Enhancing Final Fantasy Movie Quality

[peridian]

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 (http://forums.ngemu.com/misc-ps2-discussion/86145-ffxii2mov-us-version.html)) 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.

[Dark Shikari]

"EnhanceMovie" is likely just a mediocre SuperResolution program, or worse even just a Sinc, Spline, or Lanczos resizer.

[Stingrey]

It doesn't really make sense to encode the video from a low resolution to a higher one.
There are 2 bether ways:
1. stay on the same res but use some filters to "enhance" the quality, or
2. change the decoder settings, so that the player makes the work whyle decoding the original stuff.

[nekostephan]

You may want to try some effect similar to selective gaussian blur, which blurs preserving edges. But I haven't actually heard about such an utility, probably there is an Avisynth plugin.
And as for larger resolution media players will do that just fine.

But to tell the truth the idea seems quite pointless to me, since it is likely to be a very labour-intensive goal to achieve.

[foxyshadis]

On a good quality DVD, a good place to start is Jeremy's realtime thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=115727). It makes a good introduction if you don't know how things fit together.

If you're looking for extreme quality at any time expense, look up iip in avisynth, possibly combined with a newer denoiser like fft3dfilter or mvdegrain. Forget the commercial stuff.

[Dark Shikari]

If you have a very fast computer and your source isn't HD one could theoretically use MVTools to MVFlowFPS in real time, which would increase motion smoothness a lot.

[peridian]

Thanks for all of this. I've had AviSynth recommended to me from another board as well, but having looked at it I think it's going to require more advanced knowledge than I currently have. I will investigate it and look for some guides too.

My PC is an FX-62, 2GbRAM, GF8800GTX with 1TB HDD in a RAID 0, so I'm hoping my performance should be good enough to use high quality settings and not take forever to do.

Thanks again.

Regards,
Rob.

[peridian]

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:

http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/NoEffects.jpg http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/NoEffects2.jpg

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:

http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/FieldBob.jpg http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/FieldBob2.jpg

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:

http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Smoother.jpg http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Smoother2.jpg

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:

http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Blur.jpg http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Blur2.jpg

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:

http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Sharpen.jpg http://www.peridian.co.uk/Image/External/Sharpen2.jpg

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.

[Wishbringer]

Look around for "remove blend" scripts and/or dlls!

Then there was around the board an article (can't remember where) how to enhance picture quality and upscale...
method like:
some scenes move only, so maybe pictures before or behind actual have some additional infos to put in actual one to get more details

edit:
ha, found the second article about that
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=517100#post517100
edit2:
Did you test Yadif() as interlacer?

[[P]ako]

I have a question, are you playing back the uncompressed avi of the rips?

Now to the issue, why don't you change the resolution of your LCD screen to that of the video?