Making older animes look HD

[Another Shauna Video]

I've been wanting to make an AMV using the Trigun footage I have. I've seen AMVs where the animation look crisp and clean. However it seems every time I try to use my DVD footage between ripping and deinterlace I just can't get it to look as clean as I want it to.

I'm using a macbook and have been using MacX DVD Ripper Pro to rip the footage and have tried using that, MPEG Streamclip, and Compressor to deinterlace with varying degrees of success. I'm just curious (and very hopeful) that someone here can suggest a better program that I could be using.

Also, I'm not using blue ray footage. I'm really hoping I don't need blue ray to get it to look sharp because I can't afford to buy a blue ray copy.

[Mister Hatt]

The blurays look terrible anyway, you'll get better results with the DVD. You basically have two options, both of which require you to know a little about programming. The first is to run a Windows VM in Parallels or Fusion and use avisynth. This is easier by far I think, but you'll need to be very careful of system resources, particularly memory. The second option is to build and install vapoursynth and write your own cleaning filters in a language of choice. This sounds more complicated than it is but unless you've coded before and know basically how some avs filters work internally, it'll be next to impossible. Performance would be a lot better though. The Trigun source isn't the greatest so no automated program will ever be able to process it reasonably.

[Another Shauna Video]

Ah, thanks for the advice. I've never done coding myself, but I have a friend who's done a little. I'll talk to them about your advice and see what they think. (Partly because I always love learning new skills anyway so having an excuse to go to them and be all: TEACH MEEEEEE is always nice.)

I must say I am a little disappointed that there are so few options. I know I've seen some pretty slick stuff, but ah well, I'm not surprised either. It's something you get use to hearing when you're in love with an older fandom after all. At least knowing this that if these two options aren't feasible for me at the moment (after a bit of trail and error of course) then I'll know I've at least tried everything that I could!

[Mister Hatt]

The main reason for it is that blurays of old content sell badly. Really badly. Initially they were mastered properly but shitty sales convinced companies to go with cheaper processing routes to avoid making too little profit for production. What they should be doing, and does happen on extremely popular old content, is to resample the original analogue master into HD. These look fantastic although are sometimes interlaced, Planetes being a good example. What happens more often though is that the DVD master, which was made 10+ years ago with poor analog-digital conversion techniques, is upscaled (badly) to "HD". This is why the blurays are blurry, blocky, have incorrect colour, and generally look bad. You can get better results by upscaling the DVD yourself. In the end, studios are lazy and on tight budgets, so they won't often go for a full ADC master when they can use some Sony or Qtec crapware to upsample a DVD they already have in digital.

Re coding, I would recommend avisynth in a Windows virtual machine for you. It's possible to run vs in OSX but quite difficult to write a filter. A python based filter would be particular slow (unless using cython, but may as well just use raw C then) and you'd likely get better results using someone else's filters.