SVP3:Watching anime

This page is about SVP 3. In SVP 4 use built-in "Animation" preset instead.

Motionflow, TruMotion, Clearscan, etc. Dear child has many names. Most are familiar with frame-interpolation and its effects. However,it is never mentioned in the context of anime, how come?

A large majority of people seem fond of its effects when it comes to panning and zooming scenes. What’s the catch then? Well, traditionally, it has been associated with the "soap-opera"-effect. With anime, the problem is not the same as with traditional film. Instead we get artifacts. There are mainly two artifacts to be concerned about:

Double contours

So you’ve grown tired of these horrible stuttering scenes. You install the SVP and you’re amazed at the smoothness of panning and zooming scenes, but then you see this:

It’s almost as if two frames have been blended together. This is in fact what happens, one way of motion interpolating is simply blending frames together, for real movies this resembles motion blur, something which makes the movie appear more fluent. However, for anime this doesn’t work, since the contours are too sharp for it. Now, if you had a TV with hardware based frame interpolation, there’s basically no way to solve this. Software-based interpolation software is a little more flexible, by simply enabling “Sharp” interpolation mode in the control panel, we circumvent this issue. Enabling "Sharp" interpolation means no frame blending will take place.

Wave artifacts

So far so good. We’ve fixed our double contours. But now, another problem becomes apparent. Our interpolated frames seem wavy:

This problem stems from the fact that motion interpolation simply cannot create good enough frames for animated content. But what if we still want our smooth zooming and panning scenes? Fear not. By simply changing the parameters for when a motion vector is detected to something far more crude. The software will simply not detect anything but global motion (panning, zoom, etc) and will therefore not create frames under anything but the best conditions (global motion).

So there you have it, smooth motion in panning and zooming scenes, while the rest remain untouched.

(c) heyer