smooth color on cartoons/anime

[roxbang]

Hi there!

I've been trying to convert an avi file to DVD. The conversion looks identical to the original, except for a little thing that annoys me:
in darker scenes, all the dark colors have little artifacts, little darker blocks (that were actually in the original file).

Okey, darker scenes are challenging, I know. But I was thinking: is there a filter in tmpgenc or virtualdub that maybe "smooth" things up a bit?

I mean, the filter would 'think: "well, this area has a lot of brown. and just few spots of darker brown. I'll just make it totally brown"

It can be the hair of some character, or the wall behind it... just for ex.

Meaning = no darker spots or at least smoothed darker spots

hope u got my point...

[junkmalle]

There are a lot of temporal smoothers for VirtaulDub and AVISynth that might help.

[roxbang]

can you tell me more about that? Please

[junkmalle]

VirtualDub: Video -> Filters -> Add -> Temporal Smoother. Set the slider -- (the tick marks are 0, 1, 2, 3...) try something around 5 (the higher the value the more filtering).

Temporal (time based) filtering averages corresponding pixels from different frames together. There are other temporal filters, some designed specifically for cartoons. Just search for "temporal filter virtualdub" or something like that.