Removing bad noise without creating a plastic look

[aNToK]

Wish I was just talking about my credit....

Basically, I suppose what I'm looking for is a way to repair the over-smoothing that seems to occur with filtering. The vid I'm playing with has tons of noise, aliasing, and halos (especially dark ones) that are too distracting to ignore.

I've tried dfttest, mvdegrain2 & 3, MC_Spuds, and a few others. Dehalo_Alpha does a good job reducing the halos, but the resulting vid ends up too blurred, and when I try any sharpening whatsoever, the vid's clean but looks more like an anime interpretation of the live action.

I've read a bit about addgrain, would something like that help? This video's driving me nuts!

[Sagekilla]

Post an unprocessed clip of your video; just cut ~15 seconds out and upload it to mediafire.

Very hard to help if we don't know what we're dealing with :)

[aNToK]

I will do so shortly. Thank you!

[aNToK]

OK, here's 2 short clips showing different scenes. I'll post some clips of my latest attempts at cleaning it up shortly.

unprocessed clips: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=80d5d5d1b27350c54012e8015643d9c89af7fb550c6d128b

[Sagekilla]

Maybe it's just me, but both clips look fine to me. I don't really see any noise, or halos in this source.

[aNToK]

Hmm.. They look better on my laptop than my pc.

These are some of the better clips from the vid. Maybe halos isn't the correct term for what I'm looking at.
As far as the noise, the most extreme example can be seen on the girl's arm in clip two as she sits down (around the 18 second mark.

What I was referring to as halos are the dark areas above several of the characters' shoulders in the first clip (especially the old guy in the middle and the girl with the white top a few seconds later in the clip.) Strangely, there's none of it on the shoulders of the lady with the orange shirt in the middle of the clip.

Using Sharpaamcmod seems to do a nice job cleaning up the aliasing on the edges, but the dark areas there still remain.

In the second clip, an example is the black area showing beneath the man's chin starting at the 5 second mark, and an example of the "noise" I was referring to (ringing?) at around the 19 second mark around the man's left arm and the chair arm as he gets up. Also around the right side of his collar and neck at the end of the clip. It appears (at least on my monitors) as light gold or white glittering. I'll post a few stills showing what I'm seeing.

[aNToK]

OK, here's a few stills of what I'm seeing. In the first one, the dark areas above her shoulders are mildly distracting since she covers most of the screen, but it's the same width, etc. when the characters are much farther away from the camera and look like little shadows hanging over them.

The second one shows the noise (ringing, not sure of the proper term. Shows up in various spots all over the video though)

You can see from the pics that this video's not exactly very sharp. Maybe why the dehalo has such a strong effect on how "real-life" it looks? I can't think of a solution.

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i234/locoinsf/sample2.jpg

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i234/locoinsf/sample1.jpg

[LoRd_MuldeR]

The first picture has some aliasing. In the second picture I see some ringing and blocking - these are usual compression artifacts.

I wouldn't call that "noise" and a denoise filter may not be the best method to deal with it.

[Sagekilla]

Yes, aliasing in that is an issue. Not quite "noise" as LoRd_MuldeR pointed out.

Try this:

src = last
src.NNEDI(0,dh=true).TurnLeft().NNEDI(0,dh=true).TurnRight().Spline36Resize(src.width, src.height)

[aNToK]

Hmm... tried nnedi and it reduced the aliasing some. Sharpaamcmod seems to clean them up more thoroughly though. I thought nnedi was only for interlaced? Still much for me to learn. I played with the deblocking as LoRd_MuldeR suggested as well, and it did seem to reduce a bit of the "noise" I mentioned. Using the "very low" presets on mctemporaldenoise with a few tweaks seems to be getting me closer, though I guess I may just have to live with the dark halos, artifacts, whichever the correct term is that appear over the characters' shoulders. The only thing that seems to dent them is dehalo_alpha with the darkstrength cranked up to 1.6 or so, but the plastic (cartoon?) look rears it's head. I'll continue looking into some more things as well.

Thanks Sagekilla and LoRd_MuldeR for your input. I'm definitely closer to where I'd like to be with this.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

I thought nnedi was only for interlaced?

In fact it's a high quality "resize" filter, that doubles the height of the video. This can be used for the interpolation step of deinterlacing, but it is not limited to that purpose.

To double the resolution of a video you can do: NNEDI -> rotate by 90° -> NEEDI -> rotate by -90°