Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

This forum is for questions and discussion of all the aspects of handling and cleaning up your footage with Avisynth.
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bloppyblue
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by bloppyblue » Mon Oct 25, 2010 9:24 pm

Phantasmagoriat wrote::dino: did you try ttempsmooth() just by itself without any arguments? Do you even have TTempSmooth.dll in your avisynth plugins folder?
I just used it's default... So I used
TTempSmooth(maxr=3, lthresh=4, cthresh=5, lmdiff=2, cmdiff=3, strength=2, scthresh=12.0, fp=true, vis_blur=0, debug=false, interlaced=false, pfclip=?)

Except in place of ? I had put null (because it told me to...)
Phantasmagoriat wrote:Did you check if you actually have libfftw3f-3.dll in your C:\Windows\System32 folder?
Yes, I do. I have libfftw3f-3.def plus pairs of two others that are very similar (came with a pack).
Phantasmagoriat wrote:It's not that that bad, some of it may even go away in the final stage when you compress your video... but still it looks like you'll need to experiment with temporal cleaning filters [like fft3dgpu(), ttempsmooth(), dfttest(), fluxsmoothst() etc...] and a gradient-fixer [gradfun2db(), gradfun2dbmod(), gradfunkmirror() etc...] I can't recommend much for temporal filters because they are... temporal. Thus require a sequence of frames to process [I suppose if you are really desperate, you could post a lossless video clip... ] But anyways, you'll definitely need a gradient-fixer. Higher values with gradfun2db show some good improvements at the expense of some haloing around edges, but if your temporal filters do a good job you won't need as high values for gradient fixing.
Thank you for listing those. I'll definitely check them all out and write it down. And no, I'm not gonna post a lossless clip :P I'm sure this just takes a lot of trial and error to get right.

Thanks for all that help Phantasmagoriat. Your username is also very fun to type.
Qyot27 wrote:To be completely honest here, monitor settings have a lot to do with how noticeable this is. I threw the before and after shots next to each other and jumped back and forth in Firefox, and I couldn't see the problem with the black dress. I had to crank my brightness values way up just to see it (and yeah, that's pretty nasty, but I'm not seeing why the smoother - any smoother - was even necessary in the first place).
Hm... Alright. I'll make sure in the future I don't rely on Avisynth for everything and filter every source I have. Although on my monitor, the noise and random blocks in the backgrounds were very noticeable... Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by Cannonaire » Mon Oct 25, 2010 10:34 pm

If you haven't tried it already, MCTemporalDenoise can do an amazing job without destroying your source in many cases. It requires a lot of other filters to be installed in order to work, but once it's working it's really easy to use as far as parameters go. The main drawback though is it's glacial speed. On low settings you can expect it to take between 2-5 hours to work on a 23~ minute episode depending on your system, source resolution, and other factors. Regardless, I find it to be much better than many alternatives; I just set Virtualdub to render a few scripts with job control while I'm asleep or at work.

Here's the avisynth page for it: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/MCTemporalDenoise

I believe it also adds grain by default with all of the presets, which should keep your footage from banding when you encode with x264 or w/e your codec of choice is, but I could be wrong on this point.
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by Mister Hatt » Mon Oct 25, 2010 10:41 pm

I just noticed you're using 1920x1080. K-ON S1 was actually upscaled on the bluray. How does it look if you bicubicresize(1280x720,0.333,0.333) and don't filter at all? I might also suggest using the actual BDMV seeing as I can tell from the quality that you're using some torrented raws and not the bluray itself. It doesn't look bad at all and requires no filtering, just a resize and IIRC some slight cropping.

@Cannonaire: I've seen the source material, MCTD is not required. Expecting an amver to even use it is somewhat ridiculous given how slow it is. 1920x1080p24 on a single 24 minute episode on a core2duo takes around 6 DAYS. I can't see anyone doing that, and it's not like everyone here has powerful machines. Quadcores make little difference due to it not being threaded very well. I think I turned it into 5.5 days on a Q9450, or just short of 5 days on a dual X5580. It is insanely slow, and that was only on settings="medium". Test material was the Tayutama bluray if anyone cares.

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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by Phantasmagoriat » Mon Oct 25, 2010 10:47 pm

bloppyblue wrote:I just used it's default... So I used
TTempSmooth(maxr=3, lthresh=4, cthresh=5, lmdiff=2, cmdiff=3, strength=2, scthresh=12.0, fp=true, vis_blur=0, debug=false, interlaced=false, pfclip=?)

Except in place of ? I had put null (because it told me to...)
Oh, I see what error you are getting... just type:

Code: Select all

TTempSmooth()
That's it. All the defaults will load automatically. Alternatively, you could substitute the ? with the word: last
That way, you are at least offering TTempSmooth a clip to use for comparison.


bloppyblue wrote:
Phantasmagoriat wrote:Did you check if you actually have libfftw3f-3.dll in your C:\Windows\System32 folder?
Yes, I do. I have libfftw3f-3.def plus pairs of two others that are very similar (came with a pack).
hmm... are you running a 64-bit OS? You might need to copy it into your windows SysWOW64 folder [whoever named that directory is awesome :awesome:]


bloppyblue wrote:Thank you for listing those. I'll definitely check them all out and write it down. And no, I'm not gonna post a lossless clip :P I'm sure this just takes a lot of trial and error to get right.
Yeah, you seem to get the idea :amv: And if you want to install/experiment with new filters [deblock_qed() is another one...], just follow the directions in that link I posted earlier, but google the documentation in case of special instructions.


bloppyblue wrote:Thanks for all that help Phantasmagoriat. Your username is also very fun to type.
No problem ;) some people call me phan 'cuz it's easier... or some variation thereof... it's an old username I think I'm outgrowing... but really I don't care as long as I know you're talking to me :beer:



Also, I'll echo what Hatt was saying about filtering. Try to err on the side of underfiltering. That way, all the details gets preserved.
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by mirkosp » Mon Oct 25, 2010 11:52 pm

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Before going on with the tests, make sure your monitor is properly calibrated... it might be showing more issues than the ones that are really there.
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by BasharOfTheAges » Tue Oct 26, 2010 8:12 am

bloppyblue wrote:Hm... Alright. I'll make sure in the future I don't rely on Avisynth for everything and filter every source I have. Although on my monitor, the noise and random blocks in the backgrounds were very noticeable... Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
This may sound like a dumb question, but bear with me. Do you see the same problems on the PNG as you did in (i'm assuming) virtual dub? If not, are you sure vdub is set to display the correct color depth? (I think it isn't by default)
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by bloppyblue » Tue Oct 26, 2010 9:27 pm

Mister Hatt wrote:How does it look if you bicubicresize(1280x720,0.333,0.333) and don't filter at all?
Unfortunately, it still looks the same, just with a smaller resolution.
Phantasmagoriat wrote:Oh, I see what error you are getting... just type:

Code: Select all

TTempSmooth()
That's it. All the defaults will load automatically. Alternatively, you could substitute the ? with the word: last
That way, you are at least offering TTempSmooth a clip to use for comparison.
Hm... I did both of those and, although I didn't get an error, nothing happened to the footage besides the frames shifting over.
Phantasmagoriat wrote:hmm... are you running a 64-bit OS? You might need to copy it into your windows SysWOW64 folder [whoever named that directory is awesome :awesome:]
Yeah, I'm running on Vista 64-bit. I moved the libblahblah.dll over to SysWOW64 and retried both methods of TTempSmooth, and still, nothing happened :(
Phantasmagoriat wrote:
bloppyblue wrote:Thanks for all that help Phantasmagoriat. Your username is also very fun to type.
No problem ;) some people call me phan 'cuz it's easier... or some variation thereof... it's an old username I think I'm outgrowing... but really I don't care as long as I know you're talking to me :beer:
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mirkosp wrote:http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Before going on with the tests, make sure your monitor is properly calibrated... it might be showing more issues than the ones that are really there.
Thanks. I don't think my monitor is extremely off.
BasharOfTheAges wrote:This may sound like a dumb question, but bear with me. Do you see the same problems on the PNG as you did in (i'm assuming) virtual dub? If not, are you sure vdub is set to display the correct color depth? (I think it isn't by default)
I'm using AvsP to do the scripting and I captured the screenshots from there as well... And yeah, the display video has the same blockiness. I don't think it's a problem with preview.

I really wish these forums had an edit option.

Should I just skip this filtering process? Is it going to be a big deal if I want to enter this kind of footage to a con?

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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by Cannonaire » Tue Oct 26, 2010 10:40 pm

In my opinion your footage is already pretty filtered as it is. Filtering more probably won't help much if at all, but also when i first saw the screenshots I didn't see the blockiness you were talking about (although I see it now). It's my guess that it will only be really visible on LCDs, and more so on inaccurately calibrated LCD displays. At a convention, it would likely be very difficult to see that specific video issue on the projected image. But that's just my opinion... :roll:
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by Scintilla » Wed Oct 27, 2010 6:33 am

I haven't noticed TTempSmooth to produce a very visible effect at default settings, so don't be quick to assume it's not doing anything -- try encoding a clip without it and then again with it, and compare the file sizes.

As for conventions: unless your source has obvious problems like bad macroblocking, rainbows, dot crawl, etc., they very likely will not care about filtering. And K-ON! shouldn't have any of these, being of such recent vintage.

(A big part of the reason you would want to do spatial/temporal smoothing is to be able to reduce the file size of your finished encode while still getting it to look decent. But, with conventions, reducing the file size is not usually a concern.)
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Re: Beginning to experiment with Avisynth - No clue what to do

Post by bloppyblue » Wed Oct 27, 2010 8:04 pm

Cannonaire wrote:In my opinion your footage is already pretty filtered as it is. Filtering more probably won't help much if at all, but also when i first saw the screenshots I didn't see the blockiness you were talking about (although I see it now). It's my guess that it will only be really visible on LCDs, and more so on inaccurately calibrated LCD displays. At a convention, it would likely be very difficult to see that specific video issue on the projected image. But that's just my opinion... :roll:
Scintilla wrote:I haven't noticed TTempSmooth to produce a very visible effect at default settings, so don't be quick to assume it's not doing anything -- try encoding a clip without it and then again with it, and compare the file sizes.

As for conventions: unless your source has obvious problems like bad macroblocking, rainbows, dot crawl, etc., they very likely will not care about filtering. And K-ON! shouldn't have any of these, being of such recent vintage.

(A big part of the reason you would want to do spatial/temporal smoothing is to be able to reduce the file size of your finished encode while still getting it to look decent. But, with conventions, reducing the file size is not usually a concern.)
Thanks for the responses. I'll just leave the footage as is then. I'll also go and play around with TTempSmooth some more once I get the hang of it!

Thanks, again!

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