Animephile - Revolutionary Girl Utena the Movie (Limited Edition 1st Pressing)

Revolutionary Girl Utena the Movie (Limited Edition 1st Pressing)

Created/Updated 2001-10-27

Catalog Number : SSDVD-6191
Manufacturer : Software Sculptors
Series : Utena
Printing Date : N/A
Region : 1
Price : N/A
Play Time : 90 minutes not including extra features
Number of Discs : 2 but Anime Zone 1.1 advertising disc doesn't really count.
Number of Sides per Disc : 1
Number of Layers (side1) : 2
Number of Layers (side2) : N/A
Audio1 : English Dolby Digital 2ch
Audio2 : Japanese Dolby Digital 2ch
Audio3 : Japanese Director Commentary Dolby Digital 2ch
Audio4 : N/A
Audio5 : N/A
Subtitle1 : English (Signs and lyrics only)
Subtitle2 : English (With Romanji lyrics)
Subtitle3 : English (Director commentary translation)
Subtitle4 : N/A
Subtitle5 : N/A

Animephile Rating: F-------! (-0.5)

Video Scan Type : progressive (-0.0) - It is flagged as 30 frames per second progressed even though the source is 24 frames per second! It contains the stupidest pre-deinterlaced video I've ever seen on a DVD. See Other section as well as the comments.
Aspect Handling : anamorphic-ANY (-0.0)
Compression : -0.0 - Very well done.
Video Separation : -0.0
Scene Transition : -0.5 - Frames shake down into place each time there's a major transition.
Calibration : -1.0 - Japanese NTSC has 0 IRE black. It seems they raised it linearly to hit North American NTSC's minimum IRE level. This gives it great black-level details, but white-level details get washed out. Do they have any technically competent people at whatever crappy studio they were doing this at?
Other : -9.0 - It's COMPLETELY messed up! I KNOW that originally it was 24 frames per second. Not only does this DVD _not_ contain progressive 24 frames per second video, it does _not_ even contain proper 3:2 pulldown sequence. This is completely not acceptable! dScaler cannot possibly detect the correct pulldown.

Comments:

I am VERY upset because I had to spend way too much time analyzing this stupid DVD because they totally messed it up!
Here's is what normally happens with 24 frames/second movie converted to 60 fields/second by using 3:2 pulldown:

-------------------------------------------------------------
|     1/24     |     1/24     |     1/24     |     1/24     |
|   Frame A    |   Frame B    |   Frame C    |   Frame D    | 24 frames/s original
-------------------------------------------------------------
| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60|
|  A1    A2 |  B1    B2 |  B1    C2 |  C1    D2 |  D1    D2 | 60 fields/s with 3:2 pulldown
-------------------------------------------------------------
|    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |
|  Frame I  |  Frame J  |  Frame K  |  Frame L  |  Frame M  | 30 frames/s with force-weave from interlaced DVD
-------------------------------------------------------------
|    good   |    good   |    bad    |    bad    |    good   |
-------------------------------------------------------------

Note that you'll get 3 good ones and 2 bad ones as you step through each frame if the DVD contains proper 3:2 pulldown. From the example above, I-J-K-L-M are good/good/bad/bad/good. As we go on, we'll continue to get that sequence of good and bad, like this: GGBBGGGBBGGGBBGGGBBGGGBBG....
Bad frames have feathering, stair-casing, combing, or whatever else you like to call it because they're comprised of fields from two different original frames. Note how 'K' is made up of 'B1' and 'C2.' 'B1' and 'C2' are from different frames and will not combine cleanly unless nothing moved between those two frames. The same goes for 'L.'

First of all, Utena Movie R1 DVD shows 2 good ones and 3 bad ones like this: GGBBBGGBBB....
How did that happen? As with many screwed up things, I am not 100% sure, but after looking at it for many hours, this seems to be what's going on:

-------------------------------------------------------------
|     1/24     |     1/24     |     1/24     |     1/24     |
|   Frame A    |   Frame B    |   Frame C    |   Frame D    | 24 frames/s original
-------------------------------------------------------------
| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60|
|  A1    A2 |  B1    B2 | B1C1   C2 |  C1    D2 |  D1   D2E2| Huh? What the heck is this?
-------------------------------------------------------------
|    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |    1/30   |
|  Frame V  |  Frame W  |  Frame X  |  Frame Y  |  Frame Z  | 30 frames/s with force-weave from Utena DVD
-------------------------------------------------------------
|    good   |    good   |    bad    |    bad    |    bad    |
-------------------------------------------------------------

The field 'X1' is mix of 'B1' and 'C1.' Also the field 'Z2' is mix of 'D2' and 'E2.' What does this all mean? It means that they screwed up big time.

Now, compare the correct pulldown with whatever the heck they did:

-------------------------------------------------------------
| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60|
|  A1    A2 |  B1    B2 |  B1    C2 |  C1    D2 |  D1    D2 | Correct
-------------------------------------------------------------
| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60| 1/60|
|  A1    A2 |  B1    B2 | B1C1   C2 |  C1    D2 |  D1   D2E2| Incorrect
-------------------------------------------------------------

See how it's no longer 3:2 pulldown. It's more like 2.5:2.5 pulldown. Let's analyze this a little further now that I thought of 2.5:2.5.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|1/60|
| B1   B2 |B1C1  C2 | C1   D2 | D1  D2E2| E1   E2 | F1   F2 |F1G1  G2 |G1H1|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey, what do you know? It really is 2.5:2.5:2.5:2.5:2.5. I'd say this is some kind of cheap deinterlacing algorithm. Remember how they claimed, or rather boasted, how Utena Movie DVD will be progressively encoded? Well well well.... Does that say a lot about what these (insert plural noun with extremely negative connotation of your choice) know about "progressive scan."

Even if the flags are incorrectly marked (30fps progressive even though it's not), cadence reading players ignore the flags, so as long as the 3:2 pulldown is in the stream, it will properly convert the stream to 24fps progressive. In this case, actual video stream contains 2.5:2.5 sequence, so if the deinterlacer chip is looking for exact 3:2 pulldown (as dScaler does), it will not see the sequence. Even if it did, it can't use one of the field when reconstructing the original image because it contains 0.5 extra field information.

I have nothing more to say. Enjoy the images.

Actually, there's more I want to say. Director commentary confuses the hell out of me. It doesn't make any sense! The movie made more sense before I listened to the commentary. That's messed up. And it's certainly not that great of a movie. Visually, it has some great moments, but story itself is not all that coherent because symbolism is used without a clear goal in mind. Something like Mamono Hunter Yohko has way better use of symbolism. It's just a nice eye-catch, which is why I didn't buy R2. Well, I guess I can't really enjoy the eye-catch all that well with R1. Actually, depending on whether dScaler throws away repeated D2 or first D2, manual pulldown detection could give me back the original progressive video. I'm tempted to rip this DVD, collect the original 24 progressive frames and make my own DIVX file. Note how all frames are still available above if you grab A1A2 B1B2 C2C1 D2D1.
And lastly, I understand that they put a lot of effort into this DVD. For that, I feel sorry for them.

Images (move cursor over each image to see short comment):

From R2 Hanaukyou Maid Tai as a reference of GOOD 3:2 pulldown.

Just for fun. Slight chroma bleeding can't be avoided.

Unrelated to the R1 mess up, the character design for Anthy is quite beautiful.

Revolutionary Girl Utena the Movie (Limited Edition 1st Pressing)

Created/Updated 2001-10-27

Comments:

Images (move cursor over each image to see short comment):

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