Arisa Good Luck v2

Now, this is embarrassing.

Almost as soon as I released Arisa Good Luck, a viewer posted a comment pointing out that the video was, to put it kindly, a mess: not only crawling with blended frames, but encoded to the wrong aspect ratio (16:9 instead of 16:10). It seemed strange that a 1999 OVA would be framed to the by-then obsolete 5:3 ratio, but the viewer was correct.

So the encoder, Rezo, went back to the drawing board. The DVD played smoothly enough, but all attempts to deinterlace it or deblend it at 23.976 fps, or even 29.97 fps, failed. So Rezo tried a solution that Intrepid has used before with bad sources: encoding at 59.94 fps (double speed). Sure enough, most, but not all, of the blended frames disappeared. And despite the much higher number of frames, the encode was smaller, because the disappearance of the blending allowed for more effective compression.

Of course, the typesetting had to be redone, both for the 16:10 aspect ratio and the much higher frame rate. There weren't many signs, but the only motion-tracked sign proved troublesome. No matter what I did, at various points the motion tracking seemed to lose synchronization, moving to the next position before the picture actually changed. I think the issue is a difference in rounding algorithms between Aegisub and the clips produced by x264, causing gradual frame drift. (See a previous blog entry on problems with 29.97 fps encodes.) I ended up having to fix the frame boundaries by hand - not easy because Aegisub doesn't carry enough precision in its millisecond times (it has two digits but needs three for 60fps). If an experienced typesetter has a solution - or if a later build of Aegisub fixes this problem - please let me know.

I also gave into Editor's Remorse™, so a few lines have been changed for this do-over.

Anyway, here is version 2 of Arisa Good Luck, at the right resolution. It's much easier on the eyes than the previous version. You can get it from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channels #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.