Alright, I gotta say my peace on this, because I just genuinely don't understand what's going on.

I recently noticed that a not-insignificant number of posts have been, for whatever reason, deleted as being "low quality" for the reason of "Frame Blending". No other reason given.

This feels weird to me for a number of reasons. For one, deleting a post for frame blending feels *incredibly* extreme. While I'll admit it's often a flaw, sometimes it's used as an effect, and either way it's barely even noticable to most people. We have many, many, *many* amateur-level animations on this site - sometimes even 2 or 3 frame "animations" - that we allow with absolutely no issue at all. But this is a line we can't cross? Seriously? This feels pedantic at best, and cold-hearted at worst. Like, literal animation studios have used frame blending - give the hobbyists on this site a dang break.

The other thing, though, is that it's not like this is a hard standard. Or even a rule! I checked the code of conduct, help pages, rules, all of them top to bottom, and not anywhere is "frame blending" listed as banned. In fact, there are 45 posts on this site currently tagged "frame blending" that are totally fine and just sitting there no problem. It doesn't make sense.

Finally, in addition to being vague, not grounded in the rules, *and* snobbish at best (mean-spirited at worst), all of the deletions for this appear to be by a single mod. And a lot of them were posts that I and hundreds of other people had upvoted before deletion, with not a single comment complaining about it, so it's pretty clear that the community at large does not consider this to be a problem. A lot of them even have comments by users confused how the post didn't meet minimum standards! As far as I can tell, a single dude is going on a power trip, and there isn't a soul that I can find that agrees with it. Certainly not a majority.

I think this "policy" should be revisited. This site already has a slowly-growing reputation for being needlessly hostile to new and veteran artists alike, and this is definitely not helping.

Some examples of posts that were removed for this sole issue:

https://e621.net/posts/4168237
https://e621.net/posts/4088353
https://e621.net/posts/5214797
https://e621.net/posts/5189908
https://e621.net/posts/4303788
https://e621.net/posts/5021396
https://e621.net/posts/4836995
https://e621.net/posts/4743463

(There are many, many others. Just Google "site:e621.net frame blending". Spoiler: the same single mod deleted every single one of them.)

Also, I apologize for being noticably upset about this, but like... For real? Artists have it tough right now, with AI on the upsurge and social media blowing up and all manner of other things. A lot of my friends are artists and they've had trouble finding a platform lately, and I really think, with that in mind, bloody frame blending shouldn't be a thing we're causing conflict and strife over. Can whoever's doing this just, like... Chill? Please?

frame interpolation is almost exclusively a net negative, and for animation does little other than make everything a smeary, blury mess, on par with compression artefacts.

raw frames or no frames.

dba_afish said:
frame interpolation is almost exclusively a net negative, and for animation does little other than make everything a smeary, blury mess, on par with compression artefacts.

raw frames or no frames.

The fact that all of these animations have massively net-positive scores indicates that most people disagree with you.

EDIT:

Copy/pasting my original reply to the duplicate thread.

Giving this a bump, and seconding it. I was able to track down some of the deleted animations, and they look fine. Not sure why Mairo has such an issue with frame-blending, but IMO he should cut it out, and if possible these deletions should probably be reversed (not entirely sure what admins here can and can't do).

dba_afish said:
frame interpolation is almost exclusively a net negative, and for animation does little other than make everything a smeary, blury mess, on par with compression artefacts.

raw frames or no frames.

I respect your point of view - and, let's be clear, I actually am not a fan of frame interpolation by any means. It reminds me of when it was a trend to ""enhance"" animation by interpolating it to 180 fps, and it was just... yikes. Lol

That being said, unless it's an incredibly egregious example like that, I don't see why it should warrant nuking all these popular and well-received posts. It's not in the rules, it barely affects the quality if it's only affecting a small number of frames, and it's clearly not bad enough that anyone said anything - or even noticed, in many cases. And, again, it's something being applied very inconsistently, seemingly by one guy with a weirdly-specific crusade.

Or they just got the wrong memo, who knows. I don't want to assume ill will. But the actions themselves are objectively pretty harmful, inconsistent, and just don't make sense. So, yeah, I'm sticking to my guns on this one, haha.

OK, TBF, I am looking at post #4743463 (randomly chosen), trying to figure out what is meant by 'frame blending', and... it's fully 3D animated? Am I thinking something like tweening in 2D animation?
You can also request that the dupe be hidden, I guess. It looked like literally the same text but different formatting?

subtlereminder said:
The fact that all of these animations have massively net-positive scores indicates that most people disagree with you.

Most people don't know what "frame interpolation" or "frame blending" means (in fact, we have an example right in this very thread), I would never use post scores as a way to judge a video's quality.

alphamule said:
OK, TBF, I am looking at post #4743463 (randomly chosen), trying to figure out what is meant by 'frame blending', and... it's fully 3D animated? Am I thinking something like tweening in 2D animation?
You can also request that the dupe be hidden, I guess. It looked like literally the same text but different formatting?

Go to 0:42, pause, and notice how you can observe several frames being blended together. It's not an intentional motion blur, it's just a bad video export.

lafcadio said:
I would never use post scores as a way to judge a video's quality.

Be that as it may, it is a good way to judge the community's reception on something - along with comments, though that's limited to those with more vocal tendencies. But by both of those metrics, it feels as if the removal of these posts (and many others removed for this issue) is extreme and at odds with the preferences and well-being of the community.

Like, let's be clear, if a post is extremely blurry and unwatchable quality through and through, that's one thing. But something like a minor export issue most people don't even seem to notice? I don't know - it feels like deleting a post for having bad anatomy or something. And God knows we've got plenty of that, lol

I'm gonna be blunt: this pisses me the fuck off.

Artists aren't always great at super technical stuff. This kind of minor mis-configured export is common. Most people can enjoy it just fine.

I can understand that if a better quality copy of the video exists and a corrupted copy was uploaded to e621 it would make sense to replace it with the superior version. But if the artist got one number slightly wrong on the "export" window and no superior version will ever be available, it's banned from ever being uploaded to e621? This seems like an absurd decision that will only negatively affect users with absolutely no positives.

Many of the common technical reasons for deletion (frame interpolation, anamorphic videos, heavy compression/macroblocking, etc.) can just be resolved with a better re-render, so it's not an artistic issue. If people have the ability to learn how to animate and spend hours working on their animations, they can surely take the time to learn how to check the right boxes on the export menu.

But on the other hand it does seem like this is enforced overly strictly. Artworks don't get deleted because they're a 1280x1280 JPG at 70% quality converted into the wrong color space from the original 4000x4000 PNG. Why are renders treated more harshly?

interiorcrocodile said:
... all of the deletions for this appear to be by a single mod ...

interiorcrocodile said:
... As far as I can tell, a single dude is going on a power trip ...

interiorcrocodile said:
... Spoiler: the same single mod deleted every single one of them ...

subtlereminder said:
Not sure why Mairo has such an issue with frame-blending ...

It's worth noting that Mairo is responsible for 9,283 out of 17,636 (almost 53%) of all webm files uploaded in 2024 - so deletions by Mairo are going to seem very disproportionate compared to other janitors.

subtlereminder said:
The fact that all of these animations have massively net-positive scores indicates that most people disagree with you.

If we took positive scores as an indicator of what was good, we'd end up with posts like post #3404558 (archive)

faucet said:
If we took positive scores as an indicator of what was good, we'd end up with posts like post #3404558 (archive)

That's a funny post.

I fail to see the issue.

EDIT

faucet said:
Many of the common technical reasons for deletion (frame interpolation, anamorphic videos, heavy compression/macroblocking, etc.) can just be resolved with a better re-render, so it's not an artistic issue. If people have the ability to learn how to animate and spend hours working on their animations, they can surely take the time to learn how to check the right boxes on the export menu.

I'm under the impression that a lot of art is uploaded to e621 by third parties, and the artist might not even know that e621 exists. Am I mistaken?

In that case, over-eagerly enforcing a rule like this doesn't cause the artist to export things better, it just causes e621 users to be arbitrarily deprived of content they like.

faucet said:

It's worth noting that Mairo is responsible for 9,283 out of 17,636 (almost 53%) of all webm files uploaded in 2024 - so deletions by Mairo are going to seem very disproportionate compared to other janitors.

This is an excellent context, and not something I was aware of - my apologies for the callout in that case. I just legitimately could not find an example of someone else removing a post for this, so I figured there was a connection.

That said, regardless of whether it's a person acting independently or just carrying out some internal policy, it still seems really harsh and inconsistent either way.

faucet said:

If we took positive scores as an indicator of what was good, we'd end up with posts like post #3404558 (archive)

... ok but did you have to pick literally the funniest possible example 👀💦💦

Jokes aside, I stand by my above reply. Whether or not a post is "good" is determined by many things. By the same logic of, "We cannot judge whether a post is good based on score", we must also admit that we cannot judge whether or not a post is good based on, "does it or does it not contain frame blending?" That's ridiculous, and totally ignoring things like content, sound design, art style, and... You know, literally ever other metric, lol.

subtlereminder said:
The fact that all of these animations have massively net-positive scores indicates that most people disagree with you.

interiorcrocodile said:
Be that as it may, it is a good way to judge the community's reception on something - along with comments, though that's limited to those with more vocal tendencies. But by both of those metrics, it feels as if the removal of these posts (and many others removed for this issue) is extreme and at odds with the preferences and well-being of the community.

If we ran with what was upvoted we'd be littered with terrible quality image macros, shitty downscales, half broken videos, and piracy
The sheer amount of people that wouldn't know quality if it hit them in the face is staggering
That should be clear by how often a 10MB PNG ends up getting recompressed hundreds of times over and passed around as a <100KB JPEG

The quality of these videos was fine. The consensus was that the quality was fine. I looked at some of the videos, and agree that the quality was fine.

We aren't talking about <100KB jpegs or image macros. We're talking about these videos. The very high scores of these videos were clearly an indicator of their perceived quality.

subtlereminder said:
The quality of these videos was fine. The consensus was that the quality was fine. I looked at some of the videos, and agree that the quality was fine.

We aren't talking about <100KB jpegs or image macros. We're talking about these videos. The very high scores of these videos were clearly an indicator of their perceived quality.

Votes are not in any way a symbol of actual quality
Once again if we just ran with votes we'd be littered with shit content, because most people do not know what actual quality is and only care that they can see something, even if things are so blurry or the macroblocking is so big you don't even need to look hard to see it

I'm locking this because nothing useful is going to come from going back and fourth here, and this is only serving as a call out post
If you believe a staff member is doing something incorrect report them, handle it civily rather than shouting about it on the forums