New Upscaling Method

[Tarage]

So I just happened to get this linked to me and it looks amazing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments ... workbased/

It's called Waifu2x, aptly enough, and the results seem to speak for themselves.

Spoiler :

Now, this program is designed for static images, but it appears there is also an Avisynth plugin for it as well: http://waifu2x-avisynth.sunnyone.org/

Here's a complete list of all the different derived software: http://kourindrug.sakura.ne.jp/waifu2x.html

I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet myself, but if the results are anything like what's being done for static images, this could be a boon for working with older SD footage such as *shutter* GTO. Now granted, this thing is probably really slow even on beefy machines, so it might not be best for everything, but I think it's at least worth checking out.

Let me know what you guys think.

[ZoroIttoryu]

If we could get same results for videos then this is freaking awesome!

[BasharOfTheAges]

Looks like you'd have to downscale on the other side to handle the fact that it only handles exact powers of 2 for right now. I'd have to look at the code to figure out why that is, but a more reasonable wrapper might not be too hard to pull off.

EDIT- Tried it out and all it seems to want to do is complain that it wants YV12/16/24 footage, even if you convert to YV12.

EDIT2 - If you're using avisource() to import it complains less, but still crashes vdub for me when I try 4x resolutions. 2x processes at about 80 seconds per frame on my i7-5820K. So, yea, you could totally use it in footage prep, you just need a server farm to crank on your footage for a couple of days first.

[Qyot27]

The thread at Doom9:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=172197

There's some minor observational and code analysis on what it's actually doing. Part of the reason it's so slow is that it's really not optimized at all yet. My guess is that, seeing as how it looks for avisynth.h on the system and doesn't ship one locally, it may be doing the correct thing and is set up for using AviSynth+'s headers, which means that a 64-bit build would hopefully be trivial, and that might reduce the chances of running out of memory and crashing. Being that it works on single frames, hopefully it's also written to be thread-safe, and thus easily able to use MT (if the memory usage is brought under control, anyway; otherwise it'll just magnify the memory issue, 64-bit or not).