De-noising and Sharpening Filters

[Metroidn1f]

Hey guys, I don't know if you remember a post by a few years back about trying to replicate 3Li encodes, here is the link to the topic.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/322296-Best-Quality-Possible-in-x264

It's been about 2 years now and I am still trying replicate his settings. I have tried so much but I have learned a lot.

His settings with x264 have changed but that's not what I am trying to get at. I want to take my blu ray rips, de-noise them then sharpen them to make it "Appear" that it is better quality. Anything you do to a video degrades the quality but I am obsessed with Sharpening.

Here is a really good example of one of 3Li encodes.

http://www.imagebam.com/image/c5836f188955746

It's a 1080p of the movie Transit. If you look at there is like no noise what so ever, and it is sharpened really nicely.

What filters do you think he has used to de-noise it and sharpen it?

I'm working on finding the source, but even for the resident Evil vidoes I can't make them look the same even if I rip them my self from blu ray.

What are some good filters that I could use to get relatively close to these results? De-noise filters and sharpen filters. I have tried a lot of stuff.

I just want to have close to no noise in my videos and being really sharp too.

Any help is much helpful.

Thanks.

[manono]

Denoising Filters:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Denoisers

Sharpening Filters:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Sharpeners

Have you even tried any of them yet?

[Metroidn1f]

I have only tried LimitedSharpenFaster so far. I have heard a lot of great things about that filter.

Could you be more specific about what filters are better? I don't want to have to go through every single one. But I will if I have too.

[sanlyn]

Are these images a sample of what you're tryijg to emulate? Or are you asking how to avoid all the mistakes?

[manono]

Are these images a sample of what you're tryijg to emulate? Or are you asking how to avoid all the mistakes?

Funny! You mean the blown whites and crushed blacks? And what looks to me to be some serious oversharpening? I didn't mention those things wondering if the picture he took created it, or if maybe Metroidn1f really wants his movies to have that look. Me, I like the look of film grain (which make a movie harder to compress). And since sharpening filters also make it less compressible, and since he wants to use a very low bitrate, I think he should go easy on the sharpening.

[sanlyn]

Well...just asking. Some people like a certain "look". Watching video with badly crushed colors and no clean blacks is annoying for me, but many viewers don't notice. Depends on what the O.P. wants. I like film to look like film, it's more convincing (when not overdone).

Sorry for the typos. Tryijg? Sorry.

[Hoser Rob]

I may be out in left field here, but I prefer to dither (ie. add noise) and then use a sharpening filter. In that order.

[sanlyn]

Yes, I recently came across the dither plugin and (when I get time) will try working with it. I see where it's helpful when deblocking and debanding. Among other things. <sigh> ... when I get time.

[transcendent]

Not particularly efficient but I quite like xsharpen with 3x super sampling using lanczos resizer. It's an old sharperner though, the one you tried is more sophisticated, but you can super sample with anything. Mdegrain2 is a good 3 frame sample temporal denoiser-pretty subtle, you won't lose much detail from it. I don't have much experience myself so I don't know what would be a good spatial relative denoiser to use on real life material. I've only filtered 1 anime film (used a smoother called deen on very low settings otherwise you lose colour/detail)...but it took me about a week to reach the desired result trying about a dozen different filters.

Just be careful of warpsharp usage.

[Metroidn1f]

I use to want to use a low bitrate but now I don't really care about it that much. I don't mind the noise that much but as some of you said it makes the video less compressible because of all the sharpened noise. Plus, on my tv with all the noise it starts to look like static all over the place, just as if you were to way over sharpen it by lets say using Sharpen(1.0) twice. I really like the look of how some of you say "Over Sharpening" but I don't think it is over sharpening. I have tried sharpening the video with Sharpen(1.0) but encoding it with almost lossless with CRF = 1. If I use 0 then I can't import it to After Effects. Saying that, after I would use Sharpen(1.0) I would use Neat Video to de-noise it. I kind like the way it works, but it does degrade some of the quality at certain frames.

The images that I provided are what I am trying to get at for the one guy that wanted to know.

I personally thinking using Lanczos re-sizer makes the video to sharpen to use a secondary filter. It really brings out the noise in the video. I like to use Bilinear Soft.

As I said I do like some noise as it makes it look more like film. but just as the original post said, I have been working on this for at least 2 years now.

Doesn't temporal de-noisers leave a trail of ghosting though if you use it?

Could someone please tell me what temporal and spatial means?

[transcendent]

temporal looks at the difference between adjacent frames to determine what is noise and what isn't noise is usually random so can be detected quite well when compared between similar frames. Their effect can be small or large dependant on the source material.
Spatial denoisers literally just look at a single image and will try to blend and mediate areas in the hope of getting rid of noise. Spatial denoisers are much more prone to killing your image quality. What might look good in one frame might be killing detail in another, so it takes a lot of trial and error. So limiting the strength of your spatial denoiser/grainer is quite important. Spatial smoothing however gives pretty strong improvements to compressability.

Too much denoising/smoothing will introduce problems such as banding however and can wash away colours (particularly spatial). I don't know much about ghosting though, as I said I've only had a week or so's experience =D

[Metroidn1f]

Thanks for the info.

[mathers3000]

I've recently started to backup my blu rays, to play on my WD live. I want the best quality but a decent size, say 2-5GB. I started out with my copy of 300. I used BD_rebuilder, RipBot, and Handbrake to compare different qualities. After playing with the settings a 1.9GB file looked as good as my original 4.4GB try with RB_R.
Then I decided to see how good a video from a pirate website compared with mine. I download one from a 3Li user. I was BLOWN away! His 2.2GB file looked almost as good 23.2GB original BD!!!

Don't believe me? here are the images that show just how good his are.






I'm on a quest now, just as you Metroidn1f, how can i make mine look this good? I've emailed him but he has yet to share. The original is a 1080p, and the other two are 720p.

[sanlyn]

You're assuming that denoisers and sharpeners are all that's being used. It looks more complicated to me. The darks are crushed and the video looks oversaturated, not just denoised and sharpened. Learn to use color and level controls; lower gain and gamma until the darks are crushed below RGB64 or so and start climbing against the left-hand side of a histogram as in your images, and the lower midtones are darkened until they look almost oil-painted. Increase saturation. You'll have to control the extreme brights a bit to prevent total blow-out. Sharpeners and denoisers alone won't get the effects you're looking for.