Avisynth filters to enhance DVD content...

[Dralt]

Hi,

I have been reading in this forum for about 3 days and I have also parsed the repository at http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/.
Yet, I still can't figure out if what I have in mind is possible or makes sense.

Is there a universal combination of filters that can be used to improve DVD content?
By "universal" I mean a combination of filters that would always improve a little bit and almost never decrease original picture quality.

From what I have read, putting together scripts is a bit like sorcery, people seem to combine different filters in mysterious ways.

Is there some established recipe everybody agrees on?

[Guest]

Is there a universal combination of filters that can be used to improve DVD content? No.

From what I have read, putting together scripts is a bit like sorcery, people seem to combine different filters in mysterious ways. It's not sorcery or mysterious. But esthetic tastes are subjective.

Is there some established recipe everybody agrees on? Of course not.

Filtering should be applied only when the source material has a problem that cries out for correction.

[ilpippo80]

I know that looking at the huge list of filters created may be frightening, anyway every filter has its own purpose and different sources need different ways to be processed, so that's why there's no "perfect script".
there are denoisers, useful if your source has noisy artifacts like dots or scratches or problems like that, sharpeners to enhance the edges in an image, deinterlacers if you have an interlaced source and want to make it progressive, or filters for resizing, adding or removing borders and so on...
You could just try some simple scripts on a source, maybe starting using the avisynth core filters, to see what's their effect. And after you began to understand what is every filter for, you will know for every source you want to process what you want to obtain and which filters could do the job.
I hope that this is enough to give an idea to what's the "sorcery" behind scripting!

[movax]

First, figure out what needs to be done to the source (analysis), then play with the different filters designed to combat that problem, and then tweak the filter parameters to your result. And then of course, you chain them together :)

[Dralt]

OK, let's take a couple of concrete examples...

Alien (1979)
aka "Alien: The Director's Cut" - USA (director's cut)

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
aka "John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13"

Both of these have problems (IMHO), not so much "Alien" than "Assault on Precinct 13". "Assault on Precinct 13" is particularly noisy, for instance, among its many problems.

Which filters or scripts would be useful in "enhancing" these DVDs?

[movax]

Well, you consider them "noisy"...hence, we would need "denoising". Searching the forum would help immensely at this stage, in finding a denoiser, and configuring its parameters properly.