Commercial DVD with various artifact?

[Undead Sega]

Hello everyone! how are you? and how is everything? I hope all is well and it has been awhile.

I firstly want to thank everyone here for their very much appreciated help to the problems I was having with the footage, and it has given me a better idea on how to filter is or use things. I am not completely finish with it, I've put it on hold as alot of work will need to be done and I will come to that later.

The reason why I have brough this up again is because there is something else that I am needing some asistance on or that I dont fully understand either, this time on a commercial DVD (yes I do own it) This would be the French Studio Canal DVD of Evil Dead II (seen it anyone?), here is a sample of what I think shows all the visible artifacts as possible:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IVLR5Q5S

We can clearly see that there is a bunch of grain, but I assume I can clear this off nicely with TemporalDegrain, unless someone else can recommended something else?

Also, to my suprise from a commercial DVD is the amount of blocking that's viewable and some other sort of compression artifacts, now I have done cpu=4 to enable full deblocking (if thats correct) however this results to having patches of noise or other compression artifacts. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it either but the deblocking filtering to my assumption might make the other filtering processes difficult.

I wont say much for now, but I also would like to point out is the Haloing thats present in the top and bottom black borders, may I ask, does that represent the amount of haloing in the entire frame of the video?

Again I would appreciate it if anyone can help me on this, I hope the sample gives a good idea. Look forward hearing ack from you guys! :)

[Nightshiver]

Evil Dead II is a cult classic and I like the film. I honestly don't see what is you are seeing, but this is a rather clean source. I see no halo's or blocking, and that grain is actually good grain for keeping detail, but there are people out there who like to remove grain anyway. Some simple cropping, Mvdegrainmulti, and a sharpen later, it looks fine.


MPEG2Source("D:\test.d2v", cpu=0)
source = last
vectors = source.MVAnalyseMulti(refframes=3, pel=2, overlap=4, sharp=1, idx=1)
source.MVDegrainMulti(vectors,thSAD=500,idx=1)
LimitedSharpenFaster(ss_x=1.8, ss_y=1.8, smode=3, strength=185, overshoot=1, undershoot=1)
crop( 2, 14, -48, -8)
Spline36Resize(720,400)

There is a small hint of haloing IF you oversharpen, but otherwise, it's fine.

[Mug Funky]

horror movies need grain like they need fake blood. no need to sanitize this film.

blocking could be less aggressively handled with a script like deblock_qed - you might want to try that if you're re-encoding, otherwise just let it be i think.

[Undead Sega]

You are right, Evil Dead II is a cult classic, it is such an excellent film but the problem with films like these is that they are hardly ever given proper treatment, including the Blu Ray release which is an abomination, precisely why I got the French Studio Canal DVD, I couldnt care anymore for special features of these films. Apprantly, this is probably one of the better print versions of the film on DVD, it was quite fortunate of me that it was also available on Region 2 :D However its still not great, here i provide another sample, which should be more evident, you can see on the shot (of her outside with the smoke pulling him in and out of the bolted window) is traces of grain scattered around and blocking artifacts (please look carefully, frame by frame is recommended :D).

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HTKFRH1Q

You dont see Haloing? I take it i am wrong about that, so does that mean the haloing on the top and bottom black borders is seperate for the overall frame?

horror movies need grain like they need fake blood. no need to sanitize this film.

blocking could be less aggressively handled with a script like deblock_qed - you might want to try that if you're re-encoding, otherwise just let it be i think.

All film in a way need grain, but to an acceptable level, and I think with this print or with the way it was handled the grain structure just makes it unpleasurable to view combined with the compression artifacts that I am trying to define on the dvd. But may i ask, why use Deblock_QED? doesnt the internal Deblocking of MPEG2Source do a more appropiate job?

[poisondeathray]

Regarding the grain - I think it's tricky to deal with because the pattern temporally is uneven. It's splotch and barely any in some frames, but in a few frames it's a lot stronger . So you risk oversmoothing on some frames, but leaving grain on others if you use single global
setting for a filter .


(Off topic: does anyone watch Burn Notice? Have you seen how much weight Bruce Campbell has put on since the Evil Dead days LOL)

[Undead Sega]

Regarding the grain - I think it's tricky to deal with because the pattern temporally is uneven. It's splotch and barely any in some frames, but in a few frames it's a lot stronger . So you risk oversmoothing on some frames, but leaving grain on others if you use single global
setting for a filter .

This is exactly what I am talking about, the grain is just in patches everywhere, the compression of the DVD probably resulted in fine detail being lost slightly (hence the grain being the main visible evidence), even when I do the Deblocking filtering, it makes this case worse, this is why I was having difficultly trying to identify it and how to deal with it.

The frames with the grain fully intact is a blessing, but cant the filters do somekind of adaptive filtering to know how to adjust itself for how much to filter in certain frames?

What would be an alternative if one was using this 'single global'? :D

(Off topic: does anyone watch Burn Notice? Have you seen how much weight Bruce Campbell has put on since the Evil Dead days LOL)

I dont watch it, but I have seen a good few episodes that featured Bruce Campbell, he really has let himself go! But I dont think it is too late for him, if he really wants to, he can easily bring himself to the same state as he was in, in Evil Dead II & Army of Darkness. His age isnt a factor either, he can still do an Evil Dead 4 before its too late.

[poisondeathray]

I don't know of how to approach this without filtering in segments and some manual work, and I don't know of any adaptive filter that will work well "automagically" in this case. Not only is the grain amount different, the grain quality is different too - there is more chroma noise in the "heavier grain" frames - so you would have to adjust to target that as well. I guess one approach would be shotgun and just kill everything... but I'd prefer leaving it alone to that

Maybe one of the gurus will pop by and say oh its simple... x, y z filter etc...

[Undead Sega]

This is indeed a strange case, and it seems i was right about that this DVD containing various artifacts, I did always thought that the grain looked abit weird to me cause at somke places it resembles noise, but I didnt want to push this into text straightaway but instead mention the grain structure and the way it was (or has) been handled.

I suppose it would have to go through a few filtering stages, however may i ask, would a filter like TemporalDegrain rid of not only grain but noise as well? Its just, as I mentioned earlier, the deblocking process affects the grain splotches in the frames, Do I go ahead will full deblocking? cause looking at it, it is quite bad, unless I am sacrificing quality with internal deblocking?

Also something like EdgeCleaner might handle some of the compression artifacts on edges, and it having a weak dehaloing function:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1350361#post1350361

[poisondeathray]

This is indeed a strange case, and it seems i was right about that this DVD containing various artifacts, I did always thought that the grain looked abit weird to me cause at somke places it resembles noise, but I didnt want to push this into text straightaway but instead mention the grain structure and the way it was (or has) been handled.

I suppose it would have to go through a few filtering stages, however may i ask, would a filter like TemporalDegrain rid of not only grain but noise as well? Its just, as I mentioned earlier, the deblocking process affects the grain splotches in the frames, Do I go ahead will full deblocking? cause looking at it, it is quite bad, unless I am sacrificing quality with internal deblocking?

Also something like EdgeCleaner might handle some of the compression artifacts on edges, and it having a weak dehaloing function:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1350361#post1350361


You know, you can try these things out yourself :)

In AVSP you can preview with multiple tabs (comparing different versions of scripts)

Only you can decide if the filter is killing too much detail for your tastes. I tried a few things, and it killed too much for my tastes. I would just leave it (again my preferences), because it would take alot of selective filtering to make it look even.

When I had a look at it, it looked too difficult to filter easily and effectively, because of the changing characteristics (still waiting for some guru to say, oh it's easy, just use x,y,z...)

[Mug Funky]

big hint with film grain, especially horror:

because the eye is less sensitive to blue, the yellow layer on the neg sits on top, before the remaining light exposes the other two layers.

this means, to be more transmissive, and bearing in mind we're less sensitive to blue, the yellow layer is very thin and thus grainy to le more light through to the important layers.

horror films are shot at night (or at least, film land night). this means using tungsten balanced film, where the ISO speed of the blue channel is effectively much higher. this means more grain still.

basically the major effect of all this is the blue channel is filthy, with big grainy blue fists punching their way into the image, especially in dark scenes.

so filter the blue.

in YUV land, you'll be looking at the V channel as the noisiest.

and you can get away with a lot in blue. the other two channels you don't have to hit as hard.

btw, my copy of evil dead 2 (R4) looks fine to me. grain structure is maintained and it's not too excessive. i'd love to see the blu-ray. i bet it's grainier than a bread factory. bring it on! you should see standard 16mm blown up to HD, especially really old stuff (eastman, or anything that pre-dates the kodak Vision line)

[Undead Sega]

You know, you can try these things out yourself :)

In AVSP you can preview with multiple tabs (comparing different versions of scripts)

Only you can decide if the filter is killing too much detail for your tastes. I tried a few things, and it killed too much for my tastes. I would just leave it (again my preferences), because it would take alot of selective filtering to make it look even.

When I had a look at it, it looked too difficult to filter easily and effectively, because of the changing characteristics (still waiting for some guru to say, oh it's easy, just use x,y,z...)

I'll definately have a go with trying some things, but reason why I'm asking is because I'm not full experienced with poor mastered DVDs like this which surprises me, I can probably pinpoint the problems but with the case of this DVD, I got abit confused. I wanted to improve on this transfer its one of the best (ideally I would want to try out the japanese Laserdisc print, but hey, no laserdisc player :D) Also, while many will argue with this, I want to clean the source, trying to bring out some details that could've been lost from the poor encoding and give it a proper treatment. Because of my recent discovery of Super Slow Sharpen and TemporalDegrain, it opened some ideas of what can potentially be done.

big hint with film grain, especially horror:

because the eye is less sensitive to blue, the yellow layer on the neg sits on top, before the remaining light exposes the other two layers.

this means, to be more transmissive, and bearing in mind we're less sensitive to blue, the yellow layer is very thin and thus grainy to le more light through to the important layers.

horror films are shot at night (or at least, film land night). this means using tungsten balanced film, where the ISO speed of the blue channel is effectively much higher. this means more grain still.

basically the major effect of all this is the blue channel is filthy, with big grainy blue fists punching their way into the image, especially in dark scenes.

so filter the blue.

in YUV land, you'll be looking at the V channel as the noisiest.

and you can get away with a lot in blue. the other two channels you don't have to hit as hard.

btw, my copy of evil dead 2 (R4) looks fine to me. grain structure is maintained and it's not too excessive. i'd love to see the blu-ray. i bet it's grainier than a bread factory. bring it on! you should see standard 16mm blown up to HD, especially really old stuff (eastman, or anything that pre-dates the kodak Vision line)

That's very interesting, of course htey would be filming on a high ISO film stock for low light scenes, thus the image would be grainier (I suppose these days u can get the same ISO stock with virtually no visible grain compared to older film stock of the same ISO). So, I'm guessing you're saying for me to only or mainly filter the Blue channel or something? Therefore It wouldnt touch the other channels which would lead in washing out further fine details? Is this the precise case for this DVD?

Hmmm...which R4 DVD? Australian or Brazilian DVD? Its very hard for me to know which print they are using, can you possible post a screenshot?

And I would love for you to see the Blu-ray of Evil Dead II, its the best thing ever. No, it's not really, it's absolute pile of you know what! It really shocked me, cause it was infact the first time i watch the Evil Dead II (its the same print from one of the more recent DVD release) dumbed down from HD to DVD, and I enjoyed it of course, thought it looked good, clean and even better i thought if watched in HD. But after doing initial research, oh my god how wrong I was. Only pictures can describe this mess and this made me digging for my R2 DVD, I couldnt care anymore for special features, I just now wanted a good quality transfer, and this was the best I got.

Here is one example, not the best but it should give you a good idea, here is the wonder Blu-Ray screencap in glorious 1920x1080:

http://fusedfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/evil_dead_2_24.png

Now the same frame from my DVD but only in 1024x576 :( :

http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/9343/evildeadiir2frame48718.png

I could've done a BlackmanResize (why does it sound so racist? and that I dont want to be) to make the comparision easier, but I thought I would leave it untouch for now :)

EDIT: Screw, I am, here you go:

http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/9540/evildeadiir2frame48718b.png

[Lyris]

Undead Sega, you think that source is grainy?

It looks like it's already been de-grained before encoding, and the poor quality compression (as you point out) has destroyed much of what would have been left of the grain structure.

The best thing to do there would probably be to degrain then RE-grain to fill in the parts corrupted by the poor compression. Film naturally has grain, it's not an artefact unless there was an error during processing.

[zee944]

I've watched the sample. Looks fine, I'd leave it as it is. On the bright sky there's some stronger grain, but even that isn't intrusive.

[Undead Sega]

The film print in this DVD is quite grainy, it's just the samples I provided tends to focus as well on other artifacts, the reason probably why you wouldnt see much grain is because of the bad compression that has been encoded, if you have been reading as well the grain appears in splotches which inherently makes the job slightly difficult.

I would like to reassure people, that even though I am removing the grain present in this DVD, with additional filtering to improve on what we have, I of course intend on putting grain back into the film, but a more appealing grain that's not distracting and for it to just cover some of the residue of the filtering processes and to give some texture back ontop of that.

Look forward hearing back from my previous posters :D By the way, is there a way to see grain or noise in the different colour channels?

[Undead Sega]

bump! :D

anyone at all may i ask from my previous post regarding to see grain or noise in the different colour channels?

To reiterate what my problem is with htis DVD, here is an example frame of what rarely appears on the DVD should be like in terms of the grain or image quality:

http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/3994/evildeadiigrainframe.png (http://img809.imageshack.us/i/evildeadiigrainframe.png/)

And here would be my problem when the grain is disappeared but through patches throughout due to the horrible compression done for the DVD:

http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/8656/evildeadiigrainframecom.png (http://img707.imageshack.us/i/evildeadiigrainframecom.png/)

it might be abit dark to see, if that is still a problem then please dont hesitate to ask and i will try to find a better/brighter frame of the same example.

EDIT: More screenshots but in daytime scenes, the same visible grain/ compression problem:

Frame before:
http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/7729/evildeadiigrainframe2.png (http://img828.imageshack.us/i/evildeadiigrainframe2.png/)

Frame after:
http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/8656/evildeadiigrainframecom.png (http://img801.imageshack.us/i/evildeadiigrainframecom.png/)