Best Resolution for Anime

[jagarus]

What is the best resolution for anime episodes? 320x240 or 384x288?

[jagarus]

anyone?

[Enchanter]

That depends entirely on how much you wish to store on each episode. For 4 episodes per CD (ie. 175MB per episode), a resolution of 640x480 or 512x384 is acceptable. For a resolution of 320x240, I'd try to stay around 100MB per episode (A 50MB episode is undeniably ugly to look at). In addition, the compressibility of each series differs from each others, so you may require more or less of the above-stated file size.

As to your original question, there is too little difference in resolutions of 320x240 and 284x288 so that it really does not matter which you decide to use. 320x24o is the much more commonly used resolution, though.

[Fluffy]

Most anime encodes these days have a much larger size then 384X 288. you should be able to get 500 something if you use Gordian knot. assuming a 24 minute episode, 170 to 200 megs is considered an acceptable filesize. most of the recent fansubs ive seen encoded had resolutions from 500 to 640

[Enchanter]

I'd stay at 175MB and lower for anime rips. I don't know what Soldats and recently, E-F are thinking by releasing 230+MB episodes. Surely 3 episodes per CD is a bit too overdone.

[Fluffy]

I dont mind 230 megs for a divx, i never burn them to CD and with my new 120 Gb hard drive, bringing my total storage up to 220 gigs, id rathe have a 230 meg rip then see them take the route anime pixel went with their hellsing encodes. "Hey! if we use a smoothing filter so that you loose all detail we can save 4kb of space!!!!!"

[Enchanter]

I'm not as fortunate as you, owning a smaller HD for storage. Moreover, I often lend the fansubs to my friends and it feels funny having to carry so many discs (for one series). And I personally think 175MB episodes don't look bad at all (when properly done). Soldats claims to have the best quality subs, but that's only because they use exceedingly high video bitrate. Nothing surprising there...

By the way, smoothing is good, as in it removes some unwanted bits of details (in addition to making the video more compressible). Of course, care has to be taken not to overdo it. E-F has done the smoothing very lightly and well with their Hikaru no Go series. I won't say the same for [HQA & Anbu]-released RahXephon, which is a tad too "smooth."