90s Cartoon Noise

[MDLuffy]

Hi everyone, I've got a hold of some early 90s Rugrats shows on DVD. I am taking the time to go through and manually IVTC them because there are a number of ugly places throughout the episodes. Anyways, since I am taking the time to do this, I'd like to make sure I have some really good settings to get rid of the noise/artifacts (while still keeping it decently sharp). I'm not really up to date on the latest and greatest avisynth techniques for this. I have tried a handful of "smoother" filters, but have not been too terribly satisfied with the results; because in order to get rid of most of the noise, it ends up blurring the picture too much (then after applying sharpeners it comes out looking kind of washed out/too filtered). So will ya'll download the 55 MB demuxed sample below and apply your guruness to it (as far as filters to make the image look better) and let me know what comes out best for you? I'd be forever grateful!!!

:thanks:

UNPROCESSED SAMPLE:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ijymmjzm4zm

[shoopdabloop]

have you tried MT("fft3dfilter(sigma=2)",0,overlap=2)? (MT required)

[MDLuffy]

No, I have not tried that one out yet. I'm trying to load it, but nothing is working. It keeps saying that I have the wrong version of avisynth. I've tried all of the versions available of MT, but none are working. I'll keep tinkering with it though and let you know what I think. Thanks for the help!

[shoopdabloop]

Do you have the modified Avisynth 2.5.7 for MT?

[thetoof]

I'd go with the same advice than here:http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=147634

[MDLuffy]

Do you mean the avisynth.dll file that comes with the rar? If so, then yes... I'm not exactly sure what to do with it though (I put it in both my plugins directory and my windows/system32 folder.

EDIT: I finally got it working... I had to stick it inside of the windows/SysWOW64 directory lol. I altered the sigma settings a little bit and it's coming out pretty well from the skimmings I have done. Thanks!

[MDLuffy]

thetoof: I tried your advice from that thread, but it didn't look very good to me. It didn't seem to do much of anything actually?

[lansing]

thetoof: I tried your advice from that thread, but it didn't look very good to me. It didn't seem to do much of anything actually?

lol, that's actually for the flickering and stabilizing problem on anime, which is pretty much not for your source, maybe toof is tired, haha.

For you source, I just throws in things like this:

MPEG2Source("source.d2v", info=3)
ColorMatrix(hints=true) #auto color correction
checkmate() #dot crawl removal, add another one if you still see some more
AnimeIVTC(1,aa=0) #IVTC for hard telecined source; aa=antialiasing, 0=off if you don't need it
fastdegrain() #or temporaldegrain(), but it's much slower
fastlinedarkenmod(thinning=0)
limitedsharpenfaster()

For the AnimeIVTC line, if you already have your preferred filter for IVTC, you can replace it at your will.

you can throw in a fft3dfilter() after fastdegrain() if you still see some noises. My computer hangs on me when I try to do that, so I don't know how it looks like after that.

[thetoof]

Having played with the Rugrats before, I noticed that TD was great for overall noise (if it's too overkill for you, try dfttest(sigma=x, sbsize=5,tbsize=3,smode=0)) and msmooth for edge noise (or even the line stabilizing thingie)

lansing, yes, the thread topic is different, but the method to solve the problem can be similar. Almost everything I said in the other thread, except stab(), can be used to remove noise. The 55mb file was a turn off for me, so I spoke of my experience with old Rugrats episodes.
1 - msmooth can be good at taming ringing, especially with a cartoon with such simple drawings
2 - TD for noise
3 - line flickering and edge noise can both be removed by temporal averaging (mvtools with fft3dgpu prefiltered clip) of those lines

Line enhancement and sharpening can be good... but that's also not about denoising ain't it? ;)

On a side note, fastdegrain is simply mdegrain put in a function and loses all the advantages of the prefiltered clip for motion search... sharpens before instead of doing contra-sharpening... and so forth. In other words:That function is in bad shape, short of saying it were b0rked. If speed is an issue, you could try the prefiltering mentionned in the same post.

Another side sote: I prefer Tcomb for dotcrawl since you can tune it a lot more easily than checkmate