digital animated shows there is some aliasing. On X-Men: Evolution whenever there is a rope or something like that, even though the show was digitally colored, because a rope is so fine, and the show was made in SD, the lines indicating the texture of the rope tend to have a rainbow shimmer.
 
A lot aliasing is produced by deinterlacing the individual interlaced fields of 480i television. Its also caused by excessive vertical edge enhancement.

That's actually called "cross-coloration" and its a whole other can of worms that is a side effect of bad video encoding.
 
X-Men Evo S3 was a really BAD offender. Some scenes, you could see two or three frames of image overlapped on each other out of synch, even when "forcing the bob". It was just hideous.

Here's a good example I just screencapped:



This was with the De-Interlacing mode set to "force bob". On the standard "automatic" setting the problem would be much worse than this.
 
I don't know what that is, but I've noticed that kind of ghostly doubled image effect on my Pup Named Scooby Doo Volume One DVD, too. It's really bad there. It's like after-images, except sometimes they actually come first.
 
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