Masked Rider Agito - 42

Masked Rider Agito - 42

Welcome to Volume 11, second of three five episode discs. Welcome to probably the most important episode of the series. And, finally, welcome to by far the greatest victim of DVDShrink's tyranny.

You may notice that this is by a wide margin the largest episode yet. Why? Because this episode is full of grain. Not wheat or corn however, but noise that was intended at some point to approximate film grain. As the show was filmed digitally, this was always fake, but even fake grain stands up poorly to MPEG-2 compression. Recompression with half the bitrate results in nearly unwatchable garbage; averaged out blocks dancing as far as the eye can see.

In an attempt to salvage the video quality and deliver the best approximate of the original experience, the scenes that included this fake grain have been aggressively smoothed, and then even more grain layered over the top. This new grain is larger and even less like true film grain than the original, but it has the benefit of obscuring blocks that averaged out, making it merely look low detail behind the wall of grain. x264 is very capable of preserving such grain, but it comes at a price: bitrate.

It was at this point that we realized the true depths of the horrors some anonymous Japanese person loosed upon the world by running these last three discs through DVDShrink. May god have no mercy on his soul.