About Dithering/Debanding plugins

[zanaitoryoushi]

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[jagabo]

My question is does dithering/debanding solution make the movie darker?

No.

[Selur]

sounds more of a problem of TV (16-235) vs. PC (0-255) scale

[zanaitoryoushi]

thanks for the response guys, anyway..is it more practical to use dithering before or after the sharpening function?

[Selur]

I would definitely use using it after the sharpening function, otherwise you will probably produce a lot of unwanted ringing,..

[zanaitoryoushi]

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[Selur]

depends on the source and personal preferences,..

Personally, I normally use the following order:

• source filters
• color adjustments (make sure to use the 'interlaced' option if the source is interlaced and the filter has one)
• deinterlace / interlace
• crop
• rotate
• resize
• add borders
• dehalo (if source has Halos)
• denoise
• degrain
• sharpen
• deHalo (to remove halos introduced through sharpening)
• anti aliasing
• debanding
• line darken
• subtitle,logos
• softener if compressibility needs to be boosted (really soft, like RemoveGrain(2) and similiar)

Cu Selur

[zanaitoryoushi]

depends on the source and personal preferences,..

Personally, I normally use the following order:

• source filters
• color adjustments (make sure to use the 'interlaced' option if the source is interlaced and the filter has one)
• deinterlace / interlace
• crop
• rotate
• resize
• add borders
• dehalo (if source has Halos)
• denoise
• degrain
• sharpen
• deHalo (to remove halos introduced through sharpening)
• anti aliasing
• debanding
• line darken
• subtitle,logos
• softener if compressibility needs to be boosted (really soft, like RemoveGrain(2) and similiar)

Cu Selur

wow! that's a lot of functions, anyway thanks for sharing, if I may, if you'll classify Deen, where will it fall in your order, i mean as what i see with what it does, it smoothens images, aside that, i don't really know what it really does aside the smoothing..

[Selur]

Deen is a Spatio-Temporal Denoisers, see: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_plugins

that's a lot of functions

don't use every function type for each source, I just posted all the stuff I remembered to give an overview

[zanaitoryoushi]

Deen is a Spatio-Temporal Denoisers, see: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_plugins

that's a lot of functions

don't use every function type for each source, I just posted all the stuff I remembered to give an overview

so a denoiser too, hmm, thanks for that, though i mainly use it for smoothening, i don't know if my eyes decieve me but that's the function i specifically use it for..also i see in your order that at the last procedure you add removegrain for compressibility, does it not affect the details of the movie/clip/video your encoding after all the functions processed behind it, like denoising, sharpening, etc..

[Selur]

removegrain(2) or undot() don't really do much, but not totally sure if it interferes with the debanding,...

[pandy]

My question is does dithering/debanding solution make the movie darker?

Ordered dithering have tendency to bias level and make video slightly brighter.
Error diffusion dithers should be transparent from overall picture level point of view (measured and perceived).

[zanaitoryoushi]

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[Selur]

as a side note if you are encoding anime to x264, debanding can be avoided by using 10bit x264,... (downside is that 10bit H.264 is not supported by hardware decoders atm.)
about 10bit H.264:
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_01-ateme_pierre_larbier_422_10-bit.pdf
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_02-ateme-why_does_10bit_save_bandwidth.pdf
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_03-422_10_bit_pristine_video_quality.pdf

[zanaitoryoushi]

as a side note if you are encoding anime to x264, debanding can be avoided by using 10bit x264,... (downside is that 10bit H.264 is not supported by hardware decoders atm.)
about 10bit H.264:
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_01-ateme_pierre_larbier_422_10-bit.pdf
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_02-ateme-why_does_10bit_save_bandwidth.pdf
http://www.x264.nl/x264/10bit_03-422_10_bit_pristine_video_quality.pdf

this references really do help me a whole lot, thank you so much

[jagabo]

it appears that it made the movie slightly darker, losing it's chroma level

Losing chroma would give less saturated colors, not a darker picture. Losing luma will give a darker picture.

How are you comparing your two encodes? Side by side in two media players? That's usually not a good way to compare because the players may be using different proc amp settings. Also, one may be using the graphics card's video overlay feature with its video proc amp, and the other writing directly to the desktop. Unless you have both calibrated the same even playing the same video will look different.

[pandy]

edit: (before i go) @pandy, thanks for the info, though in my case it's weird..it appears that it made the movie slightly darker, losing it's chroma level (sorry i'm not really sure what i'm babbling about here) a bit, though it's barely noticeable, my eyes are probably just that sensitive..i compare my first encode, which has the banding problem, and the new one with the debanding/dithering solution and it seems it made it a little darker, not noticeable if you won't really pay attention, but i liked how the first one was converted in terms of the visual feel i'm getting, so i guess i'll redo it messing with the tweak function, i use hue=0,sat=1.117,brightness=.7,contrast=1.117 first, probably i'll try 1.2,.85,1.2 respectively next..

Not sure on Your case however from mathematical point of view - before any video processing video should be linearized i.e. gamma corrected video should be turn to linear and after processing gamma should be restored. For dithering this can be something that can create different bias i.e. shift video to brighter/darker. Similar to dithering, noise can be added to smooth gradient areas to prevent banding - noise perform function of random dither - this can slightly brighten (bias) video.

[zanaitoryoushi]

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