Cleaning up Outlaw Star

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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 3:31 am

The following is based on a conversation I just had with KiTo:

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And then the troll's like "No! I'm gonna eat you!"
Then I'm like "Well, thanks for answering my question anyway. I'm gonna go around though."
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby mirkosp » Mon May 10, 2010 5:11 am

Since he didn't bother explaining, I'll explain for him. Toon has very little parameters to toggle with, so it will always thin and sharp at the same amount, allowing the user only to change the darkening amount. If you don't wanna thin you can use toonline, but the fact still remains that it's best to have a filter you can perfectly set for your source's needs. Of course, the reason this limiting was done, was because people kept abusing the old *toon filters' parameters, but the solution shouldn't be limiting the user, but showing him why abuse is bad.
As for derainbow, it blurs and melts the chroma channel, litterally desaturating the areas around the borders, even at the lowest settings. This can be either hard or easy to notice depending on the scene.
Also I'm not sure you actually would like a source to look sterile... generally preserving detail should be kept in mind when filtering, because you don't mind blurring and killing detail, you might as well just downscale to 320x240, since keeping the source resolution to 640x480 would give you no further sharpness nor detail for twice the resolution to compress.
Again, Mister Hatt isn't a troll, he just keeps forgetting that he also needs to provide explanations for what he says, with the consequence that people dislike him and tend to disregard his suggestions, generally for the worse. >_>
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Mister Hatt » Mon May 10, 2010 5:25 am

More to the point, I assume people know everything I do to a degree, and I forget to give reasons for things. The main reason Toon is bad is that it is insanely untweakable. It doesn't allow for much user interaction and while you might want one thing it does, the others don't need the same strength, which tends to make it a filter with an INSANE amount of overkill. Anime like Outlaw Star doesn't need line thinning anyway, just some minor sharpening, the kind of thing EE is very good at.

I don't understand this concept of making your footage sterile at all. If you have defects, and don't want detail, just do a dropdown scale, I guess with bicubic reinterpolation. That is to say, downscale just small enough to keep line detail present, then scale it back up to the original, using bicubicresize for both, although for strong rainbowing bilinear would be more effective I'd imagine. Lanczos filters in general are bad and should be avoided because of their knack for ringing footage. Spline36 will be sharper (it has more taps, 6 compared to 3 in default Lanczos) without giving the same ringing and minor haloing in some cases that Lanczos will. If you need to intentionally blur, or for some reason test GPU driver scaling, bicubic (bilinear for older cards) is the way to go. Footage is meant to have detail, anime is NOT like an american cartoon, it has a lot of minor things you seem to be nuking for no good reason.

In a completely unrelated vein, stop calling me a troll already. I hate trolls and I never troll others. If you don't understand the reasoning for something, ask for clarification instead of just yelling TROLL ONOES A TROLL HELP ME KARIUDO THAR BE A TROLL HERE or whatever. It doesn't help anybody and just fills threads with useless posts.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 5:32 am

I realize he isn't a troll, and I apologize. I regretted posting that conversation the moment I did so because it's not quite appropriate. (Is there a way to delete posts? i couldn't find it)
Thank you for your help, Mister Hatt, I do actually appreciate it.

I also must have misunderstood the use of the term 'sterile' in regards to video. I'm new to video editing so I don't have a complete grasp of the terminology, though I have read through most of the guides by now. I took sterile to mean cleaned up, but not enhanced past how it looked originally. I would consider a video with interlacing, dot crawl, and rainbowing removed to be in this state, but a video enhanced with edge enhancement (like toon) or other kinds of touch-ups to not be in this state. I liked what I initially saw with Toon(), but I need to work with that footage more before I decide on which enhancement(s) I'm going to use. I'll double check for blurring with derainbow as well. I'm a perfectionist (to the extent that a beginner CAN be a perfectionist) when it comes to cleaning my source material. It takes experimenting to figure out what works and what doesn't, which is why I add extraneous lines and comment/uncomment them liberally at this point. :o I also probably won't keep the CPU=6 in the top line.

Many of the guides I've read say that you should use LanczosResize, while others say you should use Spline36. I don't really know the difference at this point, but I guess I'll Google it. I'll ask here if I can't find my answer.

Thanks for all the help so far. :D
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 5:37 am

Answered my question before I even posted. Thanks!
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Mister Hatt » Mon May 10, 2010 5:44 am

lol'd

The guides that say to use Lanczos are not WRONG, they're just outdated. Spline scaling just got added to avisynth relatively recently (v2.56) while most guides were written years before that. Even photoshop doesn't use a spline filter yet IIRC. In my above post, I gave a rather brief outline on why Lanczos is bad though and how Spline rectifies that. I can expand on that if you want.

Nothing wrong with being a perfectionist if you're just a bit ignorant on the specifics, both mirko and I are as well I guess. What I meant by sterile was exactly what the word means, devoid of anything. Sterile video would just be the outlines and the fills and maybe a TINY bit of texture. Anime usually has a fair bit of texture, especially on more recent stuff (lol Outlaw Star) so blindly nuking it with <filter that sounds an awful lot like DEEN or DFTTest> isn't really the greatest idea. You really don't need the source plugin post processing, it is destructive and usually not helpful. Your filters are doing what you want them to, the problem is that they are not the best filters for that. There are much better newer filters.

For simple edge enhancement, I would probably suggest EdgeCleaner(), or if you can find enough info on google about it, frequency domain contrasharpening works REALLY well, although not so great on content like this as it would on Katanagatari/Kemono no Souja Erin/Noein, or anything else that looks like it's drawn with crayons.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 5:59 am

I'm still trying to figure out how to fix the dot crawl if possible, as that is the reason for this thread. But while we're on the topic of the other stuff, I have a couple examples for my use of DeRainbow. I welcome any advice for a better solution that still fixes the problem as well as DeRainbow(10) without blurring, although I can't see any difference in the scenes I've checked it with. (I also can't see any difference between Spline36 and Lanczos yet, but that will require checking more scenes).

Here's a scene exhibiting rainbowing. It's not the most prominent example, but it easily shows off the difference between using DeRainbow and not using it:

Image

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Zoom 200% DeRainbow(10) OFF
Image

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Zoom 200% DeRainbow(10) ON
Image

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And here is my script for the moment. The only difference between image 2 and 3 is in the third DeRainbow is active and not commented out with #.
Code: Select all
mpeg2source("J:\video_rip\outlawstar\ep1a.d2v",cpu=6)
#checkmate(24)
#Tcomb(mode=2,fthreshl=12, othreshl=19)
AMVIVTC(mode=1)
Crop(8, 0, -8, -0)
#LanczosResize(624, 480)
Spline36Resize(624, 480, src_width=704, src_height=480)
#DeRainbow(10)
#Toon()

(For the record, DeRainbow and Toon were both commented out in the other screencaps I posted earlier.)
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby mirkosp » Mon May 10, 2010 6:26 am

For the dotcrawl, try unboxb. It's the one Mister Hatt suggested earlier on, and seems to be pretty good, pans aside.
For the rainbowing, I like LUTDeRainbow.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby EvaFan » Mon May 10, 2010 10:37 am

I try never to use cpu=6, usually it oversmooths for me but typically I use bilinearresize for everything so that might be why. I can't tell if it is for you with just that screencap. If you feel like you need to do some sharpening then try just lowering that to cpu=4 before you go sharpening, may like results better or may not even see a difference. Either way lowering that before adding a sharpener would be more efficient for speed. Slightly off topic but I figured I'd throw it out there.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Mister Hatt » Mon May 10, 2010 3:23 pm

Or like I hope I said above, don't use the cpu flags in neuron2source because they are far too destructive and slow compared to filters designed for fine filtering in a similar manner.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 6:15 pm

Good advice. I keep forgetting I used the CPU=*, so I'll disable it for now and see what else I can do to fix any artifacts I see. As far as speed goes, I have plenty of hard drive space, so I'm likely to convert footage to clips rather than using scripts for editing. Also, my CPU is rather slow, so even though I like the idea of being able to edit how the source looks at any time during the project, it would make things run too slowly, even with most of the script lines disabled.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby BasharOfTheAges » Mon May 10, 2010 7:04 pm

If you have plenty of HDD space, don't even bother clipping, just dump entire DVDs to single files.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Cannonaire » Mon May 10, 2010 8:44 pm

I'm having some trouble finding EdgeCleaner(). It wasn't included with AMVApp, and I can't seem to find a download for it searching Google.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby Mister Hatt » Mon May 10, 2010 9:13 pm

http://voodoo-powered.net/EdgeCleaner.avs limited time offer, will drop the link in a few days.
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Re: Cleaning up Outlaw Star

Postby mirkosp » Mon May 10, 2010 9:17 pm

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