Guardian Screencaps, Episodes 6-8

[kernezelda]

Screencaps deleted as of October 22, 2023.

Hi. :)

Screencaps for episodes 6 through 8 are now up on Smugmug at the following links (three galleries per episode).
Source: Solo's textless HQ episodes

Photo Galleries
Episode 6 Caps 1, Episode 6 Caps 2, Episode 6 Caps 3

Episode 7 Caps 1, Episode 7 Caps 2, Episode 7 Caps 3

Episode 8 Caps 1, Episode 8 Caps 2, Episode 8 Caps 3


Happy Wednesday. :)

Comments

[kernezelda]

That's absolutely fine. :)

[tinny]

Thank you! I am adding them to the post now.

May I ask why you're making them in png format? png is not really suited for photos (or caps). jpg would be much smaller without noticeable loss of quality.

[kernezelda]

I've read in several places that png files are best for lossless quality, so I figure they're good for permanent backups and can be copied/converted to jpgs for gifs and such.

It was interesting last night reviewing the caps for Episode 19, how even batch-capping at a rate of 1 in VLC really doesn't catch all frames. The scene in SID where Shen Wei slaps the ladder, none of the caps captured that, only his grabbing it ladder afterward. From Shen Wei's noticing Zhao Yunlan's nosebleed to ZY saying he felt fine, there were only 249 caps, so I went back and did a frame-by-frame advance/screenshot. Shen Wei's slap took only three frames, it was that fast. I finally just fbf'd the whole section for micro-expressions, etc., and it went from 249 to around 1500-2000ish. I wonder if it's because of the medium, if batch-capping from a DVD or blu-ray would have a closer ratio of frames to caps.

[tinny]

I've read in several places that png files are best for lossless quality

Well... this is true, if you are starting from lossless sources in the first place. But you have a video file, which is in itself encoded as MPEG (which is like JPG, just for Movies), so they are already compressed.

You can't magically create lossless quality from loss-y source. The HQ videos have about 2GB each, but your collections of caps (which, as you say, contain maybe every 5th to 10th frame?) already have ten times that. There is not more quality in the caps than in the original video. They just take up more space.

What PNG is useful for is things with a finite color palette - like screenshots from a computer window, or drawings, where almost all pixels have the same color, and then you have thin lines in another color that you don't want distorted by compression. For this kind of source material, PNG is ideal.

For movies (or screencaps, or photos), this doesn't apply. There you have millions of colors and only very few pixels are the same. This is where JPEG excels and creates a much smaller file size for you without visible loss. Of course, there are different levels of JPG, and if you choose a too low one, you will get visible compression artifacts. So you have to choose a relatively high one if you're going for (near) lossless backup.

VLC also provides an option for capping in JPG (but I don't know how to set the compression level there).

It was interesting last night reviewing the caps for Episode 19, how even batch-capping at a rate of 1 in VLC really doesn't catch all frames.

I am not quite sure, but I think it may be connected to where the keyframes are? I've noticed that the Guardian videos are weirdly encoded, and the keyframes aren't where I expect them when I make my own caps, and there are fewer of them than I would have thought. So maybe that makes it harder on the capping algorithm.

Or maybe it's not that at all and you can set another parameter in VLC somewhere? I don't use VLC, so I don't know that much about it.


In any case: thank you for capping and sharing! <3

[kernezelda]

Thank you. This is something I had no clue on, and had only googled shallowly for best file formats. At this point, I've already capped the whole series, so I won't re-cap with jpg format, but if I do another extensive project from video files, I will. I may experiment with DVDs, too. The last time I worked with video was in 2011/12, Windows Movie Maker and avi files, and when the sources started appearing as mkv and mpg and mp4, that old program just couldn't work with them, and I drifted away.

I saw references to keyframes in the settings, but had no idea what they were. And I don't know anything about encoding, but Guardian is weird as heck in its pacing, too. Those scenes with Guo Changcheng writing always feel like epilogues, but no, there are more scenes after that sometimes just... end. Not even on cliffhanger moments. Just mid-scene.

Briefly, briefly, I considered re-cutting the episodes, but gave that up as madness almost as soon as I thought of it. ;D

On another note, there's something a little masochistically satisfying about frame-by-frame capping to get every little minute shift in expression, sometimes.

Thanks again, and you're welcome, too! :D