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FAQ
[1.20] What about animation on DVD? Doesn't
it compress poorly?
Some people claim that animation, especially hand-drawn
cell animation such as cartoons and anime, does not compress well
with MPEG-2 or even ends up larger than the original. Other people
claim that animation is simple so it compresses better. Neither
is true.
Supposedly the "jitter" between frames caused by
differences in the drawings or in their alignment causes problems.
An animation expert at Disney pointed out that this doesn't happen
with modern animation techniques. And even if it did, the motion
estimation feature of MPEG-2 would compensate for it.
Because of the way MPEG-2 breaks a picture into
blocks and transforms them into frequency information it can have
a problem with the sharp edges common in animation. This loss of
high-frequency information can show up as "ringing" or blurry spots
along edges (called the Gibbs effect). However, at the data rates
commonly used for DVD this problem does not usually occur.
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