How do I make this anime video look so good upscaled from DVD to 720p

[sanlyn]

No. Once dark or bright values are crushed or clipped, they're gone. You can retrieve a certain fringe portion of data that lies just above the crushing point or just below the clipping point by manipulating contrast, brightness and other factors, or with contrast masks. But those tricks have limits.

Technically, crushing and clipping actually mean the same thing. But usually as graphics lingo goes, crushing applies to darks and clipping applies to brights. Take highlight clipping as an example: Let's say the RGB value of the original brights was RGB 230. That's actually a fairly bright color, near the acceptable limits for video data storage. You can use contrast controls to pump up contrast so that the brightest RGB value actually exceeds RGB 255. Unfortunately, video can't store higher data values. So if you have a bright object wherein the Blue component hits RGB 255, and the Green component hits 255, but red exceeds 255, then the bright red values above 255 are lost. That bright color won't be white at the brightest point; it has lost some red, so a white will look cyan (blue-green), not white. If red and green were OK but blue was clipped, that white would look yellow.

Crushing and clipping also destroy gradients, or subtle transitions between different hues of color or luma. Some of the data that describes the gradual transitions have been lost (either thru crushing or due to low-bitrate compression), so many of the "transition" hues have been lost and are replaced by harder edges. The result is banding, noise, or both.

In the script I used, GradFun3 is used in high-bit mode to help mask some hard gradient edges with dithering and some grain. But most filters are 8-bit. In an 8-bit standard system, 10-bit often just means dithering (but don't sell dithering short. Up to a point, it works well when correctly applied). If you really want to work in high-bit media, you need a graphics card, software, and hardware that can use high-bit processing.

[jagabo]

Keep in mind that using 10 bit h.264 limits your playback options. I don't know of any standalone players that can handle 10 bit h.264. You're pretty much limiting yourself to computer playback.

[sanlyn]

I don't think Mode=2 is the right mode to use here because the source is the result of a simple deinterlacing of a telecined film.

Got it.

Sometimes you stare at something for a long time but don't see it.

TDecimate(mode=1,rate=23.97)

[jagabo]

Although the author claims mode=1 is best for animation I'm not sure it is. For the purposes of this video there won't be much difference (since we're only deleting one frame out of every 5) but consider a case where you are removing more frames. Suppose you need to remove six frames this sequence:

 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4  5 5 (ie, cell 1 repeated 8 times, the others repeated 2 times)

I believe mode=1 will leave you with:

1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5

But that shortens the duration of cell 1 from 8 time increments to 2 time increments, the same as the other cells. But the animators intention was for cell 1 to last 4 times longer than the other cells. Ie, it should have been reduced to:

1 1 1 1 2 3 4 5

[sanlyn]

Yes, I was looking for effects like that. It won't be perfect, considering damage to the original. I did get the same results with:
TDecimate(mode=0,cycle=5,cycleR=1,rate=23.97)
but it was slower for some reason. Reviewed the results several times and it looks smoother. There's still some flicker in those light cones; if banding in the original weren't so obvious, I'd throw more filters at it.

Attached demo used "mode=0,rate=23.97". It's plain ol' 720x480, 23.97p, no pulldown, no resize to 720p. A lower bitrate than I'd use for big screen display, so there's some banding here but it shows how the different mode worked better on the walking business.

[Kyousuke]

If it can be improved avoiding upscaling, then it's great! I'm going to get a proper bluray player (mine is ancient), I heard that most recent models have better rendering for low resolution videos.