Stabilize Anime Colors

[Congruent]

I have a lot of Anime DVDs. My kids and their friends are gradually destroying them and I don't want to use them as coasters.

So I started making .h264 encodes of them recently with Handbrake and it works really well. But then I looked at the source material: not so hot. So I figured I would use Premiere CS3 to fix them up a tad and then Handbrake them to HDD. I can sharpen them up and tweak the contrast but the gradients and colors shift around way too much.

I want to smooth out the color fluctuations of the source material because it is distracting to see a dark background move around more than the characters in the foreground. Is there a plug-in or procedure that I can use to stabilize this sometimes obtusely wild pixel motion?

[dizzie]

Have you tried going into the advanced options tab for h.264 on Handbrake? Utilizing some of the non-default options there may be all you need! If you just hover your mouse over the different choices, there are some really good explanations that can guide you toward clearing things up. For one, you might want to try multi-hexagon and quarter pixel motion estimation. Good luck!

[Congruent]

Yup, I have the option string for .h264 encoding maxed out which doesn't help the frame by frame color shifting. What has taken a small bite out of the rampant color shifting is running the denoise filter and setting the motion predict to temporal with the beta-deblock at 3. Denoising dimishes detail, something I would like to avoid.

What I am hoping for is a method to fix the source material, I don't mind paying for a tool that would do the job.

[jagabo]

Post a short sample that shows the problems.

[codecpage]

Color flicker lookas a lot like these pictures have once been copied from tape.

If you don't bother using VirtualDub in between, there is a chroma noise filter (http://freevcr.ifrance.com/virtualdub/cnr-en.html),
and a general recipe for tape cleaning you'll find at http://www.codecpage.com/index_cleaning.html.
You just need Virtualdub, the filter and an MPEG2 plugin for it to have it read your DVD files.

Cheers,

[rumplestiltskin]

Bumping up the bitrate sometimes helps, as well.