Help with sharpening upscaled animated content

[Rumbah]

Hi,

I'm trying to upscale and sharpen old videogame movies and would be happy to get some input. An example video:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DMY376DQ

I would like to save it at 4 times the resolution at 1280x896.
I did the upscaling the following way:
FFVideoSource("source.mp4")
Assumefps(15)
nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4,cshift="spline36resize",qual=2)
MCTemporalDenoise(settings="very high", edgeclean=true, enhance=true)
I think it looks pretty good for such a crappy source.
I saved that one losslessly:

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

To finish up I tried to sharpen but could not get a satisfying result. A simple sharpen didn't get it any better and a strong warpsharp made it look artificial. I hope you have some ideas.

Thank you,
Rumbah

PS: Be careful as the videos are at full range so you have to convert the levels before viewing.

[Mini-Me]

I'm no expert, but hopefully I can give you an idea to toy with while you're waiting for someone who knows what they're talking about:

When ordinary local sharpening filters don't seem to have an effect, it may be because the picture is too soft for them. If that's the case, you might want to try something like FQFocusDefocus (http://avisynth.org/vcmohan/FQFocusDefocus/FQFocusDefocus.htm). It's basically a blind deconvolution that works by making strong assumptions about the pixel spread function, and as such it can sharpen more strongly than local contrast enhancement.

That said, video game movies and other artificially generated clips are pretty much the worst-suited sources for a filter like that. Unlike film/video content, they won't have any hidden detail spread around and obscured by an unfocused camera, and anything that even seems like hidden detail must instead be noise. Plus, the FFVII source has a lot of compression artifacts to start with (I'm still DL'ing your filtered version, so I'm not sure how well MCTD addressed them), so that further limits the usefulness of FQFocusDefocus.

Nevertheless, it might still be worth playing with as another tool in the toolbox.

[Dogway]

for this content, Id use awarpsharp2 or MCawarpsharp but this last one is very heavy as it already is your script.