Cleaning up Outlaw Star

[Mister Hatt]

There was a huge discussion on dotcrawl removal last night in Darkhold. The eventual decision was actually useless in your case, but one of the really good suggestions was unboxb(), although I'm not sure where to grab that from. TComb is just really bad and should be avoided, while Checkmate and LUTDeCrawl blur the shit out of things. DeDot is useless. Unboxb is a targetted dotcrawl remover which shouldn't blur but I might advise running EE() or LimitedSharpen() (not LSFMod or LSF, just plain LS) over the output anyway.
Additionally, get rid of Toon(), DeRainbow(), and switch Lanczos to Spline36. Just because your video is sterile as hell doesn't mean it looks good. If there is actual rainbowing, see how sangnom flipping it goes, otherwise bifrost might be a good idea. I have no idea what you are using Toon() for so I can't suggest an alternative.

[mirkosp]

but one of the really good suggestions was unboxb(), although I'm not sure where to grab that from.

http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=1 ... ostcount=1
Duh.

[Mister Hatt]

>Implying I care enough to google
(☞ﾟ∀ﾟ)☞ O U

Most of us are on doom10, or even doom11 now. Keep up.

[Cannonaire]

I like to clean up footage so it's sterile, then once that's achieved I add more lines to make it look good, or to make it 'pop' as some say. The screenshots were taken with Toon and Derainbow off. The Derainbow actually does a great job of removing rainbow wherever I've seen it in Outlaw Star, I just didn't want it interfering in any way with my visual comparisons while tweaking the dot crawl removal. Thanks for the suggestions though, I'll take a look at that other forum.

[Kariudo]

Once again Mister Hatt, you fail to explain why <insert filter/program/method> is bad.

I expected more of you by now, but I guess I was too optimistic.

Cannonaire: pay no mind to Mister Hatt there

[Cannonaire]

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

I'm so polite on forums, I'm even polite to the trolls!
It's like "Hello, Mr. Troll. May I cross your bridge please?"
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."

[mirkosp]

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. >_>

[Mister Hatt]

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.

[Cannonaire]

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. 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.

[Cannonaire]

Answered my question before I even posted. Thanks!