Upscaling to HD for a convention- need help!!

[Chaobunny12]

So I need to upgrade my AMV to 720p for a convention, and I got a vague idea of what to do for my basic script with help from a few people.

I'm upscaling to 1280x720 from 720x480. My source AMV is an .avi compressed with HuffyUV with a framerate of 23.976 fps and a PAR of 1.00.

Here's what I have so far:

Code: Select all

AVISource("filepath")
Spline36Resize(960,720)
Addborders(160,0,160,0)

I guess I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of quality problems because stuff like this goes way over my head. I also really don't understand all the fancy AVIsynth plugins or how to use them. But I'm having some major quality issues with the upscaling. I think they're called "artifacts" or something?? I double checked the file in Vegas and the saved AVI, so I'm sure none of these problems were there before the upscale. Here are some examples:













If anyone is curious, the AMV has about 10 different sources, and some took to HD better than others. Air TV, Kanon, Chrono Crusade, Ouran, and Origins look fine, whereas some of the above ones didn't turn out all that super. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke look so-so, but they're not really suited to HD.

I'm just worried that what might work for one source might not work for them all, so I'm panicking.

[Scintilla]

The "shadows" you mention in the first screenshot look like haloing. Look into using, say, DeHalo_Alpha or BlindDeHalo for those.

This isn't something you mentioned, but the aspect ratios for the Shinkai source (5cm/s?) and the last screenshot look off. Those two sources should probably be widescreen.

As for the graining, that's mosquito noise, or ordinary DCT compression artifacting (like in JPEGs)... and I have no idea how that would be in the upscale but not in the original export, unless you compressed with a lossy codec in between (say, XviD). Is it possible that these problems were in fact present in the original sources and you just couldn't see them clearly until you upscaled?
In any case, many spatial and spatio-temporal smoothers have been designed to handle this problem. Try Deen, or FFT3DFilter, or MSmooth, or...

And I have no idea how the ghost images in your Avatar screenshots would have shown up just now either. I suppose your best bet for those is something like FFT3DFilter; normal temporal smoothers might just make the problem worse.

[Chaobunny12]

((The screencaps I posted are zoomed in and not the full image. I did this so that I could show the detail better, so parts are cut off. That's why the aspect ratios look strange. And as for the overall aspect ratio- I'm combining about 10 different sources in one AMV so I had to pick one and readjust the others to fit it))

And I didn't compress with a lossy codec... just HuffyUV. My video source files look fine, and the finished AMV looks fine. It really is just the upscale. I don't know how this works. D:

As for these filters...I'm getting an error message telling me that my videos need to be in YV12 or YUY2 colorspace...how do I change my video to fit that?

[Chaobunny12]

Oh, um...I'm a little embarrassed now but I realize that the haloing in the first picture and those weird after-images in the avatar clips are present in the original files, just too small to be noticable.

Now I don't know what to do... D: The AMV is already done. Gah. >__<

[Zarxrax]

This is the first time that I've heard of a convention requiring videos to be in HD O_o
Um, those problems all exist in your source, and when you resize it, it just makes them bigger, so they are easier to see. Because you are using lots of different sources, you can't just apply any filters to your entire video that will fix the problem (because some sources have different problems than others).

Honestly I don't think it's that big of a deal. Artifacts don't usually stand out so much at conventions, from what I've seen, and no one is going to be stepping through frame by frame.

To convert your video to YV12 colorspace, you need to add the line ConvertToYV12()
If you add any filters, do it BEFORE you resize, and make sure to use very light settings.

[BasharOfTheAges]

This is the first time that I've heard of a convention requiring videos to be in HD O_o

http://www.animeboston.com/events/amv_rules/

It's not a requirement per-say... It's a "we're going to upscale to 720p to do the contest on an HD set-up. Either you can fix the upscale on your end or we'll just upscale it on our end and it'll look how it looks" kinda thing.

[Chaobunny12]

Honestly I don't think it's that big of a deal. Artifacts don't usually stand out so much at conventions, from what I've seen, and no one is going to be stepping through frame by frame.

To convert your video to YV12 colorspace, you need to add the line ConvertToYV12()
If you add any filters, do it BEFORE you resize, and make sure to use very light settings.

Okay, thanks. Hopefully, it's not the end of the world if I can't fix them because the deadline is coming up soon.

The degraining I think I've figured out, but I still can't figure out how to fix the ghost images in the Avatar clip. I looked more closely at the original file, and they're everywhere. The only way I can really tell is to go through frame by frame.

What's driving me crazy is that apart from the ghosting the quality is stellar. I've tried applying a few blurs and while that makes the ghosting less noticable, it absolutely destroys the rest of the image.

Which filter would be best for the ghosting problem?

[Enigma]

Try DFTTest() a friend of mine managed to upscale 360p footage up to 480p without barley any noticeable quality loss, Try it out


it's REALLY SLOW though

[Enigma]

gah ffffffuuuu ;_;

[Scintilla]

And as for the overall aspect ratio- I'm combining about 10 different sources in one AMV so I had to pick one and readjust the others to fit it))

I'm aware of that. In this case, I think the "making everything fullscreen" section of this page of EADFAG is applicable; except that since you chose to edit at 720x480 (instead of 640x480 as in the example), you'd want to resize your anamorphic sources to 960x480 and then crop off the edges to get back down to 720x480, as part of the preprocessing of those sources before editing. That way, their faces wouldn't be squished.