Grain reduction and removal of dot crawl among other things.

[cbg]

I wanted to encode some episodes of Dragon Ball Z, and I'm using the Dragon Box R2J discs.

There seems to be a bit of dot crawl around edges and a little too much grain.
I'm new to using avisynth, and I haven't been able to figure out how to use it very well yet.
Would someone help me build a script to reduce the grain a little bit, anit-alias the edges perhaps?, perhaps thicken the lines a little (FastLineDarken didn't work very well), remove the dot crawl and enhance the video quality in general?

Here's a sample. (remuxed in mkv, but untouched video) : https://mega.co.nz/#!ZIZWgCRB!Qq-C7SOpY-isOs4NrknB8V-igehojp7L-tqhoNne4Sc

Help much appreciated

[Brad]

Isn't this one of the episodes that's on Blu-ray?

There is no dot crawl in your sample, nor could there be since these aren't from a composite master. The grain is "supposed" to be there but you're of course free to alter the video to your desires.

[cbg]

Isn't this one of the episodes that's on Blu-ray?

There is no dot crawl in your sample, nor could there be since these aren't from a composite master. The grain is "supposed" to be there but you're of course free to alter the video to your desires.

No, this is from the R2 Dragon Box DVD.

And, I don't think there's any dot crawl on that particular sample. But here's a screenshot, that does show what I presumed as dot crawl. (around the letters of the title). I just presumed it was dot crawl, but after some reading realized I was wrong. So what exactly is that called?(just aliased edges...? Idk) In any case, that seems to be apparent quite a lot throughout the episodes, at random frames, which I would like to fix, if possible.

And yeah, I know that grain is supposed to be there, but it's just a personal preference to have a smoother image I guess. I was reading up on spatial and temporal smoothers (Scintilla's Guide to AVISynth Postprocessing Filters) Though, I'm still not sure which one is best here, so yeah.

[poisondeathray]

And, I don't think there's any dot crawl on that particular sample. But here's a screenshot, that does show dot crawl (around the letters of the title). Correct me if I'm wrong, but that is dot crawl, right? Or am I using the wrong term here? (sorry if I am) In any case, that seems to be apparent quite a lot throughout the episodes, at random frames, which I would like to fix, if possible.

That doesn't look like dot crawl; that's your method of chroma upsampling (conversion from YUV to RGB) with nearest neighbor algorithm

(ie. It's your method of taking screenshots)

[cbg]

That doesn't look like dot crawl; that's your method of chroma upsampling (conversion from YUV to RGB) with nearest neighbor algorithm

(ie. It's your method of taking screenshots)

Oh, yeah. Looks like you're right. Fixed it
Thanks!

Okay, so about the spatial/temporal smoothers. Which one suits this sort of grain? And how do you go about properly thickening the lines more?

[x264]

Try this

SMDegrain(lsb=true, thSAD=250, pel=4, subpixel=3, refinemotion=true, contrasharp=true, truemotion=false)

[poisondeathray]

Okay, so about the spatial/temporal smoothers. Which one suits this sort of grain? And how do you go about properly thickening the lines more?

Grain - it's very subjective. One person's grain is another person's "noise" . You have to try some filters out and play with the strenghts and settings to see what YOU personally like

Line thickeners - negative awarpsharp/awarpsharp2 values, some line darkeners have line thicken/thin values e.g. fastlinedarken/mod is normally set to thin (ie. some positive number). Set thinning=zero or negative value . There are other line darkeners you can try as well e.g. toon, hysteria, etc...

[cbg]

Try this

SMDegrain(lsb=true, thSAD=250, pel=4, subpixel=3, refinemotion=true, contrasharp=true, truemotion=false)

Whenever I try using SMDegrain, I get this error (included screenshot)

Okay, so about the spatial/temporal smoothers. Which one suits this sort of grain? And how do you go about properly thickening the lines more?

Grain - it's very subjective. One person's grain is another person's "noise" . You have to try some filters out and play with the strenghts and settings to see what YOU personally like

Line thickeners - negative awarpsharp/awarpsharp2 values, some line darkeners have line thicken/thin values e.g. fastlinedarken/mod is normally set to thin (ie. some positive number). Set thinning=zero or negative value . There are other line darkeners you can try as well e.g. toon, hysteria, etc...

Sounds fair enough. I'll continue to tweak them around then. I guess none of them looked good to me before, because of the chroma upsampling on my player. But now that that's fixed, I guess I can properly work with it.

[poisondeathray]

Whenever I try using SMDegrain, I get this error (included screenshot)

You need dither package ; see here

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1386559

[cbg]

You need dither package ; see here

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1386559

Still getting the same error after installing.

[poisondeathray]

Do you have both the dither.dll and dither.avsi in the plugins folder ?

[cbg]

Do you have both the dither.dll and dither.avsi in the plugins folder ?

Yeah, I tried putting the dither.avsi, and a series of errors came up, and I loaded each of the plugins it asked. And finally, no more errors came. Though the actual SMDegrain(lsb=true, thSAD=250, pel=4, subpixel=3, refinemotion=true, contrasharp=true, truemotion=false) filter didn't seem to do anything at all for some reason. It looked exactly the same, though the preview became unbearably slow (0.5fps) when I added the SMDegrain line.

[poisondeathray]

lsb=true is only for "fake" 16bit processing . I would start with the default settings SMDegrain() , adjust the TR value. TR=1 is about the same as MDegrain, TR=2 is about the same as MDegrain2, TR=3 is about the same as MDegrain3

You can also try MCTemporalDenoise(settings="medium") to start with

[jagabo]

Yeah, I was going to suggest McTemporalDenoise too. If you have a lot of time. You can go as high as settings="very high". And there are tons of parameters you can adjust.

[poisondeathray]

And if you over degrain, beware you will start to get other problems like banding when you encode . If you don't use line protection or masks, you will see eroded shadow areas and lines when you use strong denoise settings

[x264]

I've had better results with SMDegrain( ). View it with Histogram(mode="luma") if you want to see the difference.

[cbg]

Away from the computer right now. Will do after I'm back. Screenshots?

[x264]

Use avspmod to compare the frames.

[2Bdecided]

Looking at the style of the picture, you are in some danger of doing a "restoration" that looks great to you today - while everyone else (and maybe yourself, in a year's time) will look at it and wonder why you wrecked the source and destroyed its essential character.

I could be wrong. It might be that it'll still look OK even if you made it totally noise-free with very clean lines - effectively like it's been re-rendered on a PC, or run from a website as a flash animation. I think that's the look that some people go for. Be careful though. You can spend a long time fixing something, and then when you watch it next, you realise you hate what you've done.

Cheers,
David.

[sanlyn]

Yep.