Help cleaning up anime footage

[mmbwdpnz]

Ok, so I plan on re-releasing this anime fan-subbed. However, It needs to be re-encoded. There is chroma bleeding from the xvid, over blurred and then over sharpened footage with halos and aliasing. I really am confused on how to clean it up. Can anybody help me with my script?

[sanlyn]

Fixing the godawful color would be an agonizing chore in itself. Looks like the contrast button had a video kamikaze in charge. Not that much noise.

[manono]

Buy the DVD and do it right from the beginning. Parts of that were true 29.97fps before being decimated.

[mmbwdpnz]

The dvds cost 400 dollars, the isos are impossible to find, and raws aren't good quality. The show is very old. Even if the chroma bleeding can't be fixed, I would like to clean up the aliasing, and small amounts of grain.

[jagabo]

Start with something like:

Deblock_QED()
HQDeRing()
UnDot()
MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=24))

Maybe add a line darkener. The missing frames would be hard to recover. The blown out brights aren't recoverable.

[loster]

The dvds cost 400 dollars, the isos are impossible to find, and raws aren't good quality. The show is very old. Even if the chroma bleeding can't be fixed, I would like to clean up the aliasing, and small amounts of grain.

There are a few companies that specialize in releasing older anime did you try http://www.rightstuf.com.

[mmbwdpnz]

yes, this show was actually fully dubbed by adv and never released. The japanese company had been holding the english version for about 11 years now and others countries used the english version to dub off of it. A total waist of time and money

[mmbwdpnz]

Anyone know where i can download MaskTools v1.4.9.

[mmbwdpnz]

Thank you jajabo

[mmbwdpnz]

Is there a way to use MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=24)) without awarpsharp2 effecting the lines, bluring, or warping anything. I only want to use the MergeChroma function.

[jagabo]

Is there a way to use MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=24)) without awarpsharp2 effecting the lines, bluring, or warping anything. I only want to use the MergeChroma function.

MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=24)) merges sharpened versions of the chroma with the original luma. With the very minor chroma bleeding in your video you can probably use much a much smaller depth value. Use UtoY() or VtoY() to view the chroma channels as greyscale images. You can see just how much sharpening/warping they need.

The deringing and deblocking filters may be effecting thin, light, outlines. Not the chroma sharpening.

[Brad]

Consider the amount of time this is going to take to fix.

Pick up some extra shifts at work or odd jobs and buy the DVDs. Seriously.

[loster]

Maybe solicit donations to buy the DVD. mmbwdpnz I sent you a pm.

[mmbwdpnz]

Loster check your inbox, not sure if you got my message.

[sanlyn]

Is there a way to use MergeChroma(awarpsharp2(depth=24)) without awarpsharp2 effecting the lines, bluring, or warping anything. I only want to use the MergeChroma function.

awarpsharp2 isn't blurring anything. In many cases, there's nothing to blur. Many of those lines disappeared or broke apart a long time ago. One look at a histogram would reveal the problem: details were blown away by hot brights that did worse than merely bleed -- they bloomed. High contrast blooming is worse than chroma bleed: blooming destroys whatever it touches. If you doubt this, look at the image sequence below. The image on the left is one of the last frames of your original mkv sample. The two images on the right have contrast raised a mere 5%, then 5% again. You can see the detail disappear.

[Attachment 16897 - Click to enlarge]

Before and after: original frame 357 (left), after correcting levels, lowering gamma, and correcting the middle point. No need for a line darkener. And even so, it wouldn't replace lines grayed-out by high-contrast white blooming.

[Attachment 16898 - Click to enlarge]

Before and after: frame 1176. Like all dark scenes in the video, macroblocks are serious and color banding appears around the bright circle. The very low bitrate used for the video has destroyed too much data to make color transitions smooth. Remove the blocks and grain, and low-bitrate detail gets removed with them. More denoising and each re-encode makes the blocks and banding worse. Note that the small figure inside the bright circle has been nearly destroyed by blooming.

[Attachment 16899 - Click to enlarge]

The darks fare a little better, only because they aren't completely mangled. Dark red here is starting to posterize, lines and edges are vague and murky. Crushed darks will reveal no more detail by brightening or with contrast masking. Midtones are also depressed, making the original look dim. You can brighten the mids, which helps give the dark details a bit more dimension.

[Attachment 16900 - Click to enlarge]

You could probably get more improvement with masking in Avisynth and even After Effects Pro. Macroblocks and banding won't go away, however, and denoising makes it worse. The source you posted is bitrate-starved beyond repair. And even if you had heavy-duty tools like AE Pro, its asking price would buy multliple copies of the DVD.

It's a shame. I hate to see people ruin video the way the previous owner did. There's no excuse for it.

The attached mkv looks a little better but, really, I'd be far from satisfied. It does show that denoising and line darkening won't accomplish what you think it will. The only Avisynth filters used were UnDot, FFT3Dfilter, DeBlock, LSFMod, GradFun2DBMod, with FastLineDarken in a couple of spots. The rest was corrected with gamma and level controls in VirtualDub. Getting into dither plugins or heavy hitters like MCTemporalDenoise might make it look different, but there won't be much remains from the low-bitrate encode.

[mmbwdpnz]

I would buy the dvd's if I could. I really, really can't afford it 400 dollars is a lot of money just for one dvd boxset.