Cowboy Bebop
Complete series (26 episodes)
Series information
Year: 1998–1999
Original Work: Hajime Yatate
Direction: Shinichirou Watanabe
Music: Youko Kanno
Production studio: Sunrise
Runtime: 24 minutes × 26 episodes
Storyline
Spike Spiegel, a bounty Hunter with a dark past, lives on bounty to bounty, barely making it each time, or not making it at all. His partners Jet Black, Faye Valentine, Ed and Ein the dog all help him in his adventures from planet to planet.
Source: Anime News Network
Spike Spiegel et Jet Black sont deux chasseurs de primes parcourant la galaxie à bord du
Bebop à la recherche de truands en tout genre. Ils seront vite rejoints par Faye Valentine l’endettée amnésique, Ed l’enfant hacker et Ein le chien prodige. Malgré les apparences, ils forment un petit groupe soudé à qui il arrive de nombreuses aventures. Les uns et les autres vont voir ressurgir des démons de leur passé…
Source : Anime-kun
Release information
Audio:
– Japanese 5.1 48 kHz AAC ~600 kb/s (souce: Blu-ray, qaac V127)
– French 5.1 48 kHz AC3 448 kb/s (source: Fr DVD, lildadou3)
– English 5.1 48 kHz AC3 448 kb/s (source: R1 DVD, NP-Complete)
– Japanese commentary mono 48 kHz AAC ~100 kb/s (source: Blu-ray, qaac V91)
– English commentary stereo 48 kHz HE-AAC ~160 kb/s (source: R1 DVD, OZC)
Subtitles, both styled and SRT:
– French (source: Fr DVD, lildadou3)
– English (source: R1 DVD, OZC)
– Chinese (source: 灵风FOSKY工作室 Lingfeng Studio)
– English commentary (source: R1 DVD, OZC)
Video: 960×720 23.976 fps VFR, 10-bit H.264, 2–3 Mb/s, CRF 15–17
Format: MKV
Source: Blu-ray (shayes on ADC)
Only episodes 1, 5, 11, 17, 22 and 24 come with an audio commentary, in English for episode 5. The translation is missing for episodes 11 and 22.
Encoding notes
The Cowboy Bebop Blu-ray footage come in four kinds:
– True 1080p film scan. The quality is excellent but shows a lot of grain. Fortunately, most parts of the series are made of these.
– Smooth 720p film scan. Less crisp than the 1080p scans, but still good. Shows a bit of noise reduction. Episode 3 is mostly made of these footage.
– Sharp 720p film scan. Grainy and much closer to the 1080p look than the smooth-720p sort, but shows terrible halos. Lot of them in episodes 14 or 24.
– Various forms of upscaled SD video. They show halos, noticeable aliasing (especially on the CG parts) and sometimes noise looking like dot crawl or color banding. Some parts seem to have been processed in a very ugly way (episode 23).
What we did:
– Interlaced video has been manually IVTCed and controlled in a semi-automated way.
– A few episodes contained 30p or 30i footage, we converted these parts to 30p and made the video VFR.
– Remaining interlacing artefacts and interlaced fades (ending) have been smoothed.
– Most grain has been filtered, but we kept it intact on delicate scenes.
– Aliasing has been smoothed and temporally stabilised to counter the horrible shimmering of CG animation.
– Halos have been masked.
– Color banding has been fixed.
– We detected a few badly composed pictures that we fixed.
What we could have done but did not:
– Cel stabilization. Footage were not shaky enough to justify this processing and the huge amount of work.
– Dust cleaning. The whole series was already quite clean, but some parts had more dust than others. Again, this is a lot of semi-automated work for a minor annoyance.
– Keeping the Japanese setero track.
– Blu-ray bonus.
Encoding source code attached to the episode 1, for encoders who wants to create and release a “whole-grain” version without redoing the IVTC and SD filtering from scratch.
Screenshots
Mediainfo
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