==== 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: FOSKY Lingfeng Studio)
- English commentary (source: R1 DVD, OZC)

Video: 1448×1080 23.976 fps VFR, 10-bit H.264, 5-6 Mb/s, CRF 16-18

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 ====
 
http://postimg.org/gallery/qq7loe4/4cd56394/