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Believe it or not, here's a good encode for this.
**Audio:** Japanese, English, French, German, Italian, Castilian Spanish
**Subtitles:** English, French, German, Italian, Castilian Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Chinese
All subtitles are official.
192kbps Opus audio transcoded from each Blu-ray's lossless tracks.
Did not have lossless audio for the Spanish dub, so I left it as AC3.
Included are three extras, all subtitled in English:
- A 30-minute interview with Satoshi Kon interview by anime distributor Dybex, sourced from French BD's DVD extras. Subtitles are my own.
- A 5-minute interview with Satoshi Kon and Tamaki Saito, sourced from Japanese DVD with BD audio. The Japanese BD video suffers from bad deinterlacing.
- A 20-minute talk-show with Satoshi Kon and Susumu Hirasawa, sourced from US BD and resized in the same way as the main show.
---
useless notes below, do not read
An important aspect of this show's look and feel is the heavy grain, which unsurprisingly falls apart on the DVD release due to compression artifacts and horizontal blurring.
For this reason we have to turn to Blu-rays, they are all upscaled and come with some quirks.
Japanese and French BD have some filtering applied to them that destroyed detail in some scenes.
French BD is sharpened (it's okay tbh), the German and Italian BD even more so, with messed up levels as a bonus.
Hong Kong BD is fine aside from having low bitrate which hurts the grain.
This is how I've come to pick the US BD as the source for this encode.
The upscale was reversed, we end up with a standard definition video that retains as much detail as the original.
Every encode before this relied on automated IVTC, which *very often* choked because of the messy upscale and produced unnecessary aliasing all over the place.
By doing manual IVTC, I avoid these issues, and can properly handle the many mixed-pattern crossfades.
This alone makes this encode better than existing ones.
I fixed the blurry and discolored edges of the frame. A 1px black border remains on either side, because part of the original master, and attempting to fill it with fake data often ends up looking worse. Cropping them would require additional resizing and degrade quality, so they are kept. Container cropping was not used as its interaction with anamorphic video is ill-defined.
Some scenes were only 240p and didn't follow a 2:3 pulldown pattern. It's like that on DVD too. I interpolated the missing field for those scenes.
Also interpolated episode 4's half-framerate badly deinterlaced "Prophetic Vision" segment.
Encoded at 10-bit with 4:4:4 chroma. Episodes 5 and 7 had scenes that warranted 30fps so those files are VFR.
For future souls that want to take a crack at this:
I think the Blu-ray master may suffer from a rounding error on chroma, but I couldn't find exact values that match the DVD on all scenes so I left it as-is.
It also has wonky interlacing causing some sideways lineart to appear less sharp than it should, with occasional weird lines flickering for a single frame. I manually patched some of it, and rendered the rest less noticeable through filtering.
Those are minor issues and USBD absolutely still beats what blood you could draw from the DVD stone.
The ideal would be to repair those deinterlacing issues with a synced DVD copy, without reintroducing the ugly compression or harming detail.
There's some banding hiding behind the grain. I made no attempt to deband because it'd destroy detail.
I'm happy with my work, it's the best that can be done without a hybrid encode.
Orphan fields were matched to their neighbor, or sometimes deinterlaced for high-motion scenes. Masked deinterlacing should be done in every instance instead.
I don't usually spend much time tweaking x264 settings, but it was necessary here to preserve the grain. It's not something I'm used to, but I did my best.
Project files are attached to episode 1's mkv.
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FILE LIST
Filename
Size
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 01 (BD) [9DAF74BF].mkv
1.1 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 02 (BD) [B9F77296].mkv
1.1 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 03 (BD) [3E0B282B].mkv
745.2 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 04 (BD) [C650B19F].mkv
1.2 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 05 (BD) [660FEABA].mkv
825.5 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 06 (BD) [C3F616A4].mkv
1.2 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 07 (BD) [424EF544].mkv
763.9 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 08 (BD) [4BECFC83].mkv
1.1 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 09 (BD) [245E6EA7].mkv
827.7 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 10 (BD) [5FA94E1A].mkv
1.1 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 11 (BD) [DB73E869].mkv
820.1 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 12 (BD) [E26E357F].mkv
983.6 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - 13 (BD) [2B522098].mkv
1.3 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - Satoshi Kon interview with anime distributor Dybex (DVD) [9E784D6D].mkv
1.7 GB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - Special Talk with Satoshi Kon and Tamaki Saito (DVD) [9CE12651].mkv
150.2 MB
[XC] Paranoia Agent - Talk Show with Satoshi Kon and Susumu Hirasawa (BD) [A45CF2FB].mkv
![[XC] Paranoia Agent AKA Mousou Dairinin (BD)](https://f.t0r.site/no-cover.webp)
