[WakuWan] Hirogaru Sky! Precure - 49 (WEB 1080p HEVC AAC) [B39B4E1B].mkv

This episode stalled to you by me still going through BG3 Act 1 after more than 30 hours in. Also, All Stars F in like a week or something idk

Here's our staff:

Encoding, OP Styling: LightArrowsEXE TLC: UMT-san Timing, Editing, TS, ED2 Styling: Falloree QC: petzku

Here's some notes on the encode:

This encode mixes multiple sources together, with a focus on retaining details and textures while lessening compression artefacting. The massive increase in filesize largely owes to this process. A lot more detail is retained in the final encode than on any one source on its own, and I wasn't about to compress those away again. Sources used are Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime h264 (both CBR and VBR). When it comes to lineart, Crunchyroll generally has slightly better lineart, but during high-motion scenes, a lot of detail is lost. Both Amazons preserve stuff like textures significantly better, and while neither are stellar during high-motion scenes either, they preserve finer lines that Crunchyroll does not. Merging was accomplished by combining high-frequency information from every clip (extracted using a bilateral blur) and averaging those out.

Additionally, this show is not rescaleable. It appears to be post-sharpened, so relatively weak dehaloing was applied. I was able to ascertain that the native resolutions are 900p (potentially 899.9p?) for most scenes, and 810p for select scenes (including the henshin). Kernel is unknown, as every kernel I tried increased error. Without a way to safely rescale, I was left with little option but to AA to deal with the copious amounts of aliasing. AAing was performed with an antialiaser that attempts to keep the image sharp (unlike regular AAs), while still affecting staircasing without going overboard. Besides that, I used a denoiser aimed at strictly affecting high-frequency compression noise leftover from the lehmer merge, while leaving most of the low-frequency information (blurrier textures, flat areas) only lightly touched. The denoiser used also had the extra benefit of deblurring certain blurrier lines that would be faded away during debanding + dithering.

And here's a comp for your comparing pleasure.

For the motivation for this project, refer to my Episode 1 release.