Okay,
I got AviSynth. I get how it works, but I have no idea as to where to start, how to get the various addins and such to work, or how best to use it. May need to hunt down some better guides on it.
I then got Virtual Dub, since I needed something to be able to play and save the avs files from AviSynth. I discovered it already has quite a few filters in. So I played around with them, and got some interesting results.
Before I go playing around with AviSynth scripts, I just want to run what I did past people who know what they're doing to find out if I'm overlooking something. It 'looks' like I'm in the right direction, but I'm not a video editing person.
Okay, first off, I picked out the 'A Summoner Is Born' movie from FFX. I'm using two points in the video for testing. One is a high motion bit, the other a character model close up.
Here are the original, uncompressed, unfiltered frames:
One of the most noticeable problems with the FFX videos is the interlacing on motion, which you can see if you look at Tidus' collar or around Yuna's eyes. After some experimenting, I found that the filter 'Field Bob' with settings for Smooth on both Even and Odd fields virtually removes this issue. See here:
Playing around some more, I realised what the Smoother filter did. It definitely helps clean up the colours on the screen by getting rid of the odd pixels of differing shades, especially on the character skin textures. So I added that filter, but with a small-ish value (slider 15; g750), since too high a value made the characters look like they were made of wax. The effect is not so noticeable on the high motion frame, though it is noticeable before he moves, but it can be seen on Yuna's face. Here is with both the filters applied:
Then I fiddled around with blur and sharpen. I thought you would only want to apply one or the other, since they counteract each other, but I found that doesn't seem to be the case. I applied a radius-1 gausian blur, which definitely removed some of the pixelated edges to the models, but also lowered the quality of the image overall. See here:
So I then added a Sharpen filter, and ramped it up to the maximum (64). This seems to bring the image back to the same kind of quality as I had before the blur, and whlie it does seem to counteract the benefit of the blur to some extent, I'm still convinced that some of the benefit is still there, as it does appear to have improved in quality with both applied. The final output is below:
As I say, it 'appears' to have improved the quality, but I do wonder if that's my eyesight, lack of video editing knowledge in what this all does, or just my imagination
If anybody has any opinions or advice on this, I would greatly appreciate it.
Regards,
Rob.