I suspect you could make some progress on a "fluff eliminator" by leveraging the existing "sakuga" database[1]. "Sakuga", in this context, meaning the well animated parts.

After all, there's a fairly strong correlation between high-importance scenes and overall framecount, which makes sense when you consider that frames are the main currency animation studios work with.

[1]: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post

I don't think this approach would work. It's quite common to have long-ish dialogue scenes with lower-grade animation, and save the high-quality work on scenes with interesting things to look at happening on the screen.

As an example, the final conversation between Okabe and FB in Steins;Gate is really not good animation, but it is crucial to the plot, and the dialogue and voice acting still make it a very impactful scene.

An extreme example: There's a critical scene towards the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion where a single frame is on screen for about a minute with no dialog. (Not the elevator scene.)

You are, of course, correct. It's not exactly a bulletproof heuristic. At best, you'd probably only be able to identify likely filler episodes, as opposed to filler scenes.

A truly sophisticated approach capable of identifying filler scenes would probably involve machine learning using data that's not (to my knowledge) actually available to the public, like engagement/watchtime statistics.

Also, things like transformation sequences might have high quality because they will get reused many times.

> My big want is a fluff eliminator API. Like a service where people can define timestamps of where the actual good stuff is on a per-episode basis.

I'm trying to build something similiar[0] to this by indexing (and plotting) the anime score (given by MAL, something like IMDB for anime) on a daily basis. So in theory you could look at the graph and when you see a spike in score/user/favorites the episode may be good, or bad, or anything.

That's the idea. I was busy getting the indexer stable, so it's not really finished and I haven't spent much time on design. E.g. the airing dates aren't plotted yet etc. The current work is at https://anistats.com.

An example for a overhyped show would be https://www.anistats.com/anime/41353/the-god-of-high-school. And a steady climbing, probably better-than-thought movie would be this: https://www.anistats.com/anime/38088/digimon-adventure-last-...

[0] https://anistats.com

There is a telegram bot that trim a particular anime secene from a specific moment. See more: https://github.com/soruly/trace.moe-media