Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

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Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Thu Feb 18, 2010 9:50 pm

So I need to upgrade my AMV to 720p for a convention, and I got a vague idea of what to do for my basic script with help from a few people.

I'm upscaling to 1280x720 from 720x480. My source AMV is an .avi compressed with HuffyUV with a framerate of 23.976 fps and a PAR of 1.00.

Here's what I have so far:

Code: Select all
AVISource("filepath")
Spline36Resize(960,720)
Addborders(160,0,160,0)


I guess I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of quality problems because stuff like this goes way over my head. I also really don't understand all the fancy AVIsynth plugins or how to use them. But I'm having some major quality issues with the upscaling. I think they're called "artifacts" or something?? I double checked the file in Vegas and the saved AVI, so I'm sure none of these problems were there before the upscale. Here are some examples:

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

If anyone is curious, the AMV has about 10 different sources, and some took to HD better than others. Air TV, Kanon, Chrono Crusade, Ouran, and Origins look fine, whereas some of the above ones didn't turn out all that super. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke look so-so, but they're not really suited to HD.

I'm just worried that what might work for one source might not work for them all, so I'm panicking.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Scintilla » Fri Feb 19, 2010 7:10 am

The "shadows" you mention in the first screenshot look like haloing. Look into using, say, DeHalo_Alpha or BlindDeHalo for those.

This isn't something you mentioned, but the aspect ratios for the Shinkai source (5cm/s?) and the last screenshot look off. Those two sources should probably be widescreen.

As for the graining, that's mosquito noise, or ordinary DCT compression artifacting (like in JPEGs)... and I have no idea how that would be in the upscale but not in the original export, unless you compressed with a lossy codec in between (say, XviD). Is it possible that these problems were in fact present in the original sources and you just couldn't see them clearly until you upscaled?
In any case, many spatial and spatio-temporal smoothers have been designed to handle this problem. Try Deen, or FFT3DFilter, or MSmooth, or...

And I have no idea how the ghost images in your Avatar screenshots would have shown up just now either. I suppose your best bet for those is something like FFT3DFilter; normal temporal smoothers might just make the problem worse.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Fri Feb 19, 2010 9:02 am

((The screencaps I posted are zoomed in and not the full image. I did this so that I could show the detail better, so parts are cut off. That's why the aspect ratios look strange. And as for the overall aspect ratio- I'm combining about 10 different sources in one AMV so I had to pick one and readjust the others to fit it))

And I didn't compress with a lossy codec... just HuffyUV. My video source files look fine, and the finished AMV looks fine. It really is just the upscale. I don't know how this works. D:

As for these filters...I'm getting an error message telling me that my videos need to be in YV12 or YUY2 colorspace...how do I change my video to fit that?
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Fri Feb 19, 2010 9:14 am

Oh, um...I'm a little embarrassed now but I realize that the haloing in the first picture and those weird after-images in the avatar clips are present in the original files, just too small to be noticable. :|

Now I don't know what to do... D: The AMV is already done. Gah. >__<
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Zarxrax » Fri Feb 19, 2010 11:36 am

This is the first time that I've heard of a convention requiring videos to be in HD O_o
Um, those problems all exist in your source, and when you resize it, it just makes them bigger, so they are easier to see. Because you are using lots of different sources, you can't just apply any filters to your entire video that will fix the problem (because some sources have different problems than others).

Honestly I don't think it's that big of a deal. Artifacts don't usually stand out so much at conventions, from what I've seen, and no one is going to be stepping through frame by frame.

To convert your video to YV12 colorspace, you need to add the line ConvertToYV12()
If you add any filters, do it BEFORE you resize, and make sure to use very light settings.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby BasharOfTheAges » Fri Feb 19, 2010 12:07 pm

Zarxrax wrote:This is the first time that I've heard of a convention requiring videos to be in HD O_o

http://www.animeboston.com/events/amv_rules/

It's not a requirement per-say... It's a "we're going to upscale to 720p to do the contest on an HD set-up. Either you can fix the upscale on your end or we'll just upscale it on our end and it'll look how it looks" kinda thing.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Fri Feb 19, 2010 6:05 pm

Zarxrax wrote:Honestly I don't think it's that big of a deal. Artifacts don't usually stand out so much at conventions, from what I've seen, and no one is going to be stepping through frame by frame.

To convert your video to YV12 colorspace, you need to add the line ConvertToYV12()
If you add any filters, do it BEFORE you resize, and make sure to use very light settings.


Okay, thanks. Hopefully, it's not the end of the world if I can't fix them because the deadline is coming up soon.

The degraining I think I've figured out, but I still can't figure out how to fix the ghost images in the Avatar clip. I looked more closely at the original file, and they're everywhere. The only way I can really tell is to go through frame by frame.

What's driving me crazy is that apart from the ghosting the quality is stellar. I've tried applying a few blurs and while that makes the ghosting less noticable, it absolutely destroys the rest of the image.

Which filter would be best for the ghosting problem?
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Enigma » Fri Feb 19, 2010 6:25 pm

Try DFTTest() a friend of mine managed to upscale 360p footage up to 480p without barley any noticeable quality loss, Try it out :up:


[size=50] it's REALLY SLOW though :(
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Enigma » Fri Feb 19, 2010 6:25 pm

gah ffffffuuuu ;_;
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Scintilla » Fri Feb 19, 2010 7:16 pm

Chaobunny12 wrote:And as for the overall aspect ratio- I'm combining about 10 different sources in one AMV so I had to pick one and readjust the others to fit it))

I'm aware of that. In this case, I think the "making everything fullscreen" section of this page of EADFAG is applicable; except that since you chose to edit at 720x480 (instead of 640x480 as in the example), you'd want to resize your anamorphic sources to 960x480 and then crop off the edges to get back down to 720x480, as part of the preprocessing of those sources before editing. That way, their faces wouldn't be squished.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Zarxrax » Sat Feb 20, 2010 11:27 am

As far as I'm aware, I don't believe there is any filter that can fix that ghosting problem.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby mirkosp » Sat Feb 20, 2010 1:18 pm

The "ghosting" issue with avatar looks like bad deinterlacing to me.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Sat Feb 20, 2010 6:00 pm

Hmm...well I can try using a different deinterlacing filter for next time. It's weird, because the deinterlacing filter I've been using has worked perfectly for all my other Avatar DVDs o_O Maybe it was a glitch or something *shrugs*

For the time being I think I'll put a light blur on the scene with Vegas. It makes the ghosting slightly less noticable and doesn't affect the detail much. I'm hoping it won't be too noticable; I've watched the video 20 times and I can only see the ghosting if I pause and go through frame by frame.
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Zarxrax » Sat Feb 20, 2010 7:21 pm

Chaobunny12 wrote:Hmm...well I can try using a different deinterlacing filter for next time. It's weird, because the deinterlacing filter I've been using has worked perfectly for all my other Avatar DVDs o_O Maybe it was a glitch or something *shrugs*

For the time being I think I'll put a light blur on the scene with Vegas. It makes the ghosting slightly less noticable and doesn't affect the detail much. I'm hoping it won't be too noticable; I've watched the video 20 times and I can only see the ghosting if I pause and go through frame by frame.


Oh god no. Blurring is the worst thing you can do. Blurring is not a replacement for noise removal -_-
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Re: Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

Postby Chaobunny12 » Sat Feb 20, 2010 7:40 pm

Well in that case I'll scrap the blurring. I was just using a quick blur with Sony Vegas which does way less than the Gaussian blur, but if you think it will hurt the quality I won't risk it.

And thanks for all the help!!
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