My situation is by no means unique, but I do sometimes feel as if I'm the only person picking over the scraps left by the herd, at least 10 km away. I can't even claim to be buying in at the bottom ․ what is there to sell? I'm just a laggard, is all.

It eats at me, on those occasions. I'd be lying if I said it didn't.

Speaking of the consumption of food and drink, the above plate looks to be done. I wonder if the production staff knew about dinner etiquette and utensil placement, because pushing the knife and fork closer to 4 o'clock would have been gravy.

I was looking for a bit of a unicorn chaser, and Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora seemed to fit the bill. I wound up chugging it. Paradoxically, devouring series whole is almost always a good idea, with an overall lower probability, and severity, of indigestion compared to consuming episodes piecemeal.

Natsu no Sora is another juxtaposition of the hand and the machine, of drawn characters against digitally stylized photographs. They may be HDR, or not, but it doesn't matter. The mere idea seems to revolt some people, who draw the line at watercolour backgrounds, and are strident in their proclamation that if they wanted to see photographs, they could see them on Flickr.

Hey, if you really want to see watercolour, go to an art gallery then. Don't forget to take your strident voice for those strident proclamations that you'll make to your stridently snooty friends.

Ahem.

On a purely technical basis, it's an enchanting slideshow. This applies both to the parade of travelogue-ish photographs of Japan, and the tricks used to get away with a minimum of animation work. The more charitable might be inclined to call it an interesting experiment, but I don't doubt for a second that old-man Oshii would come down pretty hard on Natsu no Sora for lack of effort.

At least the first episode has a dog and a cute kid. Actually, that might not please Oshii at all.

By now it should be obvious that I don't particularly care for those things. As long as characters don't slide around on frictionless sidewalks, instead of walking, my suspension of disbelief is the equivalent to a half metre of rolled homogeneous armor. I mean, I'll take extreme detail and fluid movement when it manifests itself; I just won't cry like a baby when it doesn't.

Natsu no Sora, as an examination into its characters and their environments, covers a lot of ground. Quantifying just how much is always a mug's game, but off the top of my head:

• Political connections
• Professionalism in the face of mistreatment
• Prejudice
• Living in the past
• Bouncing back (or not) from failure
• Abandoning childhood dreams
• Helping people unlock their potential
• Unrequited love
• Coping with (terminal) illness

Somewhere in all that, is a slight jab at the "we need a strong military so let's rewrite the constitution" type representative of Japanese historical revisionists and ultra-nationalists, whose avatar is humbled to the point of almost dropping out. At least that's how i saw it.

All of the above and more are depicted with only a modicum of drama, spelling little out, and I am always grateful when I'm not beaten over the head with the exposition/attention-getting sound effect stick. Even what most people may perceive as a shock was in fact, not.

• Kawada saying that magic cannot interfere with life and death
• Sora's distress over anything related to memory
• Sora collapsing and begging not to be taken to the hospital

It was coming, and there was no mass hysteria. We had plenty of time to prepare. I was prepared. Sora was prepared. Even the characters in the know took the news in stride. A dignified stride.

The concluding arc reaffirms that the series is really about holding your head high, but even up to the last moments always understates it, rejecting sweeping gestures in favour of a gentle breeze or an acoustic guitar.

The morning after graduation, seeing Sora slip silently out of the house with her carry-on and walk the still sleepy streets, kind of broke my heart. Quiet courage has a way of doing that.

P.S.

• There's even a tooth brushing scene.
• The teacher knew Sora was terminal, probably as early as episode 8, or before even that, as implied during graduation.
• Who else was stunned when it was shown that the author of that email draft was not Gouta, but Kuroda?
• Five years after, Kuroda still manages to put his foot in his mouth.
• Sora's mother knows who she is giving directions to. She gave him the tomato didn't he? Again, executed without blatantly giving it away.
• It's tough to accept the implication that Sora's first job as a registered mage took her life right after.
• "With all my heart." Indeed.

And lastly, a unicorn chaser for a unicorn chaser:

Who the hell do you think I am?!

I sort of implied with the last OIL entry that I was going to move on away from Sky Crawlers. Well, I lied. There were extenuating circumstances in the form of a translation of a radio transcript. It's an educational read, even if you have not watched Ponyo or Sky Crawlers.

The most interesting point made in relation to the direction of Sky Crawlers is the use of expression through form, and how the characters' movements, detailed as they are, are all directed as if they were puppets. We have met the Sheeple, and they are us. With apologies to Pogo.

In terms of the challenges of actually producing the film, the home stretch of the transcript lends credence to the view that hand-drawn animation is dying, due to a shift in demographics. The talent is getting older, and fewer. And then there's the little gem that the quality of animation is sinking as a result. I suppose that means Paul Johnson is vindicated. Not, you know, that anyone should care.

What's also of note is the suggestion that in the past, talent would be literally knocking down the doors of studios. Recruiting was unheard of.

In even mentioning this subject, I feel that I've inadvertently walked into a firestorm of irreconcilable differences. It's like Man vs. Machine, round 5061. Silicon intelligence has gained ground to the point that things are Good Enough while making Good Enough sufficiently cheap to mass-produce.

This is great! Or should be great. And you can disparage the people with money for being manipulated tools and such, but the wallet calls the shots, and the wallet doesn't seem to mind.

Maybe it's worth stepping back a moment.

What have computers traditionally been good at? Crunching numbers. Approximating physics, particle effects, explosions, rag dolls.

What are humans traditionally good at? Spanning the spectrum of those ethereal things called emotions. Gradients and shadows that span the spectrum of our vision. But you just wait! Cheap ray-tracing hardware is on the way, and if you've seen MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front, surely you must concede that computers have gotten pretty good at conveying the human touch.

But I will concede that it's not the same. And maybe it never will be.

I remember now just what I feel I've walked into: tubes versus transistors. People swear by vacuum tubes. It's warmer, they say, it brings the music to life. What they don't say is that transistors are much more linear than tubes and will therefore generate a more accurate, a more realistic, reproduction of the recorded audio.

It's the same story with vinyl versus CD. Some people just love non-linear, distorted playback. The engineers recoil at the thought that anyone should prefer anything but the most linear of amplifiers. The reproduction of signals must be as close as possible, and we'll keep throwing bits at you until you can't tell the difference!

Why do video codec developers engage in pissing contests over PSNR and SSIM?

Reality approximated to arbitrary precision. Reality run through a non-linear filter.

Irreconcilable differences.

I'm conflicted. Sometimes the distortion is easier to comprehend, like how we feed our children sugar-coated fairy tales with happy endings. Any problem, sufficiently distorted, can be made to have a convenient solution, and put in a grade school textbook. Any terrible truth, sufficiently distorted, can be made easy to swallow, and cement misconceptions that may never be dislodged.

Sometimes distortion is the only way in which we can understand each other.

It comes down to this: computers can only communicate the reality that they approximate. Humans communicate the reality they experience. And as any unreliable narrator will tell you, what we experience and what exactly happened are not at all the same.

Regardless, the day the dust settles in these debates is the day the old guard dies off. Not the nicest thing I've said all day, but loggerheads will be loggerheads until one side is forcibly removed. There will be defenders (of the ancients?) who will take up their cause, as they should lest we forget, but the cards are stacked against their ability to move the world with the old tricks.

I do sense the injustice of the practitioners, slowly being made obsolete by a younger generation, the future arbiters of animation quality, people who find nothing unusual with digital. Maybe that's just evolution, for better or worse.

A parting thought: Is Makoto Shinkai the vacuum tube of anime?

P.S.

No one on the show did anything to disabuse listeners (or readers) of the (misconceived?) notion that Japanese men are asexual. What on earth … ?

So, way at the bottom of one Sky Crawlers review is a brief suggestion that part of the whole exercise was a jab at the anime industry, with the reason being that much of the voice staff (and the script writer) are not from said industry.

Unusual? Mayhaps. But smoking gun? Consider that Vexille's three lead roles went to people with almost zero prior anime experience. And incidentally, the Leon in Vexille is Tokino in Sky Crawlers.

But leave it to the ANN review to flesh out the claim, extending the scope to include not just the industry but also the pinata that is the fan collective. All you have to do is wack them, it doesn't quite matter how, and money comes out.

So they say.

I didn't quite get that impression, but then again I didn't have the benefit of a press kit. Certainly the film tries to convey the tedium in between battles, and the unceasing gyrations between hot streak and funk, existence and death.

Oshii and Co. did a decent job laying bare the loop of the characters' lives, albeit with two lecture scenes. Maybe our lives too, by extension. You typically expect to receive the same newsprint, different story; Sky Crawlers serves you recycled pulp on a silver platter.

That's just how it goes. Yesterday's trash is today's treasure. What was old and dead and buried and ancient history, is extracted by sticking a big pipe in the ground and sold to refineries for processing into combustible fuels.

I think it's a good time to tip my hat to Kyoto Animation or whoever is responsible for producing the purest form of "feed your fans the same bloody thing" known to date, with even less window dressing than Sky Crawlers. Like I said before, it amuses me to no end how high the burn rate of social capital is when you merely deliver the same theme with virtually no variation.

Against a lavishly detailed backdrop, the shockingly plain characters do perhaps mirror the stereotypical no-standards, no-complaints anime consumer, but it is a stretch to claim that only in anime do producers and consumers engage in a never ending exchange of money for mediocrity.

And nowhere do I see industry (any industry, really) being called out. The Kildren could be any consumer, the corporations that shepard them without protest are any corporation with a marketing department. The fan/tourist, any casual uninformed observer. I challenge you to find anything in the film itself anything that denies the universality of what it depicts.

I keep coming back to that quote from Oshii gave during his research trip in Poland. Lest you have to follow this link to get to it, I've copied it below.

A person who sees and hears a lot and is worldly won't necessarily have a fulfilling life. You can live in a limited world and still have a rich, fulfilling life. We strive to live full lives within the limits of our environment.

To feel happy with what you have. I ask myself what is necessary for that. You aren't smart because you are knowledgeable. Knowledge has meaning when it is understood.

-- Oshii while researching in Poland

In the spirit of the above, you can also view Sky Crawlers as an examination of people who live in a system, a system put in place by people they will likely never see in person, and a system from which they cannot escape. Most exist their lives out and for whatever reason, never consider their in/significance in the world. Some challenge the GM and inevitably lose. Others despair at the epiphany and hold on to anything, other than fighting, that may give them purpose, lest they take their own lives. Eventually, some do kill themselves, or help someone else do the same.

If there is one character that embodies everything that Oshii says, it must be Tokino. The guy's managed to live long enough to have seen it all, but is completely unburdened by what he knows. Indeed, he takes advantage of the system that simultaneously confines and jades him.

The first time we run into him, he's been out all night and while no one is keeping score, you just know that he consumes more alcohol than any other character shown, all on the company dime. The only romantic relationships he has is with adult women, not some wingmate that may one day break his heart by being killed in the sky or by her own hand.

Tokino is the most mentally balanced person in the whole film. He has maximized the utility of his allotted sandbox. For all intents and purposes, he has won.

Is that good enough? Should it be good enough? For us mere mortals?

P.S.

This may be familiar to you, a passage from a poem frequently recited on Remembrance Day.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

-- The fourth stanza of For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon

Emphasis mine. That is all.

As I shake the last of the things I want to say about The Sky Crawlers into digits both physical and virtual, allow me to assert that the film, like any sufficiently compelling mystery carrier, is best assessed after at least two viewings.

So in that spirit, this theme is going to be split into two entries. This one is another list of observations: the loops that you actually see. The subsequent entry deals with the loop that may or may not be there.

One thing is certain: "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." I know this relates to some other series that I have not yet seen, but cannot ignore because the aggregators are dominated by Endless Eight entries whenever that sort of episode airs. It amuses me to no end, and if you're looking for something related to that, from someone who hasn't seen even the first season of said series, you may be interested in the next entry.

Then again, who am I kidding?

The Montage

There is a fair bit of scene repetition, the bulk of which is contained in the montage, so this kind of recurrence is a bit of a freebie. Some are a straight reuse of previous work, and others are adjusted for different times of day.

• Kannami smoking after landing, whereupon the Basset Hound sniffs at the match
• Kannami waiting in a hangar for returning fighters on a rainy day
• Tokino hip checking Kannami as they walk back to quarters, just as Sasakura walks past in the other direction
• Fuuko smiling
• Single Sanka landing
• Kannami opening the window to get some fresh air
• Suito Kusanagi staring out the window with an unlit cigarette in her mouth
• Mizuki Kusanagi chasing the Sankas down the runway as they perform a flyby
• Kannami riding home from the diner in a motorbike, in this instance at sunset
• Sasakura shutting off the lights

Other than the montage, the landscape shot just before the fade out to credits is the same as the post-credits shot. If you didn't watch past the credits, that's a hint to do so.

Familiarities

Familiarities, for lack of a better term, are things that you should be familiar with (duh?) should you watch Sky Crawlers a second time, although some things, like character habits, can be picked up part way through a first pass.

As mentioned previously, Mitsuya's fail raid debriefing describes the film's opening battle. The Teacher threatens one plane, a wingmate flies to the rescue, and The Teacher executes Pugachev's Cobra to take down the wingmate.

Kannami always breaks the match he uses to light his cigarette, in the exact same fashion. Kusanagi uses this to confirm that Kannami is a clone of Jin-roh, and post-credits Sasakura also uses this to identify the new pilot despite only seeing his back.

Yudagawa's newspaper folding habit is the most obvious on first pass.

As a rule of thumb, Kusanagi is most honest with herself with her glasses off, which is to say, most of the time. However, the post-credits scene where she takes off her glasses upon meeting the new Jin-roh clone underscores her determination to be more upfront with him.

Knowing that Kannami is a clone of Jin-roh, who is a clone of The Teacher, who was Kusanagi's superior officer and lover, casts a new light on everything people say and do:

• Kusanagi's honesty when the two are alone
• Kusanagi kneeling over Kannami's half of the bunk bed
• Pretty much anything Kusanagi does when alone
• Mitsuya giving Kannami a thorough inspection in the dark and totally ignoring Tokino. Clearly she had fallen for a previous iteration of him.
• Fuuko's demeanour on the car ride to the bordello
• The brothel girls asking Kannami about Kusanagi as he had known her for some time
• Fuuko: "If you are here that means Jin-roh is dead," and other irony-tinged comments

I also find it curious that after first mentioning Jin-roh, he is never referred to using his last name again.

Twin pilots are "rare" in the sense that delivering two clones at the same time is rare. Must be a glitch in Rostock's just-in-time supply chain management.

Tokino, by the way, is a man of irony. Yudagawa drops the Jin-roh murder rumour, but Tokino uses his knowledge to have a laugh at Kannami's expense. He almost gets Kannami to fly into a dam, mockingly asks him if the food he eats or the places he visits seem familiar.

While brushing teeth he "assumes" that Kannami and Kusanagi are an item. Later, he warns Kannami against getting close to either Mitsuya and Kusanagi, saying that Kusanagi will probably kill him, and implying that Mitsuya is needy and won't let go. That night, Mitsuya has an identity/existentialist crisis.

Miscellaneous stuff that may be of interest

• It is strongly implied that the Basset Hound was originally The Teacher's.
• Kusanagi is shot down by The Teacher but she survives, breaking the rule that you don't live through an engagement with him. Depending on the resolution of the video, it can be difficult to see the bullet holes in the airframe.
• En route to Mitsuya's base, Kusanagi sits in the rear pod of a command plane and is constantly looking at Kannami's Sanka
• Kusanagi's eyes following Kannami as she talks to the officer at Mitsuya's base
• During the mission briefing, Mitsuya's eyes are on Kannami
• Or is that because she realizes that Kusanagi is only really addressing Kannami?
• The only survivors of the fail raid from Kusanagi's team are Kannami and Tokino. From Mitsuya's team, herself and the twins (who either both come back from a mission or not at all)
• When out on the town, Kusanagi's eyes gravitate to the woman applying lipstick. When she returns to the table, she also has lipstick on. And totally messed up hair.
• Everyone waits for Kannami pending the outcome of his battle with The Teacher, but only up to the point where his fuel would run out.

P.S.

One thing, however, is not certain: Mark Twain may or may not have actually said it.

There are individuals who will put down or raise up a production based on its adherence to realism. If it wasn't obvious, I happen to be one of those people, but realism is in itself an umbrella term.

I do not particularly care for realism in characters because realistic characters can be realistically detestable and so an increase in character realism does not necessarily translate into an increase in enjoyment. So long as characters are not conveniently contrived, appropriately intelligent, and do not suddenly become stupid at key moments, I am generally content.

When it comes to technolgy, I do have some expectations. Short-term projection into the future is fine. Something that could be built today is good, too. Plausibility trumps improbability, in a nutshell. Maybe that's why I root for the tank against the mobile suit, because I relish the moment when outlandish fiction is crushed by the force of APFSDS and HEAT.

I have no issues with Sky Crawlers in this department. Whether or not you feel the same way depends in part on how much you buy into the premise, which necessarily places constraints on what can and cannot be done.

The Planes

Oshii wanted to make sure that all planes depicted in the film are buildable. Can we build radial engine fighter aircraft today? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is plausible. And, as it turns out, some of the airframes are from fighters that saw service during WWII.

The planes generally fly according to SCIENCE, with one exception: The Teacher's plane has thrust vectoring. I'm pretty adamant about this, insisting that he couldn't pull off Pugachev's Cobra without it, let alone his small radius circle strafing at the end of the film. I'm pretty skeptical about the ability of anything driven by nose-mounted propellers to vector thrust.

Technology available during the 1940's

It looks like WWII, it quacks like WWII, so anything that couldn't have been built during WWII must be an inconsistency, right? Who's to say that this was set during WWII?

Who's to say that this thing is even set on Earth as we currently know it? I challenge you to identify where in Europe the big raid by Rostock took place. They fly across a large stretch of water, to bomb what looks like an island, but that's not England no matter how you rotate the map.

Sky Crawlers takes place on a modified version of this planet, in a twisted timeline that combines elements of the past, present and future. Big WWII era ground radar installations dot the landscape, but there are aircraft carriers with steam catapults and aircraft with mid-air refueling capabilities, both of which are Cold-War tech. The television at the diner is too thin to be a CRT, but it's still monochrome, and the remote control is attached with wires.

Cars travel in excess of 150 km/h, accelerated growth clones are possible, and streetcars are automated, but the Sanka and Rainbow fighters lack pippers. Nowhere in the film is a date given, and given the variance in technological achievement there's no point in trying to measure historical accuracy.

If anything, the general trend is towards more advanced technology, so why the insistence on close-range combat in what we would call antiquated planes? There is the entertainment factor: missile kills are perceived as "easier" than gun kills. But there is a very compelling case to be made for cost control. Clones are cheap, jet engines are not. Putting radar, fire control, and a bunch of BVR missiles on this plane with jet engines is definitely not.

At the end of the day, the corporations only have to put on a show without any substance, kind of like the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Can all this stuff be built, today? Yes, except instantly aged to perfection clones. This is, really, the only element where you should have to deploy your suspension of disbelief. The J-Zwei could simply be made to out climb, out run, and out turn the Sanka, and this would be a much more convincing proposition than thrust vectoring on a single engine. On balance, it's a fault I can live with, if only because the suspension is not seriously taxed, which is a Good Thing(TM).

Suppose that you are (or were) a Kildren and have realized the mess you are in by virtue of the fact that you haven't been shot down in a while. How do you cope? We see or hear about several characters who face or have faced this situation, but they fall into three groups.

The first is to slip into depression and crisis. You may have a pistol on your person at all times and entertain suicidal notions, or desperately fight your anterograde amnesia, attempting to stem the exodus of the grains of your memory through the hour glass. Not unlike a certain character in ef - a tale of memories, but perhaps having something more in common with Memento. You do have your memories up until the clock stops ticking; it's just that the clock stops really early.

I think the pistol is a red flag. Were it not for the local children near her previous base, Mitsuya would have taken her own life a long time ago. Suito had someone to love until that someone became the Teacher, and until a clone of him became so tormented that he asked to be euthanized. By the time of the events of the film, Suito was just hanging around to let Jinroh return the favour.

The second option is to dominate the battlefield. Having inside knowledge certainly helps, when you turn coat and go work for the competition.

But despite being nigh indestructable, you'd still be a tool.

Lastly, you can be Naofumi and party it up. Hey, if you're going to live forever and get paid (and laid), why not? He epitomizes the blurb below from Mamoru Oshii about being content with your lot, and maybe it's no coincidence that he's the most mentally stable of the bunch. He's also been around the block long enough to know not to do anything stupid, like help out your wingman who is being pursued by two bandits.

The last point is actually relevant, as The Teacher preys on pilots who come to the aid of their comrades. That guy has a heart of gold.

[Edit: During the first sortie Tokino and Kannami were attacked by three Lautern Rainbows. A later report indicated that all three were shot down, so Tokino took the one while Kannami took the two that were pursuing him.]

On Flight and Combat

The Teacher's signature maneuver looks suspiciously like Pugachev's Cobra. Not bad for a plane with no jet engines, and no thrust vectoring.

Midori Mitsuya's hand diagraming during the debriefing following the failed Lautern raid plays out exactly like in the movie's opening: pursue one plane until a wingman comes to assist, Pugachev's Cobra to cause the wingman to overshoot, and finish by settling into firing position on the wingman. It's doubtless that someone describes the exact same thing following every failed raid, but Kildren are engineered with a memory retention of nil.

Way to leak battles plans by issuing a media statement while the attack is ongoing. If the Nazis televised a breaking news segment every time the Luftwaffe went to bomb London, the allies would have no use for ground radar. I assert that neither Rostock nor Lautern has never successfully carried out a large scale raid because that would signal a real war, as opposed to a phony one.

Interesting sound bites from the DVD extras

These are based on fictional fighter planes. […] However, we based the design on today's technology. We are treating it realistically.

-- Oshii at Skywalker Sound

In this project, the characters are extremely detailed. For example, if a character was standing… There are unconscious movements made. We made sure to incorporate those things. It's very delicate. So details like the creak of this chair are in this movie.

-- Oshii at Skywalker Sound

[It's interesting to note that the character designs are plain, particularly the main characters. Perhaps a deliberate emphasis on small gestures.]

There was a scene at one point […] where two hands come together. […] I asked Oshii-san if he wanted some sound of significance for these two hands coming together.

He said no. He wanted to leave it silent.

[…] And that was exciting because in American films, sometimes you just try and fill up everything. You just try to put stuff in there because you're afraid of it not being exciting enough or something.

So, it was really encouraging to me when Oshii-san said, no, no, he didn't want something there. He wanted to let that silence work. Which I think is very bold.

-- Skywalker Sound lead (I suppose)

A person who sees and hears a lot and is worldly won't necessarily have a fulfilling life. You can live in a limited world and still have a rich, fulfilling life. We strive to live full lives within the limits of our environment.

To feel happy with what you have. I ask myself what is necessary for that. You aren't smart because you are knowledgeable. Knowledge has meaning when it is understood.

-- Oshii while researching in Poland

[In other words, be happy with your sandbox.]

Relation to Tolkien's Elves

[…] [A]nd no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos.

[…] And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after.

From The Silmarillion, and part of a curse on the Elves departing for Middle-earth. And in another parallel, many of the Elves did eventually grow bored of the world during the Third Age and returned to Valinor (read: Heaven). Those who stayed were under the leadership of those who wore a Ring of Power, and when Sauron was defeated, they largely departed as well.

On the need to maintain a whiff of war

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Frequently misquoted and attributed to George Orwell.

P.S.

Kildren die when they are killed. Except when they're cloned.

If you haven't heard already, Mamoru Oshii has a message for you. You who are young and middle/upper class, who are Generation Y, the Echo Boomers. You who live in the Western, and even not-so-Western, industrialized nations. You who pay the minimum on your credit card balance and don't mind 19.99% APR or higher, so long as you have whatever your Facebook friends have.

The world is a wonderful place, so get out there and appreciate the ordinary. Digitize it to 12-bit precision with that new DSLR. Also, watch 5 Centimeters Per Second, Aria and read BoingBoing.

Certainly it's an idea I could subscribe to — BB is on my feed reader, after all — but I don't, because even BB occasionally needs a Unicorn Chaser. I am also subscribed to a running commentary on the train wreck of the century (thus far), and it doesn't involve Sunrise.

Just saying, so y'all know where I stand on this "It's a Wonderful World" theme. Or don't stand.

Y'all should also know that there is another message. Well, maybe it's more of an acknowledgement of what the world is really like, concerning the conflict between the youth who think they can live forever and those who have seen it all.

Youth is not as immortal as they hype themselves up to be (surprise!). To modify a passage from The Modern Traveller to sum up the battle(s) between The Teacher and pretty much everyone else:

Whatever happens, we have got
IDDQD, and they have not.

Sky Crawlers, mirroring the world we live in, reflecting back the more negative machinations that keep the planet turning. Feel free to replace "IDDQD" with your choice of

• power overwhelming
• Government bailouts
• A non-sanctioned nuclear weapons program
• Tanks (vs students)
• An undervalued currency
• THE reserve currency (oh ho!)
• $760B in US treasuries (wait, this might actually be a liability)
• An automated equity trading program
• Industry lobbyists
• Lawyers
• The ability to shut down SMS before an election
• The Mickey Mouse Protection Act
• MONEY

About time for a Unicorn Chaser, no? I certainly felt so after seeing The Man The Teacher take kids to school. The irony is that there is nothing to teach, because you learn nothing by running away, but by not running away you die. And on the momentous occasion that the rules are broken, the system will happily appoint The New Teacher in place of The Newly Deceased Teacher, and the meat grinder carries on with nary a hiccup.

Maybe you could topple The Teacher in combat, but you could never hope to topple The Teacher's boss. Maybe we should call those people The Principals, who answer to The Board (of Directors), who answer to The Ministry, and on it goes.

In some places (could be yours), this giant pyramid of power has cut us a deal: We'll give you a sandbox. Please play in it, be content. Or else. Oh, and spend your cash money. Failing that, spend your borrowed money.

Hey, it largely works for the Kildren, engineered as they are. And it largely works for us, too, engineered as we are, just not in the same way. The world is indeed wonderful, insofar as the world does not extend to one of those temporary garbage dumps, or the CUPE Local 416 picket lines. And as long as I don't rock the system/boat/gondola, I won't be thrown off of it.

P.S.

"I'm just a Toys 'R' Us kid" is how I always remembered it, probably because it flows a bit better.

"Your borrowed money" is such an oxymoron, but is it really an oxymoron if everyone does it?

[Megaupload links at end]

Taking another detour on this brief encoding stint, this time to the domain of standard definition "film." I qualify film because it's not necessarily film, but the footage is treated largely as if it were shot at 23.976 frames per second, just as film has traditionally been recorded (with NTSC).

Given the standard NTSC interlaced frame rate of 29.97 fps, a resampling method was needed, which wound up being 3:2 pulldown.

If everyone just soft telecined their DVD masters properly, we wouldn't be having this discussion. But never underestimate the determination of industry to make life difficult for its customers, whether through disrespect or ineptitude, and I say this with more than just the entertainment industry in mind.

My edition of THYME's debut album First 9uality came with a DVD containing the three PV's that they had released up to that point: Hello, forever we can make it!, and Fly Away. All of them were hard telecined, forcing me to commit more effort than just Force Film in DGIndex.

Fortunately for me, a straight-up hard telecine is also straight-forward to inverse-telecine with current AviSynth IVTC filters, with results being Good Enough to the extent that I wasn't compelled to second guess the field matching decisions. There was the occasional gotcha in each PV, which will be described below in turn.

All filter chains were based, in some way, off AnimeIVTC, although AnimeIVTC was not invoked directly. I only wanted the dependencies for a select few cases, so I pulled the relevant operations with some slight adjustments.

Since the PV's came off a VOB, the DGMPGDec package is required in all cases. DGIndex was used to cut and extract the audio, while MPEG2Source was used as the entry point into AviSynth.

Fly Away

Filters:

• TIVTC
• TDeint
• TMM
• NNEDI2
• Optional: VinVerse

Incidentally, these are all tritical filters. The first three are found at the bottom of the first post of this thread.

The trickiest step in IVTC is field matching, performed by TFM. For hard telecined material, AnimeIVTC's highest precision setting uses the following line:

ht = i.tfm(slow=2,clip2=i.tdeint(2,edeint=i.nnedi(-2),emask=i.tmm(1)))

This is apparently the most accurate setting but also the "slowest." I believe that you have not encountered "slow" until you let TempGaussMC loose on 1080i video. Other than changing the variable names, I chaned to NNEDI2 and upped the default post-processing parameter from 6 to 7.

Post-decimation to 23.976 fps, some scene changes had noticeable blending, while others had none. The above is one such obvious example, where it looks like two similar frames have been stacked on top of each other. I tried lowering TFM's scene change threshold scthresh, but in the course of bumbling around somehow managed to discover the mtype parameter in TMM.

There was some residual combing afterwards, so I applied VinVerse to mop it up with good results. The final script:

source = MPEG2Source("flyaway.d2v", idct=5)
deinterlaced = source.tdeint(2,edeint=source.nnedi2(-2),emask=source.tmm(1,mtype=2))
matched = source.tfm(mode=1,slow=2,pp=7,scthresh=12,clip2=deinterlaced)
ivtced = matched.tdecimate().vinverse()
cropped = crop(ivtced,2,62,-6,-58)
return cropped

scthresh is in there, but it is the default value of 12.

I felt that at this point, things were Good Enough. I note that there was still some minor blending, detectable if you step through certain scenes where there is motion and transparent overlay. They're infrequent enough and of sufficiently short duration as to be immaterial when watching at speed.

The black bars were cropped off, but I wanted to trim as little of the actual video as possible. Since YV12 video can only be cropped (on all sides) by even numbers of pixels, I compromised by leaving thin strips of black in situations where cutting another two pixels would eat into the video proper.

The final resolution is an unusual 712x360, and x264 complained about the dimensions not being evenly divisible by 16, but I'm not concerned with issues of hardware player compatibility or extreme compressibility: the thing is going into an MKV container with FLAC audio and for the foreseeable future I doubt that anything other than a software player will be able to play it.

Other remarks:

Heavy use of blurring for artistic effect, at least I hope it's deliberate and not bad autofocus. Good for compressibility, but I don't see the point.

Lots of static images, also good for compressibility. I don't mind it, although I should have bumped up the number of reference frames for x264 though. As it stands, the H.264 stream is only slightly larger than the FLAC stream.

forever we can make it!

At about 19 seconds in, just before the band busts out, there is a brief flash of thyme's face as a transparent overlay. To get rid of the blending this caused, I lowered scthresh to 6 while keeping everything else the same. That's kind of kludgy because the scene does not technically change, and inserting kludges bothers me some, but again it's so short that there's not much value to be had in revisiting it.

This PV uses the full SD width, so only the top and bottom bars were cropped, leaving a resolution of 720x364. Not mod 16 once again. The video is fairly kinetic, and x264 demanded that I pay about 1.7 Mbps for a CRF of 18. Still, the fully muxed MKV is smaller than at least one AVI of the same PV, perhaps largely a function of the cropping.

Hello

Filters:

• TempGaussMC and friends
• Optional: GradFun2DBmod, GradFun2db and AddGrainC v1.5

After two fairly successful IVTC runs on the above PV's, I felt that maybe I could get away with using the same filter chain a third time. Unfortunately, third time's not the charm, because there is material use of transparent overlays, and they're all telecined themselves. The result is two telecined streams stacked on top of each other: double hard telecine.

At its highest precision DHT mode, AnimeIVTC does away with TIVTC and field matching. As far as I can tell, it deploys TempGaussMC to deinterlace up to 59.94 fps, followed by deblend and decimation. It's like a video form of a multirate resampling filter.

It turns out that deblend isn't necessary, and algorithmic selection decimators like TDecimate are a little too smart for their own good in this case. What I need is indeed a simple decimation (SelectEvery) after a pretty sophisticated interpolation (TempGaussMC), i.e. boring old resampling.

The problems you see with something like TDecimate are in those transparent moving sky paintings. Some travel slower than others, and it is the slowpokes that experience stuttering movement. That's the result of non-uniformly (i.e. intelligently) choosing which frames to decimate.

AnimeIVTC recommends only using the SelectEvery method if you are going from NTSC telecined to NTSC film. I'd think it would be possible to do NTSC-PAL conversions, although I suppose the conversion ratios aren't working to your favour. At any rate, I don't require nor want PAL.

If I started with Hello first, I'd have used this exclusively, even though it'd be overkill for the other two PV's. The only reason why I didn't was because I quickly recognized that Hello was the trickiest of the three, so I avoided it.

Having been stunned by the 0.05 fps performance of TempGaussMC on 1080i, I once again opted for a lossless rendering pass, this time at 59.94 fps since AnimeIVTC did not decimate until the very end. On SD content rendering speed averaged 3 fps, which is lighting fast in comparison.

Other remarks:

A vignetting effect has been applied throughout the video, and the resulting gradients frequently lead to banding. I've applied a debanding filter to gently remove some of the bands, but short of finding a de-vignetting filter I don't think they'll ever be entirely mopped up, so this filter chain has been stamped with the Good Enough seal of approval.

At 720x374, this is another full SD width PV, but a lot less kinetic than forever we can make it!. The result is a 1.3 Mbps average bitrate for CRF 18.

The script, post TempGaussMC:

import("H:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\GradFun2DBmod.v1.3.avsi")
ivtced = AviSource("hello_tgmc.avi").selectevery(5, 0, 2)
deband = gradfun2dbmod(ivtced, radius=3)
cropped = crop(deband, 0, 56, 0, -50)
return cropped

Megaupload Links

• Fly Away
• forever we can make it!
• Hello

P.S.

You may have to give Media Player Classic a slightly kick when playing forever we can make it!. For some reason it delays the audio and then stops the video stream to allow the two to synch at the 15 second mark. A possible workaround is to skip forward one second. This seems to force MPC to synch the two streams immediately.

Creating an MKA with the FLAC file leads to the same stalling problem at 15 seconds in. An MKV with WAV muxed in is problem free. For whatever reason, something doesn't like this one FLAC file.

In a bizarre twist, the first stream under consideration is not a performance by Utada Hikaru, but rather one by Yuuka Nanri and Yuki Kajiura. Turning to Wikipedia for a brief background,

Her fourth single as FictionJunction YUUKA, Honou no Tobira, was the first seiyū single to have reached number one in the Oricon daily rankings,[9] and because of this, she was able to appear on NHK's well-known music program PopJam.

This being Wikipedia, and reference 9 being the same Wikipedia article, only in Chinese, one may wish to take the above with a grain of salt. However, to my knowledge, her appearance on NHK's PopJam is one of only two appearances on broadcast televsion, the other one being on Tokyo TV's Gekkan Melodix. Unfortunately, I don't have a transport stream of that one.

Source prep

Before the performance there was a CM for the Honoo no Tobira single, and afterwards there was a brief snippet of the show host. Using DGIndex from the DGMPGDec package, these segments were removed, leaving only the actual performance.

Saving the project with these bounds creates a D2V file, as well as a demuxed audio file with a delay parameter in the file name. Out of habit, I rename the D2V file to something shorter, but the audio file is best left alone because the delay parameter is needed for synchronization.

Lossless deinterlacing pass

Stepping through a couple frames in AvsP indicates that the footage is straight-up interlaced and thus does not need to be inverse-telecined.

In the past my deinterlacer of choice was MCBob combined with NNEDI, one of the best out there, if somewhat slow. Since then, the author of MCBob and others have developed TempGaussMC, which is purported to deliver results on par or better, if you're willing to wait.

Well I was willing to wait. I just had no concept of how much waiting was involved.

TempGaussMC itself is an AviSynth script function that calls on a suite of filters. I've listed the pre-requisites at the end of this entry. Knowing from past experience that deinterlacing was one of the most computationally intensive steps, I opted to deinterlace and decimate (toss every other output frame) straight to a lossless AVI.

I debated whether I should keep all frames for further processing, but an initial aborted pass using decimation resulted in a projected AVI size of 3 GB. Since 6 GB for two and a half minutes of 1080p at 59.94 fps was a little rich for my blood, I stuck with decimating back to 1080p at 29.97 fps.

As it turned out, the final AVI size was 3.48 GB. The video is only 2 minutes 36 seconds.

The deinterlacing pass was performed using VirutalDub with the Lagarith lossless codec, Fast Recompress mode. It took 27 hours.

That's right, 27 hours for two and a half minutes of video. I averaged 20 seconds per frame, for a blistering rendering speed of 0.05 fps.

No colorimetry changes were made since my final output resolution will be 720p or better.

Footage comments

It's dark with high intensity spotlights, and there's a fog machine. The low/high contrast setting is already trouble, and the inclusion of many small particles leads to patches of banding, most apparent in the dark red background at stage left. During close-up shots, Yuuka's left arm tends to be overexposed. The light gradient is so sharp that it looks like there's banding (maybe it is).

TempGaussMC seems to hiccup if it misses a scene change. Since it relies on motion analysis, artifacts from the next scene appear on the preceding frame. Because the explosion of blocks only lasts for a frame, it's not noticeable unless you're either paying really close attention, or are stepping through the video frame by frame.

Resizing to 720p was done using the built-in Spline64Resize filter.

At 720p, the noticeability of the blocking, and what can only be described as high ISO noise, is reduced, so I'm in no hurry to go to 1080p, because it would depress me to have to pan around the window only to see blocking artifacts in every frame.

If you're interested, the MKV file is available [MU]. The original 48 kHz AAC audio stream is included, the video encoded using x264 with a CRF of 20. The resulting video bitrate wound up being around 4.5 Mbps. Encoding time was approximately 5 hours, served from the lossless AVI.

Muxing was done by MKVToolnix. I explicitly specify the frame rate and viewing resolution of the H.264 video, and mkvmerge takes care of the audio delay by parsing it out of the file name.

Performance comments

• Yuki Kajiura on a real piano is a rare sight
• Yuuka looked tired
• Shadows beneath Yuuka's eyes didn't help any
• Some unconvincing moments in the pitch department, but not during any of the long notes

Going by sales, the most popular FictionJunction YUUKA songs are ones that took her to the upper limits of her range. Honoo no Tobira is only a notch or two down from Akatsuki no Kuruma in difficulty, and given that Yuuka has had trouble performing the latter live because of the wide register swings, this level of performance was about expected.

Possible future work

I'm open to any suggestions you may have, but the ones I'm thinking about are the following:

• Single frame editing of scene change boundaries to correct for TempGaussMC
• Motion compensated noise removal and debanding
• New round of HD encodes

Eventually, of course. I have a feeling that I started with the most challenging clip.

Appendix

Deinterlacing script:

import("TempGaussMC_beta1mod.avsi")
mpeg2source("yuuka_honoo.d2v")
TempGaussMC_beta1mod(EdiMode="NNEDI", tr2=1).SelectEven()

Deinterlacing dependencies:

• TempGaussMC with all instances of "NNEDI" replaced with "NNEDI2" (there's only a few)
• NNEDI2
• Mask Tools v2.0a36
• RemoveGrain v1.0 Pre-release
• MV Tools 2

"720p ought to be enough for anybody"
-- Some person with a 19" VGA monitor that maxes out at 1280x1024

The quoted is likely to eat crow once obtaining a digital display in excess of 52".

Or Dennou glasses.

(So, not for a while?)

I do have plans to run 1080p, because the urge to future-proof is strong, but not so strong that I'll encode at an unwatchable resolution before a watchable one.

Site Stuff

Just so I can justify slapping a "meh-ta" category on this really short entry, I broke the site for about 10 minutes a while back as I tried to push as much as I could to memcache. I was hoping to reduce the CPU time per request, which currently averages 500 ms.

With things set up so that all the XHTML is served directly from memcache, I'm now seeing times of under 20 ms, but there are still many 500 ms response times. I suspect that service time is dominated by startup time since not enough requests come in to make it worth caching the app. Quite the sorry state of affairs. Well, I won't know for certain unless I break out the profiler.

But with a free quota of 6.5 CPU hours per day, I'd have to serve over 46800 requests a day to make it worth my while, and that is probably not going to happen. Ever.

"6.5 CPU hours per day ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Some person who is evidently lacking in popularity