Difficult low quality telecined source

[BrianCrowe]

Posting in the newbie section because I've never really used anything other than handbrake.

I know enough to tell it's telecined, but handbrake's detelecine feature doesn't seem to be enough or maybe there's some other issues I don't know enough to recognize. No matter what I do, there seems to be a lot of ghosting. Especially with the writing on the bus and the old man's legs when he gets thrown off the bus.

Would greatly appreciate it if someone with proper experience could take a look at the attached clip and tell me what I'm working with here, hopefully point me in the right direction.

[davexnet]

QTGMC and Srestore help quite a bit, but it's not perfect

[hello_hello]

BrianCrowe,
just so you know, it appears to have been converted from 24fps to 30fps using field blending.
It'd require a crash course in using Avisynth Plus to remove the blending (or hopefully most of it).
QTGMC and SRestore (mentioned by davexnet in the post above) are Avisynth functions.

[BrianCrowe]

BrianCrowe,
just so you know, it appears to have been converted from 24fps to 30fps using field blending.
It'd require a crash course in using Avisynth Plus to remove the blending (or hopefully most of it).
QTGMC and SRestore (mentioned by davexnet in the post above) are Avisynth functions.

I greatly appreciate the information. Just knowing what the problem is (field blending) and potential tools to alleviate it (AviSynth Plus, QTGMC, and SRestore) is a huge leap forward. Now it's just a matter of digging in and trying things out.

[BrianCrowe]

QTGMC and Srestore help quite a bit, but it's not perfect

That's a really big improvement. Can you post the settings you used so I can have a good starting point? I've been messing around with QTGMC and SRestore for a couple hours now and sadly I haven't been able to come up with anything close to as good as that .

[davexnet]

QTGMC and Srestore help quite a bit, but it's not perfect

That's a really big improvement. Can you post the settings you used so I can have a good starting point? I've been messing around with QTGMC and SRestore for a couple hours now and sadly I haven't been able to come up with anything close to as good as that .

This is what I had

lwlibavvideosource("C:\Users\davex\Downloads\GTO test-001.mkv",fpsnum=30000,fpsden=1001)
qtgmc()
srestore(frate=23.976)

EDIT
"Although since it's mpeg-2 in the MKV",
<snip>
it's not mpeg-2 at all, ignore that bit

[hello_hello]

QTGMC and Srestore help quite a bit, but it's not perfect

I've been messing around with QTGMC and SRestore for a couple hours now and sadly I haven't been able to come up with anything close to as good as that .

Keep in mind that SRestore needs to access frames in a linear manner to find the blending pattern. If you navigate back and forth in the video while viewing the output of the script you'll probably see blends. You need to either play the video or step through the frames in playback order. SRestore can still miss a few initial blends, or miss a few blends if the blending pattern changes, as sometimes it does.

[Alwyn]

Dave must be using the secret sauce because I too cannot achieve his result. In the bit where the bloke is falling backwards, I'm still getting blends and interlacing.

Here's mine using Dave's code.

Edit: Mine came out at 29.97, but SRestore was told 23.976. Naughty SRestore??

[Alwyn]

Although since it's mpeg-2 in the MKV

Mediainfo is showing AVC, Dave.

[davexnet]

Although since it's mpeg-2 in the MKV

Mediainfo is showing AVC, Dave.

Thanks for that. Mixed up with something else! I'll edit my post

[davexnet]

Dave must be using the secret sauce because I too cannot achieve his result. In the bit where the bloke is falling backwards, I'm still getting blends and interlacing.

Here's mine using Dave's code.

Edit: Mine came out at 29.97, but SRestore was told 23.976. Naughty SRestore??

Perhaps you should post your script Alwyn.
I checked my plugins, I've been using Srestore 2.796 and masktools 2.2.30

[Alwyn]

Dave, code exactly the same as yours (as stated).

I'm on SRestore 2.797 and same masktools.

What bitness are you using?

[davexnet]

Dave, code exactly the same as yours (as stated).

I'm on SRestore 2.797 and same masktools.

What bitness are you using?

I used the 32 bit version 44282 from 2020
https://www.videohelp.com/download/VirtualDub2_44282.zip

I don't know if grunt.dll could be an issue, the doc for Srestore says it could be used in some cases.
I just noticed I've a really old version from 2008 in my 32 bit plugins folder.

Perhaps related to the source filter? I'm using LsmashSource.dll version 1167

[Alwyn]

I'm on 64 bit. Lsmash did improve things a bit, but I still have ghosting/blends.

We had a thread recently (in the last couple of months, IIRC) with a similar video and a good solution but I'll be danged if I can find it.

[jagabo]

I got the same 23.976 result as davexnet with 64 bit AviSynth+.

[BrianCrowe]

Dave must be using the secret sauce because I too cannot achieve his result. In the bit where the bloke is falling backwards, I'm still getting blends and interlacing.

Here's mine using Dave's code.

Edit: Mine came out at 29.97, but SRestore was told 23.976. Naughty SRestore??

I don't know if this was the correct thing to do or not, but after a lot of testing I was able to get a satisfactory result by enabling qtgmc's bob function.

The problem I'm facing now is finding some way to reduce the amount of jiggling/warping it causes or reveals in slow panning shots like in the attached clip. Does anyone know of a different filter or tweaks to srestore that can alleviate that?

In the attached files is the second clip I'm having an issue with, and the best version I've been able to make of the first clip.

And I must say thank you to everyone that has responded to this thread. I honestly didn't expect this much of a response or this much help

[poisondeathray]

The wobbling is in the source. You can examine it with SeparateFields() and step through the individual fields

LWLibavVideoSource("GTO test2-001.mkv")
SeparateFields()

Quite a few older Japanese anime transfers had "Temporal Scanline Blending" artifacts. There is warping in individual fields, such as the top is different from bottom, so they do not "fit".
https://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech31/video-analyze.html

In general, you cannot fix this without extensive manual work . You might be able to select specific frames, or interpolate over some bad frames, or recreate the pan from a larger plate, but all thes require some manual input, at minimum identifying and specifying "good" frames. It won't be a simple script that you can generically apply to everything

[poisondeathray]

Actually for your test scene, if you change the deinterlacer to bwdif(field=3) or yadif(1,1), srestore picks the correct frames . The negatives of those are more aliasing in general . One of the side effects of QTGMC is slight wobbling, and it must be enough in this case to confuse srestore

This doesn't mean that workaround will work for all scenes. It depends on how the transfer was done, where it was edited, the cadence

[Alwyn]

I don't know if this was the correct thing to do or not, but after a lot of testing I was able to get a satisfactory result by enabling qtgmc's bob function.

qtgmcbob mode2 omode6 speed1 thresh20 frate23.976 Brian.mkv

That's better; what's your code?

[BrianCrowe]

I don't know if this was the correct thing to do or not, but after a lot of testing I was able to get a satisfactory result by enabling qtgmc's bob function.

qtgmcbob mode2 omode6 speed1 thresh20 frate23.976 Brian.mkv

That's better; what's your code?

Here's what I used for that clip:

Crop(6,0,-6,0)
AssumeTFF()
QTGMC(Preset="Placebo", ediThreads=2)
srestore(frate=23.976,omode=6,speed=1,thresh=20,cache=5)

That's what I came up with after reading a couple tutorials and the avisynth wiki pages for the various plugins. qtgmc actually has bob enabled by default, so I don't know what I was smoking when I said to enable it lol. Must've misread something at some point.

[Alwyn]

Thanks Brian, I'll try it.

[BrianCrowe]

Actually for your test scene, if you change the deinterlacer to bwdif(field=3) or yadif(1,1), srestore picks the correct frames . The negatives of those are more aliasing in general . One of the side effects of QTGMC is slight wobbling, and it must be enough in this case to confuse srestore

This doesn't mean that workaround will work for all scenes. It depends on how the transfer was done, where it was edited, the cadence

I'll encode the entire episode with bwdif instead of qtgmc and see how it turns out, thank you! I'm not really going for perfect, just more enjoyable to watch than the source.

Just for reference however, how long do you think it'd take someone with proper experience to manually fix up something like this?

[hello_hello]

You could probably fix some of the wobble with Stab.
You can ignore the warning on the wiki about not using it with color video.
http://www.avisynth.nl/index.php/Stab
I'm not sure if it'll work better before or after the de-interlacing. You'll have to experiment with that.

Stab()
CheckMate()
QTGMC(Preset="Placebo", ediThreads=2)
SRestore(frate=24000.0/1001.0, omode=6, speed=1, thresh=20)
CropResize(0,476, 12,2,-10,-2, InDAR=15.0/11.0, Resizer="Resize8")
FineDehalo()
MergeChroma(last, aWarpSharp2(depth=20))
FastLineDarkenMod4(thinning=0)
MAA()
FineDehalo()