Enhancing Final Fantasy Videos

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Enhancing Final Fantasy Videos

Postby peridian » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:25 am

Hello,

Not sure if this is the right forum, but here goes...

I've ripped the movies off FF7, FF8, FF9, FFX, FFX-2, and FF:AC (still waiting on a UK translation of the US-only extractor for FFXII, I've tried myself but gotten nowhere with it, see here) in as raw a format as I can (either converted from the m2vs, or extracted directly, into full frames uncompressed avi).

Unfortunately, when played back, because they were originally intended for lower resolution playback, they don't look so good on an LCD screen when played at about 1024x768 resolution. This is particularly noticeable on the videos from FFX.

I've hunted around for tools to improve the quality of these videos, and found a program called EnhanceMovie. It seems to do a lot of things quite easily, which is just as well as I am not a video editing expert.

Does anybody know of either what kinds of enhancements I would look to make to these videos, or any resources explaining what to look for or do to clean up these kinds of videos?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Rob.
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Postby M.H.A.Q.S. » Mon Aug 13, 2007 11:43 am

To my knowledge, I don't know if this can be done to a better extent but if someone here can give you any help, I'll be interested too. :roll:
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Postby Zarxrax » Mon Aug 13, 2007 11:47 am

Avisynth.

I've never worked with that footage, but I would perhaps recommend some light smoothing filters, LanczosResize to upscale it, and then play around with various sharpening filters like LimitedSharpen or aWarpsharp.

EEDI2 Resizer may likely work better than LanczosResize: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=112249
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Postby Qyot27 » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:16 am

When I was working on cleaning up the FF footage my sister was using, I used a combination of supersampling, smoothing, and resizing back down. Something like a filter chain of:

BilinearResize(1280,720)
deen("w3d",3,10,12)
LanczosResize(640,352)

Most of the footage (notably, from the newer games) wasn't bad enough to warrant that kind of filtering, though. It seemed that I only needed to do that on the footage from FF8 and Kingdom Hearts (I don't think she used FF7, but I would assume that I would probably have found it necessary there, too), maybe even the old crappy web trailers for Advent Children.
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Postby peridian » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:12 am

Thanks for all this. I have seen AviSynth before, but it read like something that would require more advanced video editing skills than I have. I will investigate it and look for some guids as well.

Regards,
Rob.
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Postby peridian » Fri Aug 17, 2007 2:40 am

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:

Image Image

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:

Image Image

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:

Image Image

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:

Image Image

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:

Image Image

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.
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Postby BasharOfTheAges » Fri Aug 17, 2007 3:02 am

peridian wrote:If anybody has any opinions or advice on this, I would greatly appreciate it.


Deinterlace?
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Postby Zarxrax » Sat Aug 18, 2007 1:44 pm

It sounds like you are off to a good start, but your method so far is pretty poor. There are much much better alternatives to the things you did so far.

These guides have some pretty good information on deinterlacing and filtering videos in avisynth:
EADFAG v2: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/
EADFAG v3 beta: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtechbeta/

The plugins mentioned in the guides can be downloaded here: http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/
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Postby peridian » Mon Aug 20, 2007 3:10 am

Basher, I tried deinterlace, but it did not appear to make any difference. I'm not entirely sure if that's the format of the video or the filter I was using.

Zarxrax, thanks for the guides, they look like what I've been trying to find. I will read through them when I get the chance.

Regards,
Rob.
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Postby BasharOfTheAges » Mon Aug 20, 2007 3:37 am

peridian wrote:Bashar, I tried deinterlace, but it did not appear to make any difference. I'm not entirely sure if that's the format of the video or the filter I was using.

It's interlaced... The best way to fix it is something you're going to have to figure out through the guides, but that's the biggest issue. You shouldn't even worry about the other filtering until that is taken care of.
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Re: Enhancing Final Fantasy Videos

Postby ffxdean » Mon Aug 20, 2007 7:39 pm

peridian wrote:
still waiting on a UK translation of the US-only extractor for FFXII.


Hey Peridian, I already released the extractor for the PAL Version. Its also located @ Ngemu.

Here is the link to the AMV forum thread:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=81425
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Postby peridian » Wed Aug 22, 2007 2:41 am

Bashar, I can see that the video itself displays qualities of an interlaced video, the weird thing is that the video reports as progressive in DGIndex (the m2v files were pulled off the DVD through a specialised extractor).

I will try a few other methods of deinterlacing, but the ones I've tried so far have no impact on the video, the interlacing still appears (suggesting that this really is a progressive video file). Does a progressive video file play back as well as interlaced on a TV screen? Would they have stored the files in a progressive format but from an interlaced source for playback on TV off a PS2?

Zarxrax, that AMVapp is very useful. I already had most of the tools and plugins from it, but with the exception of the VirtualDubMod, which suddenly makes Avisynth a whole lot more user friendly. Also, very pleased to find where DVD2AVI had gone to, I thought it had been abandoned.

ffxdean, I was already aware of your work, but so far you've only managed one out of 39 videos, and the initial release didn't even work. I am aware that actually the extractor is the one built by project fao for FFX, and that it can be modified to work on FFXII, but so far it has only been successfully modified for the US disc (I do monitor the ngemu boards for this).

No offence, but I think its a bit silly to say you've done the extractor and slap your name all over it when it doesn't actually do what its supposed to. If you manage to get the whole disc working, then it will be a great achievement. Until then, I'm still waiting.

Regards,
Rob.
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Postby ffxdean » Wed Aug 22, 2007 11:16 pm

peridian wrote:the initial release didn't even work.


Yeah I need to update that one (uploaded the worng one), But the link the thread in this forum works.

P.S Read the whole thread.
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Postby peridian » Thu Aug 23, 2007 2:33 am

Well I have no idea what was going on, but I eventually deleted all the videos, re-ripped them from the disk, and this time the Decomb plugin for AviSynth was able to deinterlace the videos. No idea why they were coming out as progressive before.

I also got TomsMoComp and KernelDeint to work with them, although I don't think either of them did quite as good a job as the Decomb one. I also experiemented with DGBob, but since its just an enhanced version of the FieldBob I tried before, I'm assuming I'm better off with the deinterlace.

I'm going to play around with the same kinds of filtering as I used from VirtualDub before, but using the AviSynth ones instead.
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