Enhancing Final Fantasy Videos

peridian · Post by **peridian** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:25 am

Hello,

Not sure if this is the right forum, but here goes...

I've ripped the movies off FF7, FF8, FF9, FFX, FFX-2, and FF:AC (still waiting on a UK translation of the US-only extractor for FFXII, I've tried myself but gotten nowhere with it, see here) in as raw a format as I can (either converted from the m2vs, or extracted directly, into full frames uncompressed avi).

Unfortunately, when played back, because they were originally intended for lower resolution playback, they don't look so good on an LCD screen when played at about 1024x768 resolution. This is particularly noticeable on the videos from FFX.

I've hunted around for tools to improve the quality of these videos, and found a program called EnhanceMovie. It seems to do a lot of things quite easily, which is just as well as I am not a video editing expert.

Does anybody know of either what kinds of enhancements I would look to make to these videos, or any resources explaining what to look for or do to clean up these kinds of videos?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Rob.

M.H.A.Q.S. · Post by **M.H.A.Q.S.** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 11:43 am

To my knowledge, I don't know if this can be done to a better extent but if someone here can give you any help, I'll be interested too.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 11:47 am

Avisynth.

I've never worked with that footage, but I would perhaps recommend some light smoothing filters, LanczosResize to upscale it, and then play around with various sharpening filters like LimitedSharpen or aWarpsharp.

EEDI2 Resizer may likely work better than LanczosResize: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=112249

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:16 am

When I was working on cleaning up the FF footage my sister was using, I used a combination of supersampling, smoothing, and resizing back down. Something like a filter chain of:

BilinearResize(1280,720)
deen("w3d",3,10,12)
LanczosResize(640,352)

Most of the footage (notably, from the newer games) wasn't bad enough to warrant that kind of filtering, though. It seemed that I only needed to do that on the footage from FF8 and Kingdom Hearts (I don't think she used FF7, but I would assume that I would probably have found it necessary there, too), maybe even the old crappy web trailers for Advent Children.

peridian · Post by **peridian** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:12 am

Thanks for all this. I have seen AviSynth before, but it read like something that would require more advanced video editing skills than I have. I will investigate it and look for some guids as well.

Regards,
Rob.

peridian · Post by **peridian** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 2:40 am

Okay,

I got AviSynth. I get how it works, but I have no idea as to where to start, how to get the various addins and such to work, or how best to use it. May need to hunt down some better guides on it.

I then got Virtual Dub, since I needed something to be able to play and save the avs files from AviSynth. I discovered it already has quite a few filters in. So I played around with them, and got some interesting results.

Before I go playing around with AviSynth scripts, I just want to run what I did past people who know what they're doing to find out if I'm overlooking something. It 'looks' like I'm in the right direction, but I'm not a video editing person.

Okay, first off, I picked out the 'A Summoner Is Born' movie from FFX. I'm using two points in the video for testing. One is a high motion bit, the other a character model close up.

Here are the original, uncompressed, unfiltered frames:

One of the most noticeable problems with the FFX videos is the interlacing on motion, which you can see if you look at Tidus' collar or around Yuna's eyes. After some experimenting, I found that the filter 'Field Bob' with settings for Smooth on both Even and Odd fields virtually removes this issue. See here:

Playing around some more, I realised what the Smoother filter did. It definitely helps clean up the colours on the screen by getting rid of the odd pixels of differing shades, especially on the character skin textures. So I added that filter, but with a small-ish value (slider 15; g750), since too high a value made the characters look like they were made of wax. The effect is not so noticeable on the high motion frame, though it is noticeable before he moves, but it can be seen on Yuna's face. Here is with both the filters applied:

Then I fiddled around with blur and sharpen. I thought you would only want to apply one or the other, since they counteract each other, but I found that doesn't seem to be the case. I applied a radius-1 gausian blur, which definitely removed some of the pixelated edges to the models, but also lowered the quality of the image overall. See here:

So I then added a Sharpen filter, and ramped it up to the maximum (64). This seems to bring the image back to the same kind of quality as I had before the blur, and whlie it does seem to counteract the benefit of the blur to some extent, I'm still convinced that some of the benefit is still there, as it does appear to have improved in quality with both applied. The final output is below:

As I say, it 'appears' to have improved the quality, but I do wonder if that's my eyesight, lack of video editing knowledge in what this all does, or just my imagination

If anybody has any opinions or advice on this, I would greatly appreciate it.

Regards,
Rob.

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Fri Aug 17, 2007 3:02 am

peridian wrote:If anybody has any opinions or advice on this, I would greatly appreciate it.

Deinterlace?

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 1:44 pm

It sounds like you are off to a good start, but your method so far is pretty poor. There are much much better alternatives to the things you did so far.

These guides have some pretty good information on deinterlacing and filtering videos in avisynth:
EADFAG v2: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/
EADFAG v3 beta: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtechbeta/

The plugins mentioned in the guides can be downloaded here: http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/

peridian · Post by **peridian** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 3:10 am

Basher, I tried deinterlace, but it did not appear to make any difference. I'm not entirely sure if that's the format of the video or the filter I was using.

Zarxrax, thanks for the guides, they look like what I've been trying to find. I will read through them when I get the chance.

Regards,
Rob.

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Mon Aug 20, 2007 3:37 am

peridian wrote:Bashar, I tried deinterlace, but it did not appear to make any difference. I'm not entirely sure if that's the format of the video or the filter I was using.

It's interlaced... The best way to fix it is something you're going to have to figure out through the guides, but that's the biggest issue. You shouldn't even worry about the other filtering until that is taken care of.