Cleaning up footage?

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 5:55 pm

Ok, so I go out and spend money on DVDs because everyone on this site tells me that's how you get perfect quality and such, but I must ask, how does one clean up this footage? I just can't seem to do anything with it:

Help is much appreciated.

NeoQuixotic · Post by **NeoQuixotic** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 6:25 pm

Some DVDs are poorly mastered or that the anime is just plain old. Quick answer, read the guides!!! Then from the guides spend time tweaking the filters to where the footage looks decent.

Additionally, telling us what anime you're using might help. Personally that frame looks worse than any DVD I've seen. If its a bootleg I could maybe understand. If you have done anything beyond just ripping the DVD (ie, deinterlacing, filtering, compression, etc) please post your AVIsynth script or any thing you have done so far. Then from there it will be much easier to help you out.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:23 pm

Nope, not a bootleg, it's from Pioneer's commercial release of Sailor Moon Super S. Here's a pic to confirm that I'm not lying:

And I've read the guides, been reading them for quite a bit of time now, and I played around with it for hours earlier. This is the best "improvement" I've gotten:

badmartialarts · Post by **badmartialarts** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:50 pm

I think Pioneer just used a capture card on their satellite TV signal from Japan or something.

I can't really offer any suggestions as I don't own any Sailor Moon on DVD (or any Sailor Moon period). There is extensive macroblocking going on, which means Pioneer overcompressed the heck out of the picture. The blocks are so bad you can barely pick out the original lines. Try these two lines in your script, I've use them with fansubs of Beck to good effect:

MSmooth(threshold=2, strength=7)
Deen("a3d", 4, 30, 50)

It'll probably oversmooth it to all kinds of heck though, and leave a bunch of big colored blotches....some sort of massive chroma smoothing is needed too, I'd reckon.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 7:54 pm

Before running extremely strong smoothing filters, I'd try enabling the deblocking and deringing filters in the MPEG-2 import filter...

badmartialarts · Post by **badmartialarts** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:06 pm

Actually, the best bet would be to run all the smoothers on the chroma plane only and then remerge the original luminance values, since it loos more like color noise than anything. Wow, this is getting more complicated.

Try THESE lines.

supersmooth = MSmooth(threshold=2, strength=7).Deen("a3d", 4, 30, 50)
MergeChroma(supersmooth, 1.0)
Deen("a3d", 2, 10, 20)

See what that does.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:27 pm

Ok, here's what happens:

Worst Frame (original):
http://img175.exs.cx/img175/3746/smframe6ge.jpg

Worst Frame (Bad Martial Arts First Posted Method):

Worst Frame (Bad Martial Arts Second Posted Method):

I used that frame initially because it's the worst frame I've encountered, but that's clearly a large improvement. Here's what it did in another area of the same source:

Other frame (Original):

Other frame (Bad Martial Arts First Posted Method):

Other frame (Bad Martial Arts Second Posted Method):

Both methods improve it drastically, but I'm not sure if that first one is too strongly smoothed or not.

Org Profile · Post by **LantisEscudo** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:32 pm

I just finished a video using Sailor Moon, and this was my script. It's probably overcleaning somewhat, and it's insanely slow, but it made the footage look a LOT better.

Telecide(order=1)
Decimate()
deen("a3d",4)
mftoon()
FastLineDarken()

I couldn't find the exact frame your screencap is from, but here's an example of what this filter chain did for the attack sequence on Disk 5.

badmartialarts · Post by **badmartialarts** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 9:16 pm

Looks like I was right about it being mostly noise on the chrominance plane of the video. Mebbe I need to sit down and write out all the appropriate AMVWiki pages for this stuff.

devilmaykickass · Post by **devilmaykickass** » Mon Mar 14, 2005 9:25 pm

badmartialarts wrote:Looks like I was right about it being mostly noise on the chrominance plane of the video. Mebbe I need to sit down and write out all the appropriate AMVWiki pages for this stuff.

Yes, yes you do.