Canaan

[Kraco]

"The modern-day story centers on a present-day story about a detective, a young man, a virus researcher, a, and a cat mascot character who are brought together in the Tokyo neighborhood of Shibuya by bizarre events with worldwide implications." -ANN

Based on a visual novel 428 Fuusa Sareta Shibuya de.

Episodes: 13
Genre: Action, (mystery)

Links:
Episode 1 - gg

AniDB
ANN
Official



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The first episode was quite interesting and action wise very good, well justifying my initial interest in this anime. There were quite a few characters, though, and little indication of who they were, who they fight for or what they want, but I have a feeling it will be made clearer well before the end. Although since it was apparently a mystery game, I'd imagine not everything is made too clear. Nevertheless, this seemed about as far away from ordinary shounen as Eden of the last season, so it should be a good watch.

The characters also seemed to have plenty of attitude, which is always a good thing. I'll definitely keep watching.

[Board of Command]

Lots of big names on that voice cast.

But c'mon, 400+ MB file? gg is following in the footsteps of Umai.

[Kraco]

Lots of big names on that voice cast.

Not just the voice cast. There are Type-Moon people behind the original story and art. Although I don't know if everybody consider them big, but for me they are big.

There was a lot going on in this first episode justifying a bigger file size, but it's still a good question whether they really needed to go well above 400. All in all it seems to be a growing trend these days. Although if you intended to burn all 13 eps on a single DVDR, it would already mean a lot smaller episodes, so maybe they thought that if it's going to be 2 anyway, no need to hold back.

[Board of Command]

Isn't Type-Moon just two guys? Their stuff, especially Kara no Kyoukai, have been superb though.

I'm re-encoding this to 1280x720 @ 300 MB and 1024x576 @ 250 MB to see how much quality I lose. Results will be posted in a few hours.

[Archangel]

Awesome opening anyone?

[Board of Command]

As promised, here are some frame comparisons of two separate encodes I did. There is very minimal loss of detail, probably negligible, in my 1280x720 re-encode that's 300 MB. The 1024x576 re-encode was pretty much identical as the original aside from the resolution, and it's 250 MB. Both of these had no significant quality degradation even in dark scenes, where H264 has problems with.

Original gg encode:


1280x720 re-encode:


1024x576 re-encode:

[Everon]

There seems to be an awful lot of dramatic irony going on when people are getting killed in horrific ways. Normally when people grab thier eyes and start screaming I don't start thinking, "Oh hey, there's that new age dance that everyone's going on about. What's it called again?"

Dying. Its called dying.

[shinta|hikari]

I think it describes the kind of world Canaan lives in, where people manage to avert their eyes even to the most obvious things if it aids them in living a carefree life. This is of course, condensed and taken to the extreme in this case, but it rounds up the camera girl's comments in the episode.

[Pandadice]

i'll be waiting for a smaller size to come out :\ but I do plan to check this series out

[Buffalobiian]

I bitched alot about large files when I had crap internet. I've upgraded now, and quota really isn't a problem anymore, but it's still annoying when I try to make the most out of my DVD archives by figuring out which series are better burnt together so save disks.

I miss the days when 24 episodes fit onto 1 DVD nicely.

As for the episode, visually impressive, and the story is fittingly chaotic, much like the setting.

I've got a feeling those guys with the teddy-bear-heads (for lack of a better term) are failed, or experimental synesthesias. I'm guessing those helmets (screw writing 3 words) block all visuals. Them being synesthesias though, can still navigate around with their other senses. When they take off the helmet, being failed subjects they can't handle the influx of info from all 5 senses and die.

/speculation.

I'm liking this quite a lot. The visual quality and airing run reminds me of Eden, but more engaging. Let's hope we don't have to wait 12 months for an ending.

[Kraco]

That seems to be the case with those animal head helmet dudes. Maybe everybody's so interested in Canaan, because she's the real thing. The secretary was quite awesome, and since this isn't any nosebleed love-comedy, the man's reactions were far funnier.

[TheBladeChild]

Yes, I have been waiting for this since it was announced! Cant wait to watch it.

On a side note, this was up on gg's irc and it has to be the funniest shit iv seen in a while:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidZ3gwD6wU

[Narasho]

This series looks very promising. I was entertained throughout the 1st episode, and it opened with a lot of questions, and few answers. The only sad thing is if this series is only 13 episodes, seems too short.

[Board of Command]

I did another encode of this last night that took nearly 6 hours (!!) for the whole episode. I'd say I'm pretty disappointed at the result given how long it took. There's some sharpening, smoothing and color enhancement using supersampling. Overall though, I don't think it's a big enough improvement to justify spending 6 hours on.

Original / New

[Buffalobiian]

Any results/file size that you like better than the original?

[Board of Command]

Both of my 720p encodes were 300 MB (including audio), so that's already over 100 MB smaller than the original gg release. Quality on my second (the 6 hour one) encode is subjectively better than the original, but the difference is relatively small and, for the most part, negligible.

From now on I'm just going to re-encode everything like my first 720p one. It takes about 70 minutes to encode and quality isn't too much worse. There's a slight loss of detail, especially on edges, but it's negligible.

[Nadouku]

Heh, people die and they act like it's part of the festival. They sure do live a carefree life. Even the gunfires didn't startle much and aroused more attention in the festival itself.

[masamuneehs]

think this one has potential, but they're juggling some knives that i hope they handle well. the 'upbeat, optimistic pseudo-sister' used to contrast with a 'cold, realistic badass' character is always old mill, but sometimes it works...

the scene where the people are cheering the gunfire and the reporter remarks about them rubbed me the wrong way. i'm interested in this for the gore

[12:12] <masamune> this canaan show feels alright so far...
[12:14] <Yukimura-San> ah i finally remember what else it reminded me of
[12:15] * Quits: ero-jiji (Read error: Connection reset by peer)
[12:15] <Yukimura-San> Blood+ also had that vibe of experimenting on people to create copies of the main chars abilites
[12:18] * Joins: bomchi
[12:18] <Urashima|bot> Hello, bomchi
[12:18] <bomchi> hi
[12:19] <Yukimura-San> masa did you watch the first ep of the when the seagull's cry or whatever it's called?
[12:20] * Joins: heklin
[12:25] <masamune> nope
[12:26] <masamune> you're right. Canaan feels like Blood+ meets Black Lagoon somewhere between Noir-esque and fan-service friendly action jane
[12:27] <masamune> but vampires are sorta played out
[12:27] <Yukimura-San> indeed
[12:27] <masamune> i like to see some play off of modern stuff. even Lagoon dated itself
[12:28] <masamune> and it's fast and when it's not trying to be all emotional, it does some grittiness right. like you can see the RPG (or whatever it was, it was fast) before the Jeep gets hit towards the end of the episode
[12:28] <masamune> plus, gore is just fun
[12:28] <Yukimura-San> lol
[12:29] <Yukimura-San> quite so
[12:29] <masamune> i am STILL having trouble playing mkvs on my crappy lappy
[12:30] <Yukimura-San> it's interesting you brought up vampires, as I was watching it I started to notice assassins have been steadily replacing the role vampires usedto fill in the eye of my inner fan

[Pandadice]

hey, here's a 280mb file size version of episode 1

[Shameless-Moon] CANAAN - 01 (D-TVS 1280x720 DivX685).mkv

i just downloaded this one, and I'll be watching it later.

[Board of Command]

DivX? wtf...people these days

Not that it's bad, it just seems so obscure these days.