Shana AMV Quality Problems

surfsama · Post by **surfsama** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 3:55 pm

Hi, I'm having a tough time improving a few scenes in my AMV. The source is DVD. The following script has improved the quality substantially but as you can see it's far from ideal. I'm a learner so any guidance or suggestions would be appreciated:

AVISource("D:\ShanaAMV\HeavyMetal Take 02.avi")
ConvertToYV12
Deblock(quant=35)
deen("a3d",4,12,12)
vmtoon(strength=50,sharpen=true)
SangNom(2,151)
Tweak(cont=1.1,sat=1.3,bright=-15, hue=0.4)

Here is a screen shot of the most problematic area (which looks a little exaggerated by the photobucket compression):

CorruptNova · Post by **CorruptNova** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:13 pm

Could you grab a lossless(PNG) screen shot of that and upload it to somewhere like tinypic.com?

Kariudo · Post by **Kariudo** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 8:47 pm

try throwing a pair of parenthesis onto the end of converttoyv12 there.

I'm a bit rusty on what sangnom does (IIRC it's anti-aliasing and deinterlacing) but from what I remember Sangnom always introduced some ugly artifacts on the lines.

Deblock may be a bit too strong resulting in a washed-out look.

Phantasmagoriat · Post by **Phantasmagoriat** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 10:41 pm

if it's just a couple garbage frames from the dvd, I would simply skip them.

But I'll follow up with two other questions.
-What type of files are you putting into your editor?
-What codec are you using to export from your editor?

It almost looks like macroblocking from using a lossy codec
[which is partially fixed by deblock()]

surfsama · Post by **surfsama** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 11:17 pm

Kariudo:
I put the parenthesis at the end of converttoyv12 but no change.
Sangnom is set at the lowest setting to prevent the jagged interlacing lines.
Deblocking is also at the lowest setting to keep it from looking worse.

Phantasmagoriat:
The files went into Premier as mpeg's and the output was lagarith.

Yeah, I could probably skip it (it only affects a few scenes) but I'd like to try to tame it a bit more because it's really ugly for dvd source.

Phantasmagoriat · Post by **Phantasmagoriat** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 12:28 am

yeah, if it's the original mpeg2 stream, then I'm not sure what else you can do about it . Maybe cleverly add a blur effect to the amv [I've actually done that before

]

mirkosp · Post by **mirkosp** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 7:08 am

I'd echo Kariudo on the SangNom. Try to use an alternative filter for the antialiasing, for example AntiAliasing, AAA or perhaps TIsophote (scroll down a bit for this).
Also, I personally don't like vmtoon very much for the sharpening, and I'm not the only one I think... try limitedsharpenfaster or maybe get the Toon. If you need line darkening, perhaps use vmtoon(sharpen=false).

LivingFlame · Post by **LivingFlame** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 12:55 pm

I would also suggest not exporting Lagarith files out of Premiere. From what I hear, Premiere and Lagarith exporting don't get along very well. =\

Try Huffyuv.

surfsama · Post by **surfsama** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 5:49 pm

Thanks everyone. I took a bit of everyone's suggestions and here is the revised script:

avisource("D:\ShanaAMV\Sequence 01.avi")
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
Telecide(order=1,guide=1)
deen("a3d",4,7,8)
Tweak(cont=1.1,sat=1.3,bright=-15, hue=0.4)
Toon()
LimitedSharpenFaster(Smode=4)

and result (.png FTW):

Not perfect but much improved. Kariudo got me thinking that if I had to add that much blocking and SangNom then something during the editing process was wrong. I went back and removed the Premier deinterlacing functions and enabled blend frames then just output the interlaced clips. Telecide did a much better job of deinterlacing.

Krisqo · Post by **Krisqo** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 10:20 pm

Damn... I had a good script for Shana but I deleted it after finishing my video.

I don't think you need the cont, bright, and hue functions under Tweak.