Video transfer bars

Karmaburn writes about Nadesico today, and the post might as well be about the video transfer issues, so promiment the black bars are in Nadesico DVD captures.

I find this artifact annoying, so before posting anything I do this, in a directory for series:

i=1; ls -tr *.png| (while read f; do \    pngtopnm < $f | pamcut 4 0 846 480 | \    pnmtojpeg > $(printf 'abenobashi-%02d.jpg' $i); \    i=$(expr $i + 1); done)

The pipeline can also include resizing for blog.

The specimen above was cropped to 2 0 628 480, which is somewhat unusual in its shift to the left. The unpleasant part is how Nadesico's transfer changes from episode to episode, so parameters have to be tweaked. The bar's edges are not sharp, and so image degradation can be seen still. At this moment, the editor faces a dilemma: lop off another pixel or preserve the maximum amount of the image.

Interestingly, fansubs are always done to the perfect aspect ratio, including those captured from analog broadcasts. I am wondering if they stretch their visible area a bit. I do not recall any noticeable distortions, however.

Update: Avatar writes to remind that the black bars are not, strictly speaking, an issue of video transfer [to DVD]. Masters themselves have black areas outside of TV-safe zone.

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