[VCB-Studio] FAIRY TAIL / フェアリーテイル 10-bit 1080p HEVC BDRip [S1 Fin]

FAIRY TAIL / フェアリーテイル S1 BDRip
10-bit 1080p HEVC + FLAC, MKV format. ~ 850 MB / EP.

Fairy Tail Season 1 episodes have two image quality levels: EP 1-108 are alright, and EP 109-175 are sub par:

EP 1-108: These episodes are probably the better-looking ones in the entire season, with a native resolution of around 720p. The lines look like twisted noodles, messed up further by jitters among frames. There wasn't much we could do to tackle this type of jitter, so PP focused on spatial anti-aliasing, using the reserse-upscale method and an anti-aliasing filter. On the side, these lines on the chroma plane are broken almost all the time, and there's a bit of chroma shift. Together they make the lines look very uneven on the scenes with many reds. I've tried quite a few ways to solve this on the UV plane, but with limited success. We ended up constraining the chroma channels to avoid the "bleeding effect", combined with de-ringing and the LineDarken filter which automatically detects and fills the broken parts in lines. As expected, the result of this first ever try of the LineDarken filter, was just passible. Moving on to the flat area, because heavy banding exists at very low, very high brightness, and everywhere in between. Designing a protective mask was rather difficult - especially at the bright areas. There seems to be no way to get a clear cut between bandings to fix and details to protect. So I designed two separate masks, one for the normal scenes and the other for the high-brightness scenes. The banding on the bright scenes are also very stubburn. To avoid damaging the lines, the strength of de-banding wasn't set too high. A few eposides later in the season have some grain deliberately added, to visually couteract the banding with increased severity.

EP 109-175: Line aliasing and temporal jitters are worse. Chroma lines are as bad as the previous. The native resolution is around 576p or even lower. Haloing is rather significant around the lines. As for the PP, the strength of de-ringing was increased by a lot. A high-quality upscaling algorithm was used to maintain line sharpness and to control the ringing. De-ringing was much slighter though, and there was no more added grain to further reduce the file size. Everything else was pretty much the same as that in the script for EP 1-108.

Finally, the SPs folder of this torrent contains only the NCOP/ED and the Menus, as it is already too large. All other SPs that have been abandoned, are not important and too ugly-looking anyway. EN tracks (including EN commentary tracks) were excluded, too. With all these efforts, the final file sizes are reduced to ~ 850 MB, which admittedly is still a lot.

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Thanks to our participating members:
Script: 北上
Encode: 北上
Collate: icefires
QC: Enola, 北上
Upload: Tom
Seed: Seeding members of VCB-Studio CDN (refer to our website for full list)

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Please refer to https://vcb-s.com/archives/7949 if you have trouble viewing WebP images.

Please refer to https://www.tsdm39.net/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=879923 for more informaion about jointly purchased music.

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Part 1 (EP1 ~ EP108):

Comparison (right click on the image and open it in a new tab to see the full-size one)

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Part 2 (EP109 ~ EP175):

Comparison (right click on the image and open it in a new tab to see the full-size one)

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Information:
https://vcb-s.com/archives/138