Improve the quality of video animation

[SB4]

Hello,




I'm wondering is it possible to improve the image quality anime that is located on the top to be the same quality as the same anime bottom ?




Sample video:
http://www.mediafire.com/?4nd432whjnm




Best Regards,
SB4

[AlanHK]

http://www.aquilinestudios.org/avsfilters/index.html

[jagabo]

The bottom image is oversharpened. It has bad halos around all sharp edges lines. But if that's what you want, yes, just about every editor has the ability to sharpen or "enhance edges". And they all have the ability to adjust the brightness and contrast too.

Your sample AVI also has the problem of having been deinterlaced. That leaves jaggies on all near horizontal edges. You won't be able to fix that. If you can get ahold of the video before it has been deinterlaced you will get much better results.

[edDV]

Basic answer is work closer to the source. Once compromised, restoration will have its own issues. Nothing substitutes for the original print.

[poisondeathray]

The bottom image is oversharpened. It has bad halos around all
sharp edges lines. But if that's what you want, yes, just about every editor has the ability to
sharpen or "enhance edges". And they all have the ability to adjust the brightness and
contrast too.

Your sample AVI also has the problem of having been deinterlaced. That leaves jaggies on all
near horizontal edges. You won't be able to fix that. If you can get ahold of the video
before it has been deinterlaced you will get much better results.

I agree for the most part, and maybe you can't "fix" it but you can certainly improve upon it.

I think the jaggies/aliasing are the most distracting artifacts, worse than oversharpened halos
in the supposedly "good" picture.

But the source has other issues, like duplicate frames, bad pixellated frames, and there was a
frame out of order as well. I agree with the comments above and would re-rip this source and
start all over and use a better deinterlacer this time. The treatment I proposed below is quite slow to process, and I never addressed the dupe or out of order frames in this script - it's just a demonstration that a subjective visual improvement is possible.

AVISource("sample.avi")
AwarpSharp2(depth=6)
santiag(strh=2,strv=2)
AAA()
Toon(strength=0.6)
DFTTest() 
LSFMod(strength=50)
Levels(0,1,245,0,255,false) #You could use SmoothLevels instead, but your bitrate requirements will go up from the dithering

[SB4]

thanks guys for the answer ^_^

Let's forget the picture below. Now what should I do to make this video looks better, what filters should I use?! More importantly, what is the appropriate program to do so?

I'm sorry but I do not know anything about the improving the quality of the video

[poisondeathray]

avisynth + some encoder

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page#New_to_AviSynth_-_start_here


The learning curve is bit difficult at first , but it's well worth your while to learn it. It might take you a few hours/days to learn the basics

I posted an example script to subjectively improve it above

AlanHK posted a link above to some good tutorials on filters and usage

[jagabo]

poisondeathray already told you what filters to use.

pdr: By the way, I was impressed with how well the jaggies were fixed. Which of the filters did that?

[poisondeathray]

pdr: By the way, I was impressed with how well the jaggies were fixed. Which of the filters did that?

I can't take any credit, I just use the filters. Kudos to the authors of the filters.

Antialiasing filters - Santiag() and AAA()

Both are required in this case, because the jaggies were so bad, they work in different ways and compliment each other

Awarpsharp2 is a line thinner which is required to pre-process, because the lines are "too thick" to register as aliasing in some areas

The antialiasing filters are very dangerous on live action content, they tend to destroy fine detail (e.g. individual teeth become 1 big row of white) - but you can get away with using it on anime type content

[jagabo]

Thx. How well did they work on the next shot?



I imagine it just leaves gaps in the lines.

[poisondeathray]

Thx. How well did they work on the next shot?

Which shot / frame # is that?

313?

[AlanHK]

Let's forget the picture below. Now what should I do to make this video looks better, what filters should I use?! More importantly, what is the appropriate program to do so?

Again:

http://www.aquilinestudios.org/avsfilters/index.html

[manono]

And don't forget that the thing had been poorly deinterlaced from whatever the source was, rather than being properly IVTC'd. It was done by a clueless idiot. All that restoration work could have been avoided had it been done right in the first place. It should also be decimated back to 23.976/24fps.

[SB4]

Thanks poisondeathray

Before read the topics that you referred to I have some questions. When you look to the video how do you know that this video needs this type of filters and why I chose these filters specifically?! Does the order of these filters have an impact on the results?
Look for this sample, then tell me, what can we do to improve the quality to look better?!
http://www.mediafire.com/?y2mjy2y3zvn

Thank you all i will read the topics to which you refer carefully because this is a new challenge for me

[manono]

Another one made by idiots. The audio takes up nearly 3/4 of the entire file size. The video uses way too low of a bitrate and is a mass of blocks. It was sourced from PAL which itself was probably field-blended from an NTSC source. And to top it all off, it was blend deinterlaced. This thing is fit only for the recycle bin.

[Gavino]

pdr: By the way, I was impressed with how well the jaggies were fixed. Which of the filters did that?

Antialiasing filters - Santiag() and AAA()

For Santiag (basically a wrapper for nnedi3), see here.
But the published version wrongly shifts the image centre - this was noted by poisondeathray and I diagnosed the fix later in the same thread (posts 31-35).

[lordsmurf]

Those are deinterlacing artifacts, not sharpening artifacts.
I've seen the term used interchangeably a few times here. Watch for that.

[poisondeathray]

Thanks poisondeathray

Before read the topics that you referred to I have some questions. When you look to the video how do you know that this video needs this type of filters and why I chose these filters specifically?! Does the order of these filters have an impact on the results?
Look for this sample, then tell me, what can we do to improve the quality to look better?!
http://www.mediafire.com/?y2mjy2y3zvn

Thank you all i will read the topics to which you refer carefully because this is a new challenge for me

There are categories of filters, and they are based on functions. e.g. you might have a sharpening filter, or a denoising filter etc.... So the first thing to do is diagnose what is wrong with it. e.g. if a source is too dark you might brighten it, if a source is too noisy you might denoise it. That's a gross oversimplification, but the basic idea.

One of the many problems with that particular source is "blown out" i.e. the levels are too high on a histogram or waveform monitor. You can improve it a little, but the quality is very bad. Some scenes are more washed out than others, so you would have to process it in segments (i.e. apply filters differentially) - this is difficult to do

There are serious problems with your sources (as mentioned earlier by several people, it's not just the image quality, there are problems with processing, frame repeats, audio problems etc...)

As many others have mentioned, I would try and get a better source and start from scratch. I wouldn't waste too much time on this source, it's garbage.

AVISource("anpanman.avi")
Levels(10,0.7,255,0,255,false) #or use smoothlevels
DFTTest()
Toon(strength=0.8)
aWarpSharp2(depth=12)
LSFMod(strength=50)

[poisondeathray]

Those are deinterlacing artifacts, not sharpening artifacts.
I've seen the term used interchangeably a few times here. Watch for that.

In this thread?

I don't believe anyone in this thread referred to the aliasing as "sharpening artifacts"

jagabo specifically referred to the halos in picture#2 in the 1st post, which are sharpening artifacts

[poisondeathray]

For Santiag (basically a wrapper for nnedi3), see here.
But the published version wrongly shifts the image centre - this was noted by poisondeathray and I diagnosed the fix later in the same thread (posts 31-35).

Yes thanks for that again That 1/2 px image shift just bugs me so much... , even back during original NNEDI days

It's the coders like Gavino that make these scripts possible... good job!

[Gavino]

It's the coders like Gavino that make these scripts possible... good job!

Just to clarify, cretindesalpes is the author of santiag, not me.
All I did was provide the solution to a bug that pdr reported.

[poisondeathray]

It's the coders like Gavino that make these scripts possible... good job!

Just to clarify, cretindesalpes is the author of santiag, not me.
All I did was provide the solution to a bug that pdr reported.

Yes, and tritical for NNEDI2/3, EEDI2/3 (among many other plugins)

Regardless, Gavino you've contributed lots to the avisynth community and I just wanted to say thanks to you and all the developers!

[lordsmurf]

The other issue with drop-frame deinterlace is loss of motion. What would you to do interpolate and rebuild motion, if anything?

Concerning jaggies, I have another idea. Although destructive in one way, it may improve the overall subjective appearance to allow for enjoyment. Use the Sharpen Edge feature in TMPGEnc Plus and run it into negative values. I had quite a bit of success with this, some 6-9 years ago, converting crappy VCDs to DVDs, while improving the quality a small amount. It would blur out the heavy aliasing, but the remaining image tended to be no worse than the original softness of the VCD. On some axis, blurring is not as noticeable as others, that's the optical trick implored.

For the most part, I would just wait for better sources to come along. And they did, eventually.

Without tests (will do it later), what's the time for encoding santiag() and AAA() filters? NeatVideo speed, or more like Yadif speed?

This is the first interesting thread I've seen in a long, long time.

[manono]

There's no loss of motion with these 2 examples because the 'true' framerate for the first sample is 24fps (the AVI is 30fps) and the second is 24fps (I think, while the AVI is 25fps)). The first sample has 6 extra duplicate frames every second and the second one extra frame every second (I think). The person that made the AVIs deinterlaced where he should have IVTC'd the first one, and deinterlaced where he should of unblended with the second one (I think). Neither source was interlaced video. No interpolation or motion rebuilding is needed.

Welcome to the dark side of AviSynth, lordsmurf.

[poisondeathray]

what's the time for encoding santiag() and AAA() filters? NeatVideo speed, or more like Yadif speed?

AAA() alone is fairly fast , closer to yadif speed, while santiag() is fairly slow closer to neatvideo speed , but you can modify the function to use NNEDI2 instead of NNEDI3 which makes it a bit faster and probably no difference in quality.

The script above stacks several filters, like DFTTest() which is quite slow as well, so together it more closely resembles neatvideo speed than vanilla yadif speed

[SB4]

I could understand some things about the Avisynth program and some filters but it is hard for me to learn by myself so i want to learn here under the supervision of users to have knowledge of these things. Now I want to test poisondeathray code:

AVISource(\"sample.avi\")
AwarpSharp2(depth=6)
santiag(strh=2,strv=2)
AAA()
Toon(strength=0.6)
DFTTest() 
LSFMod(strength=50)
Levels(0,1,245,0,255,false)

but when i open sample.avs file using VirtualDub an error massage display:

Avisynth open failure:
AVISource: couldn't locate a decompressor for fourcc
(C:\Users\Animation\Desktop\sample.avs, line1)

What should i do to make this code work ?!

[jagabo]

Install a VFW decoder for the codec in question. Use GSpot to figure out what codec you need.

[poisondeathray]

Sorry there is something wrong with the code box on this website, it inserts "\" when there shouldn't be

It should read

AVISource("sample.avi")

Also, your video was WMV in AVI container, so you need to enable WMV in the ffdshow VFW configuration (yellow icon)

[SB4]

thanks jagabo and poisondeathray

Ok, i enable WMV in VFW configuration like this:
http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/8859/enable.png

and it is display another error massage:

Avisynth open failure:
Script error: there is no function named \"AwarpSharp2\"
(C:\Users\FlaShow\Desktop\sample.avs, line 2)

Note: i have AwarpSharp2 filter in plug-in directory of Avisynth program... !!

[poisondeathray]

thanks jagabo and poisondeathray

Ok, i enable WMV in VFW configuration like this:
http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/8859/enable.png

and it is display another error massage:

Avisynth open failure:
Script error: there is no function named \\\\\\\\"AwarpSharp2\\\\\\\\"
(C:\Users\FlaShow\Desktop\sample.avs, line 2)

Note: i have AwarpSharp2 filter in plug-in directory of Avisynth program... !!

Try loading it manually

e.g.

LoadPlugin("PATH\aWarpSharp.dll")
AVISource()
.
.
.
.



Replace the "PATH" with the actual path

I'm using awarpsharp2, it's different than awarpsharp. The call is awarpsharp2(), but the actual .dll is awarpsharp.dll. I would put it in a subfolder in the avisynth\plugins folder, because some filters still rely on the older awarpsharp plugin , and you can't have 2 .dll's with the same name in the same directory

Here is the original thread if you want more info
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=147285

I uploaded the unmodified awarpsharp2 plugin with original documentation here