Improving visual quality on X TV

[vemalas]

Hey there!

I thought i give it a shot on Avisynth. Read the tutorial, tried few things, and it works. But still it would take me a lot of time to actually know all the plugins that i would need to clean and improve the visual quality on this footage. Probably gonna learn about it on my next project. And on this one.. it's finished, but needs a bit of help from AviSynth guru's out here.

What i want:
1. Make it clean, and more today-looking. (EXAMPLE: http://www.vimeo.com/2823934 . I mean the dude did this from totally crappy video with his own script)
2. Thats it.

http://img227.imageshack.us/i/screen1vr.jpg/ What it looks like in motion
http://img180.imageshack.us/i/screen2ui.jpg/ What it looks like in dark colored environment
http://img709.imageshack.us/i/screen3yi.jpg/ What it looks like in more colorful environment

What scripts do you use to improve and clean the footage?

Thanks a lot.

[mirkosp]

If you want us to help you out, it'd be sweet if you could provide lossless png screenshots, at least... So far the only thing that I can say could need some help for sure is the deinterlacing. There are some leftovers, so either you improve the IVTC you did (which might require you to check that the frames are the same and thus you'll have to go through the amv again and eventually fix frames here and there to make sure it's still properly synced) or at least vinverse it... as for the rest, waiting lossless screenshots, but avisynth is not as blackmagic as that video might make one think, it does have its limits.

INB4 you're using downloaded footage and not DVDs...

[vemalas]

If you want us to help you out, it'd be sweet if you could provide lossless png screenshots, at least... So far the only thing that I can say could need some help for sure is the deinterlacing. There are some leftovers, so either you improve the IVTC you did (which might require you to check that the frames are the same and thus you'll have to go through the amv again and eventually fix frames here and there to make sure it's still properly synced) or at least vinverse it... as for the rest, waiting lossless screenshots, but avisynth is not as blackmagic as that video might make one think, it does have its limits.

INB4 you're using downloaded footage and not DVDs...

Thanks mirkosp; you're a lifesaver to many amv makers i suppose. ^^ (seeing your activity in helping others).

http://img521.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=screen4x.png Here's .png. Not sure if it's much of a difference, but here you go.

About the interlacing - yeah, i know. I'll have to work on it a bit more. I suppose it's because of some interpolating i did.


Yeah, i'm really sorry, hate myself for that >.> But i have this very strong urge to create and 50euros a week doesn't help me.

[Qyot27]

Um, those screenshots aren't from X TV, they're from the movie. The TV series is actually rather clean, having been produced in 2001/2002; the movie is from 1996 - the series, at least in the States, was released by Pioneer (yes, Pioneer, before they changed their name to Geneon), vs. the movie, which was released by Manga Entertainment in both the U.S. and U.K. (and represents Manga's usual release quality - utter crap). Since this is downloaded footage, my guess is that it probably is sourced from the U.S. release, although it's not like it would really matter, considering the company.

[mirkosp]

Heh... yeah, those artifacts are a sign of the lossy compression the footage went through (I'm guessing xvid or rather low bitrate h.264, probably former taking into account the resolution), and there are some hints that it was already filtered to begin with. Anyway, aside from the aforementioned vinverse (which I assume you already tracked down and used, seeing as I don't see the interlacing leftovers anymore in these), I'm not really sure, there isn't much you can do without overdoing it at the same time, I think. The resolution is already low, so all the detail left is easily hit by now. Some things I did regardless were shifting the chroma (looks a bit shifted upwards, especially noticeable in the picture with the girl), dehaloing a bit (especially noticeable in the third image, around the red pillars... or whatever they are called, not sure), and a really slight debanding+addgrain to fix a bit the gradients messed up a bit by the quantizer.
I also cropped a bit the edge garbage and brought back to 640x360 (with h.264 mod16 isn't really as important as one might think, mod8 is fine).
So this would be what I came up with:

Code: Select all

turnleft.chromashift(C=2).turnright
dehalo_alpha(darkstr=0.5)
crop(4,0,-2,-2).spline36resize(640,360)
gradfun2dbmod(1.005)

If you feel like it, you could also denoise a bit and perhaps sharpen too (2 of the images weren't really that bad as far as noise was concerned, but the third one has its issues, and I'm not sure what most of the source is like). In that case perhaps adding:

Code: Select all

HQDN3D(3,3,0,0)
lsfmod(70)

after the crop and resize but before the debanding could be kinda ok but still somewhat detail killer. Yeah, I know, HQDN3D is pretty old and bad, but I needed something quick and lightweight that I could get to work just spatially and I couldn't think of anything else, sorry (I don't really think this is a case for a two stage fft3d... inb4 Hatt slaps me regardless). >_>

[Mister Hatt]

Will edit this post once I can find my filter script for the X TV DVDs I have around here somewhere. May take a while.

[vemalas]

mirkosp, thank you. I don't know how didn't i crop it earlier. >.< Anyways, it really helped, but i didn't get all the script to work (gradfun2dbmod(1.005); if i use gradfun2db(1) instead - it works, but completeley grains all the video / also lsfmod(70) - it stands for LimitedSharpenFasten?). Thanks again.

Mister Hatt i actually did a mistake on topic. It's X movie. But i'm really looking forward to see this filter script (if you find it), because i still WILL edit it probably. Thanks.

[mirkosp]

gradfun2dbmod is a modification of gradfun2db. Get it here. It needs other things like addgrainc 1.4 or greater. 1.005 should actually work and is a very low strength setting.
As for lsfmod, it's, again, a modification of limitedsharpenfaster. Thread's here. It will look slightly different from the result that plain limitedsharpenfaster would give.

[vemalas]

I'm sorry but how should i make them work? I tried to do like logic tells me. Just went to the link, copy the script, save it as GradFun2DBmod.avs and place it in the plugins folder. Wualia? I have all the plugins needed but that doesn't work. Sorry i'm a noob or just there is no documentation how to do this, and you just have to magivally know.

[Scintilla]

Save it as GradFun2DBmod.avsi and it will autoload.

If you save it with the .AVS extension, then you have to load it manually with the Import() command in any script in which you want to use it.