How To Better "The Bad News Bears{1976}" Blu-ray Video

[LouieChuckyMerry]

Hello, and Happy Friday! I finally received my Blu-ray of the original (1976) "The Bad News Bears" only to find that the video quality is no better than my years-old HDTV rip. Here's a sample: TestClipBadNewsBears. Please, any suggestions to improve the video (it's almost as if it was filmed through a sunglasses lens, it's that "dark" throughout the movie)? For my HDTV rip I used VirtualDub (to UtVideo) with it's internal "brightness/contrast" filter such that the contrast was positive one (1) mark (110%?), then ran this through AviSynth to clean-sharpen it a bit. It looks better to me, but I'm sure there's a better way . As always, thanks for any constructive suggestions.

[jagabo]

That's an evening (morining?) shot. Maybe it was intended to look like that. How about a wider variety of scenes?

[Sharc]

+1
You may want to try something like

Levels(16,1.2,235,16,230)
Tweak(hue=0,sat=1.3,bright=-10,cont=1.1,coring=false)

But verify the tweaks with other scenes as it may cause crushed whites.

[Selur]

I agree that the scene is meant to look kind of dark, that said using:

AutoAdjust(auto_gain=true)

see: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/AutoAdjust
should brigthen things up a bit.

Cu Selur

[LouieChuckyMerry]

Thank you all for your replies, and I should've upped a variety of scenes:

TestClipBadNewsBears[Afternoon]

and

TestClipBadNewsBears[Indoors]

[jagabo]

A compromise setting that works fairly well across all three clips:

v1 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v2 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears[Afternoon].mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v3 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears[Indoor].mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v1+v2+v3
BilinearResize(width/2, height/2)

src = last # remember the original

# levels and gamma adjustment
ColorYUV(levels="TV->PC")
ColorYUV(gain_y=8, off_y=-6, gamma_y=100)
ColorYUV(levels="PC->TV")

# follow up with some noise reduction
# like Spotless() to remove dirt/flakes
# and SMDegrain() for general grain reduction

StackHorizontal(src, last) # original and processed, side by side

[LouieChuckyMerry]

Wow, that looks fantastic, jagabo. Thank you. I understand the color adjustments and the noise-spot reduction, but what's the first section of your script? Are you cropping height and width by two? And what's "cache=false, prefer_hw=2"?

EDIT: Ahhh, is that how you made them fit side-by-side? Yep, I'm still a bit slow...

[Selur]

"cache=false" -> temporary frame indexes will be created in memory not on hdd
"prefer_hw=2" ->
- 0 : Use default software decoder.
- 1 : Use NVIDIA CUVID acceleration for supported codec, otherwise use default software decoder.
- 2 : Use Intel Quick Sync Video acceleration for supported codec, otherwise use default software decoder.
- 3 : Try hardware decoder in the order of CUVID->QSV. If none is available then use default software decoder.

Are you cropping height and width by two?

He's resizing width&height by a factor of 2.

is that how you made them fit side-by-side?

No that's what

StackHorizontal(src, last) # original and processed, side by side

is for.

[LouieChuckyMerry]

Thanks, Selur, for the explanations and for the introduction to AutoAdjust. I ran a SelectRange with AutoAdjust and will compare it to a second SelectRange with jagabo's script when it finishes in a little less than an hour.

[jagabo]

AutoAdjust(), suggested by selur, looks good but has some bad frames at the start and might be overdoing things a bit. I'm always wary of auto adjustments like this though. I added Spotless() and SMDegrain() too.

v1 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears.mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v2 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears[Afternoon].mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v3 = LWLibavVideoSource("TestClipBadNewsBears[Indoor].mkv", cache=false, prefer_hw=2) 
v1+v2+v3
Crop(2,0,-2,-2) # get rid of black borders (they can interfere with AutoAdjust)

AutoAdjust(auto_gain=true)
Spotless()
SMDegrain()

AddBorders(2,0,2,2) # put borders back if you need the original frame size

[LouieChuckyMerry]

The second SelectRange just finished. Here's a screenshot comparison (AutoAdjust first, jagabo second):


[Attachment 60476 - Click to enlarge]

and


[Attachment 60477 - Click to enlarge]

The jagabo Method looks better to my eyes but, to be fair, it received SMDegrain and Spotless treatment while the AutoAdjust only received SMDegraining. Anyways, in case someone finds this helpful, my final script is:

LWLibavVideoSource("SourcePath")
SetFilterMTMode("Default_MT_Mode",2)
ColorYUV(Levels="TV->PC")
ColorYUV(Gain_Y=8,Off_Y=-6,Gamma_Y=100)
ColorYUV(Levels="PC->TV")
Spotless()
SMDegrain(TR=3,ThSAD=500,RefineMotion=True,Plane=0,Chroma=False,n16=True,n16_Out=True)
FastLineDarkenMod4()
F3KDB(Y=100,Cb=100,Cr=100,GrainY=0,GrainC=0)
PreFetch(5)

Considering that Spotless does some denoising, adjust SMDegrain's "TR" and "ThSAD" to taste.

Thanks for all the help (especially Spotless; it's so good I might be forced to re(rerere...)encode some of my older sources); as always I learned more than I'll remember . And I'm excited to view the final result on a big screen; I know it'll be awesome. Be well all!

[jagabo]

Here's another trick you can try. ColorYUV(autogain=true) delivers a picture that's way overdone in some shots. But if you blend it with the original video it may look a lot better.

Overlay(last, ColorYUV(autogain=true), opacity=0.50)

You can vary the opacity to get closer to the original or closer to the autogain video.

[LouieChuckyMerry]

Thanks for the additional tip, jagabo; I'll try it with a couple of trim test clips. As I tried to better understand SpotLess, I read a suggestion to use it as a prefilter in SMDegrain. Any thoughts on that?