Futari wa Precure is an interesting show. An encoder looking to do the series has the following sources available:
• DVD, which has serious chroma problems (colors in the image are shifted downwards and quite blurry/distorted) and bad artifacting in high-motion scenes.
• Amazon, which has serious loss of detail compared to DVD along with ivtc problems (jittery motion, missing frames/fields).
• Blu-Ray, which has the same loss of detail compared to DVD but none of the ivtc-related problems (note: I haven't fully verified the second statement). So it's strictly better than Amazon, but the problem is that Blu-Rays only exist for like 10% of the show (or less?). Much of the important high-bitrate footage—OP, ED, transformation sequences—is on the Blu-Ray.
• TVer, for which only 10 episodes are available on nyaa. Wrong framerate, but that can be fixed. Less bitrate in high-motion scenes compared to Amazon.
It seems to me that the best way to encode this show is to use DVD and replace with Amazon (and probably Blu-Ray where available) in scenes where the MPEG2 artifacting is likely to become unbearable. I wrote something to detect scenes in which Amazon was above a particular bitrate and splice it in. I also kinda-sorta dealt with the chroma problems—you'll see that they are much improved over DVD but still far worse than Amazon. Using the chroma from Amazon and the luma from DVD is not realistic due to frames failing to line up... but now that I think about it, maybe using the chroma from TVer would be?
Anyway, here's some comparisons.There was no point in comparing to [M-L-Stuffs], since that was just Amazon but significantly worse.
I don't have any plans to encode the rest of this.
Information:https://discord.gg/r9gyPwJeqW