Pokefan531's Posts

Happy New Years! I know it’s over a week since New Years, but I write this since then.

Today, I want to post something that I should’ve said sooner. I haven’t made progress posts for a while. I recently had worked for someone indirectly to make a model for a company. It’s a way to get attention to get jobs easier. Job is more important in life, and that’s why I haven’t post much since November, including Yuki’s Story. Let’s breakdown about 2018.

I did move to a better place in the middle of the year, and I did continue to make videos. However, from April to May, I didn’t know when we will be moving, so I was holding off some prodution of my videos, but I did Yuki’s Story MMD instead. At June, it was marked for moving, so I didn’t post anything ever since Ash’s Vacation. At late July, I thought of an idea to make a short Iris video, by using clips from All That! Season 7-8 with the morning scene. It did took less than a week. I did behind the scenes for my two videos this year. Last Year, exactly, I was in the middle of the first quarter of Ash’s Vacation. It was way long. At early March, I finally finished it. At mid June, despite nearly getting ready to move out, I finally finished the script for Miraculous Ladybug Dreams, and that’s when I started my own pre-production layout pass. At August, I started the real thing, and it did took nearly a month to finish. I am kinda goad that I made MMD videos for other shows at least. I did randomness 9 after that. My last video, Iris’s Christmas Rage, it was a quick progress actually, sort of. I was gonna do the big Iris video before that, but I had stuffs to do in life, and I do want to put something related to Iris. I did make a script for the Christmas and made it shorter than the aforementioned big one, but it didn’t have enough time to make it to Christmas. I had an idea from Rugrats clips and use Angelica Pickles’s dialogues for Iris since they both are evil and bratty. That video is short, but it did took me less than a week from scratch, and right on time in Christmas Eve! That was the whole thing in 2018.

I’ll explain about what I should’ve done or learned from. I’ve learned that doing animations alone without the help of the programs would take too long. That’s why two videos took long to produce. Ash’s Vacation and Miraculous Dreams. The first did take three months for doing shot by shot VR like, but it looked pretty good. The latter seems challenging when it comes to animation. I had many models to animate on screen at some scenes. I had to animate the stuffs in the background. It looked good, but I’m thinking about how long it took to make those videos, and what the intended length should be. Longer videos will take more longer. Ten minutes seems good, but the length is usually over a month, especially if many models are on screen. I did use motion and pose data’s to give them walking and reacting animation. The thing is, I have to either find more or make more myself to choose automated reaction to cut some production time. Reason why I am discussing about this is because I wanted to put more amount of videos. Granted, I had things to do in life, but making the videos, you need to learn how to do certain shortcuts without ruining the quality of the video on animation or story pace. Short videos that I’ve done like Iris scares All That casts and Christmas Rage were some ideas in the same week that takes less than seven days. They are less than two minutes, and I’ve learned that there is a way to make the production more efficient. I’ve learned how to use the program, MMD AnimationSmoother, to make the animated character have better animation automatically. I had to do base animation before a smoother one is generated. I did use it on Randomness 9, and they do look better and natural. I’ve learned how to use it. I just had to exclude certain bones that I don’t want to get smoothed like the position IK or master bone. Also, I sometimes must only select the parts where I want the character’s animation to be smooth at. Since it’s automated, it can create some errors or weird animation, but I mastered it. So the base animation can be done slightly less when you are able to get more realistic animated bones automatically. One thing I forgot to mention. During Spring, I was waiting because I didn’t know when I was moving, but I’ve learned something. If there is some trip or if you are not sure if making the next video will hang the production time, I could do randomness since each clips aren’t long to produce. Just learn that if you are not sure or of you have short time, but you want to finish something, start with the small clips first. That way, you will be happy that you already did them to save time.

As I mentioned about computer generated programs like AnimationSmoother, I do want to find better motion data or poses to use on the characters. I also need to make my own to have more list of motion data to use at the appropriate scene. Animate the expressions on the base model. Animate the surprise, the scared, the laugh, and yelling. Doing more of that would help me make the progress be done more quicker. Also, I gotta thing the appropriate length of the video too. This is why learning is important.

Now that I put my ideas down, I do want to do something better in 2019. I do want to put more amount of videos, including Iris videos and randomness, as well as making MMDs of other shows. I did have more ideas this year. I want to do the 10th anniversary of iCarly Parody as Pokemon, and a certain video I plan to do. I am excited to make more videos this year. I also want to finish Yuki’s Story MMD Season 1, and finish the journal series this year. I did say last year that Yuki’s Story journals would be finished in 2018, but I am giving it another year to last. I didn’t have time to do the ONA as said because I was learning things for my career. It’s better to learn first before doing the actual production. Season 2 seems like it would last longer than a year, but I do plan to keep that up to date. The journals should return in production now, and MMD’s Chapter 13 has already begun. 2019 may be the most exciting year for my content.

So what is up now? I’m doing the 3d modelling for someone. That way, I can learn better of how to make models. I know there is VDroid to create anime 3D characters. It’s in beta right now. I decide to do something better from scratch on models. I am training myself to make different kinds of model parts, thanks to that job. The next Iris video should be out next month for the better. Right now, I am experimenting with GAN based upscalers that has been trending for upscaling textures. ESRGAN got much more attention since last month, and it is good to upscale your model’s textures, but we may wait for better ESRGAN models to do them correctly. I’m learning a lot of things. I did post Miraculous Ladybug Quality Analysis few days ago on Tumblr and explained that it’s rendered at 720p 24fps.

Have a happy new year.

Today, I will be reviewing Miraculous Ladybug on the production quality. This goes on video quality and knowing its original format. We will be going over the base resolution, framerate, audio, and others. I’ve done some test by analyzing different sources of the show, and to see the techneical side.

Miraculous Ladybug credit goes to Zagtoon. Images are used for demonstration.

Video Resolution

On TV stations and on digital distribution, it is common to air or stream it on 1080p. In fact, most anime are digitally drawn on lower resolution than 1080p. For Miraculous Ladybug, this is the case.

Miraculous Ladybug is rendered at 720p, across all episodes and specials as of current. By taking some frames from Netflix stream, it is clearly upscaled from 720p. I did some check by looking at individual screenshots of the show and look at it on Photoshop. Looking at the characters hairs and some edges, you can tell that the source is upscaled.

It is common for a 3D animated TV show to render at lower resolution than 1080p, aside from the texts and the credits. The credits are clearly 1080p while the background is just upscaled to 720p. The text are clearly sharp and doesn’t have anti-aliasing. The Ladybug icon on the left is also 1080p. On the opening, only the text are rendered at 1080p, but it’s not as sharp as the credits. Still, it doesn’t have jagged edges on the texts. Again, it is mixed with 720p background. Also, the logo scene seems to fit well with debicubic filter.
I’ve tested upscaling filters with Avisynth on the frames to see what was the best. It seems like the studio actually use Bicubic scaling with Blur=1, and Ringing=3 setting. It is the default filter setting on Avisynth’s Bicubic filter. I’ve check some masking between original frame and debicubic and use bicubic again, there was no difference aside from blurring out small compression artifacts caused by streaming.

So clearly, the show is upscaled from 720p with Bicubic filtering, with texts being full HD, especially seeing the credits.

(Although, the scene where Plagg gets sucked in on Stormy Weather, the vertical resolution looks like it’s half. We know the show is not interlaced, but what happened?)

(Look at the edges of the objects when watching 1080p quality. It is certainly upscaled. Images from Robostus episode and The Bubbler)

Tonemapping

Like most 3D television shows, all scenes are tonemapped to sRGB/rec.709 colorspace. No HDR or wide color gamut is natively supported. Since it is tonemapped to SDR displays, at certain points, Ladybug’s outfits seems to have slight red value cut. It is seen when the red shades are over 255 red value, that it can’t go brighter and either shows red banding, or red highlight details may be lost. However, the problem is minor, since other color values are present to shade over it.

Overall, the show looks colorful and looks nice for any displays.

(The suit seems to lost some the bump mapping due to compressed tonemapping? Images from Stormy Weather.)

Framerate

By looking at available sources, it seems like the show is rendered at 24fps. By watching Princess Fragrance and The Mime from official Miraculous Ladybug Youtube channel, I can hear the speed difference from most sources that plays at 25fps. It supposed to sound like the 24fps version. Background music tracks and the theme song are available. They seem to match the episodes’ audio speed by reconizing the tempo. A lot of sources are seen as 25fps, with the audio sped up without altering the pitch. Technecally speaking, it would be 23.976fps instead of 24fps, but still is.

Framerate Conversion list

As said above, a lit of sources found are playing the episodes at 25fps with sped up audio, but no audio pitch has changed. It’s common for PAL conversion to speed up 24fps content to match their 50hz displays (aside from portable displays and computer monitors show natively 60hz). However, in recent years, they use better technology to speed up the audio without altering the pitch, so that it stays true to the pitch of the original format. That way, no one can tell the difference.

Since PAL regions use the format above, I’ll list the countries and channels that airs in 60hz or NTSC regions.

South Korea:

The show is aired in the original format. It’s 24fps on all channels that airs the show.

Japan:

The show airs in the original format.

Brazil:

The show airs in the original format.

Canada:

Quebec airs the french version, but airs it at 24fps. Family Channel airs it the same way too.

United States:

On Nickelodeon, they would air it at 25fps. Even though most content in the country would air at 24fps, 30fps, or 60fps, Nickelodeon decides to air their shows at 25fps to make more room for commericals to earn more revenue. That also means they cut the credit sequences for the same reason too, with the credits displayed on last 30-seconds of each episode. The audio pitch is unaltered, however. Even their streaming services airs the show at 25fps. Few of their early episodes has wrong conversion on their website, by converting from 25fps to 24fps, albert, with interlaceing, for some weird reason. They look terrible when Nickelodeon had them on their website back in 2015. It is unknown if KidsClick airs it in the original format since I never watch the show from their platform.

Latin America:

This is the most weird conversion of them all. While the show airs at 24fps, Disney Channel LA did the inverse of PAL conversion. THAT MEANS the audio pitch is LOWER than most sources! When I saw their commericals or clips of the recordings taken from their channel, I can hear the audio pitch being altered, but not the typical PAL way. It is very uncommon for NTSC standards to do this sort of thing. I even went to Costa Rica to hear how the show plays over there. I hear the audio pitch being lower as of last year. This is very rare for any channels over there to do this. I don’t know what source Disney Channel LA got for the episodes, but it seems like they got 25fps ones and decides to think it is converted already for PAL regions. Very weird. However, streaming services outside the channel never had this issue. It is unknown if PAL countries like Argentina did this too. Their Disney Channel is basically the same, except it’s their timeline and broadcasts in PAL format, 50hz.

It is possible that each country can air the show in their own local channel. However, you would have to be in the spanish community to know if they’re playing the show correctly.

Netflix:

As far as I know, they have the episodes at 25fps everywhere.
iTunes:

Not sure if they still have it, but I remember them having 25fps playback.

Youtube:

Only Princess Fragrance and The Mime are available. It is in the original format, and so as the clips on their Youtube channel.

Overall, it is commonly seen as 25fps in most platforms. I’m not sure if they preserve 25fps on Shouts Factory’s DVDs R1.

Blu-Rays

There hasn’t been a Blu-Ray release for the series. It’s not uncommon for the series to be released on Blu-Ray. Star Wars The Clones Wars, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Samuari Jack, and Batman Animated series has got blu-ray releases at 1080p. DVDs are never HD, and are usually compresses poorly due to using MPEG2 codec from 1990s. You can only find the HD versions on digital platforms. I only know iTunes would do digital release of their episodes. You may have to rip the episodes yourself from other digital platforms. I know not many TV series here have blu-ray releases, but majority of the medias are movies and anime. In Japan, they have very high sale rates on Blu-Ray releases. Not only you get to watch the episodes without internet, but you have very high quality studio like video at the highest resolution with barely video compression artifacts.

Audio

It is common to have stereo audio on TV shows. However, Netflix seems to have 5.1 Surround Sound audio for the show. Usually, the voices are at the front speakers, while you hear the rest of the sound everywhere, with panning from one or multiple speakers to the next. Nickelodeon has aired the show in surrounded sound format before on their HD channels.

Censorship

Miraculous Ladybug is a family friendly TV series, and nothing weird or inappropiate is in it. It was intentionally made for worldwide audience. However, very few television networks made their censorships to any shows. Miraculous Ladybug never got cuts or alterations for anything, but rather small decisions.

On Disney Channel UK, they did a simple motion blur on some scenes to avoid or reduce fast motion lights to reduce risks of seizures. Most notably, the transformation scenes, catching the Akumas, flying butterflies restoring damaged properties, and fast fight scenes that takes big part of the screen. On Frame-by-Frame, the image either have the next frame blended on the current frame, previous frame blended on the current, or both.

Reducing seizures by motion blur may help, but the show doesn’t have any strobe or seizure induring scenes. Most broadcasts would leave the show alone. Even Japan leaves the video untouched, despite having paka-paka laws in place on TV broadcasts for airing Electric Soldier Porygon in December 1997. All TV shows have the “Watch in bright lit room” notice on the beginning of the episode in Japan.

Saudi Arabia has skipped Copycat for some reason.

(The bottom one is from Disney Channel UK. All episodes are censored this way to reduce fast bright objects.)

Conclusion

Miraculous Ladybug is rendered at 720p 24fps, with sRGB/rec.709 colorspace. The framerate, whether you’re watching 24fps or 25fps, you wouldn’t hear the audio pitch being different on the latter, so it’s fine. The audio is maxed to 5.1 Surround Sound. Censorship goes from very small to none.

The overall TV show’s quality seems pretty good for a TV series. Netflix has all the episodes for two seasons. Even if watching upscaled content, it still looks pretty fine. The audio and sound editing seems pretty great. The animation is smooth overall. The second season is the best season so far. It can be possible that later on, the series may start doing native 1080p rendering. It could be due to the fact that ray tracing on the studio’s budget would take too long to render 1080p. Hopefully, native 1080p may soon be used for the future.

Chapter 74

Yuki is at her job, cosplaying as Ochako Uraraka from My Hero’s Academia. She is at the manga display by the window outside with the group.
Yuki: New issue has just came out! Come get them! It’s a great series!
Boy1: Want some free buttons? I got a basket of them!
Boy2: So when did you became a fan of the series?
Yuki: Since the anime came out. I them collect manga.
Boy1: Cool. I got into it a year later after anime release.
After doing their job, Yuki is at the changing room and dressed as her school clothes since she came there from school. She exited and went to the office.
Boss: You guys did a great job. I never thought you guys attract more customers to the manga store.
Yuki: It’s always a piece of cake.
Yuki went out and walks outside.
Yuki: This has been a great day.
She sees a poster of two performers doing a show while cosplaying.
Yuki: The Cosplaying Act. See our show to see these performers do tricks.
Yuki is thinking of something.
Yuki: Maybe someday, I will do something like that.
She continues walking.
Two days later, Yuki walks to her job, and sees her group.
Yuki: Hey guys!
Taru: Hey Yuki!
Taru is Yuki’s coworker.
Yuki: So what are we doing today?
Girl1: We’re heading to the scene to meet the performers for the event tomorrow.
Yuki: Oh. That’s great.
They went to a stage room to meet them.
Boss: Today, we are meeting the performers for tomorrow’s event. We will first greet them. After that, you guys will be taking the place of their extras for today. We are having them rehearse their play. All you gotta do is be on the background and do some walking and stepping back.
The performers came. Two of them are wearing Rin Tohsaka and Saber from Fate/Stay Night, respectively.
Cosplayer1: Hey guys!
Cosplayer2: Ready to see us perform?
Boss: Yeah. They all are.
Yuki: We really want to see how good you both perform.
Cosplayer2: You guys will like it.
At the set, they use a playing field layout and the workers dresses with white short and black pants.
Boss: All right. I’ll divide you guys so that you cam be on each side. Once both are at the center, go around at them by 360 like a clock, and then go by the curtains and stand there while watching them. After that, grab the spark ball and press the button to release plastic sparks in the air while raising it high.
They go to their positions and wait until the performers comes in.
Both of them walk, pretending to wave at their audience. They went to the center, and the extras walk around them, and after a 360 walk, they go to the back of the stage by the curtains. They all stand while watching.
Both performers are pretending to fight while using swords and dodging. After that, all extras release the sparks with noise while raising it high up.
Both performers take off their cosplay outfits, to black uniforms as they are already wearing it. They do jumps and flips.
After the rehearsal, they were happy to see their performance.
Cosplayer2: Thanks for helping us.
Taru: It’s good.
Cosplayer1: Wait until you guys see our actual play tomorrow, if any of you are attending.
Boss: So the next thing for you guys to do is to hand flyers at the sidewalks.
Yuki: We’ll do.
Cosplayer1: We want to see our audience have a smile when we perform.
Cosplayer2: We both were performers back in school and they liked it.
Yuki: Nice. I am also a performer in school.
Everyone got surprised.
Taru: You do flip and jumps and stuffs like that?
Yuki: Oh yeah. Many times. My fans liked it.
Cosplayer1: Sounds nice. We better be going.
They both left.
Boss: All right. You guys better go on. Yuki, I need you to be in my office.
Yuki: Okay.
In the office, Yuki sits down.
Boss: I heard that you like to perform.
Yuki: Yeah. I just put my hobby as an athlete on my resume. I am a performer.
Boss: Interesting.
Yuki: I want to do some actions physically and I am really great at performing tricky moves.
Boss: I see. One of the stations in this plaza has a training session. If you like to go there for a test, they will see how you perform and they will inform us if you are up for other jobs in the plaza with performing. You can start at level one.
Yuki: Level one? What about the last level of the test?
Boss: They wouldn’t really allow newcomers to go straight to the finish that quick.
Yuki: I never told anyone here how I perform before, but do they make exceptions?
Boss: Likely not. You can go there to do a test, but it is unlikely that they will let you pass with the highest level. It’s too risky.
Yuki: Hmm.
Boss: I would like you to go there right now and have them assign a test for you. You will perform several tasks.
Yuki: All right.
Later, Yuki arrives to the training session.
Yuki: Let’s see if I can pull this off.
She went inside, and talk to the receptionist.
Yuki walks to the desk after signing up and talks with a person.
Yuki: I would like to use the last level of the test. I know I can do this.
Man: Level 5? We cannot allow newcomer to take the most difficult performing test unless if you have license of any fitness activity or a specific adult supervision. We follow safety rules and guidelines.
Yuki: But I do a lot of great performances at school.
Man: How old are you?
Yuki: 17.
Man: We cannot allow anyone perform level 4 or 5 under the age of 18. We’re sorry. We can only give safety agreements for performers to sign on, if they’re at least 18.
Yuki: I can do this. Can I take the highest level that I am able take?
Man: You only can start at level one, sorry.
Yuki: All right, fine by me.
Later, Yuki went to the room and has a list of tasks to perform.
Yuki punches the punching bag several times, did the hoops. She flips and jumps to multiple platforms. Yuki also kicks the ball to the targets and she score all of them. She runs around fast and jumps over the sand. Yuki shoots the ball to the hoops and she scored it.
After multiple takes, she is sent to the waiting room.
The manager comes and talks to Yuki.
Man: Yuki. You scored pretty well. You’re one of the minor percentage who did score pretty great from a first try.
Yuki: Cool! Even if I can’t take higher levels, will a lot of jobs will want to hire me?
Man: Absolutely. Not taking a higher level exam early won’t mean that you won’t be getting impressive jobs with amazing skills.
Yuki: That’s great! Sounds better.
The next day, Yuki is having lunch with her friends in the classroom. She told them the story.
Minoru: That’s great that you passed the first level.
Rin: Yeah. I don’t think you should start ahead. Even if we see you do well in our gym class, Level 3-5 seems pretty intense, even for you.
Yuki: I agree. I thought I need to take those to impress everybody, but at least I could get jobs in that plaza where it involves activities.
Minoru: That’s great. If they see you doing great, your audience will see that you are very talented, and it’s best to start from the beginning of the test.
Leon: At least you can take the test each season to do more impressive action.
Yuki: That’s what I learned. I just do random jobs on the plaza, from holding a sign at the pathway to helping out the stores.
Minoru: And now, they get to see your athletic skills over there, finally.
Yuki: You bet. Also, they have a show on Friday evening, and I can allow you guys to come.
Oka: Cool!
At Friday evening, Yuki and her friends went to the seats to watch two girls perform.
The shows just started and they see the same performance that Yuki saw for the intro.
Rin: Cool! They look cute with their cosplay outfits.
Retasu: They’re my favorite characters.
Yuki: You guys will see them wear multiple outfits during the show.
Shirou: Nice.
They enjoyed the rest of the show.

Next Chapter: Yuki’s Suspension.
Team Phase are at it again. They are trying hard to get revenge on Yuki for exposing them after the incident about Rin and Retasu. They come up an idea how to get Yuki in trouble. They still plot to take over the school, but hasn’t got there yet. What will Yuki do? Tune in next time!