BrainFartz
6th January 2025, 15:50
I have been having major troubles degraining old SD anime footage. The footage in question is from the 2003 japanese Dragon Box DVD (Dragon Ball GT). Now, I personally would not care at all about the grain, but I need to do this in order to upscale the footage (using an AI Model which I will train myself). If I don't remove the grain, it is going to lead to major issues, namely flickering, loss of detail and dancing lines. I am pretty new to VapourSynth myself and I was trying for a solid month to get it to work the way I want to. Sadly, I did not have any success, with SMDegrain, KNLMeansCL, BM3D, DFTTest, etc...
All of them lead to major loss of detail (or other significant problems).
I could not even get a detail mask to work precisely, without either missing detail or including grain. Prefiltering before trying to mask is barely possible, it will reduce the noise slightly, but not sufficiently. Or it will destroy detail, defeating the whole purpose.
What makes it even harder, is that the source I am working with has some problems itself. The most troublesome is probably the ghosting.
Here is an example of stars during a panning motion. On the left during movement, on the right without movement:
https://iili.io/2g2N9ql.png
How can you keep what's left of them while degraining? Is that even possible?
There are some big, noisy areas, that will have lot's of grain. It's always rather big, monotone, bright (or let's say "not dark") areas. But, sometimes there is like fine, slightly blurry detail without much contrast hidden underneath it. If you try to degrain, these details will start dancing around. Now, that works better with some filters than with others, but generally they all share that problem in some way. Here is an example using "DFTTest(prefiltered, sbsize=5, smode=0, alpha=2, swin=10, twin=9, ftype=0, f0beta=1.5, tbsize=5, zmean=1, nlocation=nlocationKNL)"
https://i.ibb.co/Gc441Z4/dancing.gif
You'll probably also want to see an example of the unaltered grain:
https://i.ibb.co/R266cv6/Grain.gif
Or, if you want to take a look at the video yourself:
https://easyupload.io/v0dif6
How would you veterans do this?
All of them lead to major loss of detail (or other significant problems).
I could not even get a detail mask to work precisely, without either missing detail or including grain. Prefiltering before trying to mask is barely possible, it will reduce the noise slightly, but not sufficiently. Or it will destroy detail, defeating the whole purpose.
What makes it even harder, is that the source I am working with has some problems itself. The most troublesome is probably the ghosting.
Here is an example of stars during a panning motion. On the left during movement, on the right without movement:
https://iili.io/2g2N9ql.png
How can you keep what's left of them while degraining? Is that even possible?
There are some big, noisy areas, that will have lot's of grain. It's always rather big, monotone, bright (or let's say "not dark") areas. But, sometimes there is like fine, slightly blurry detail without much contrast hidden underneath it. If you try to degrain, these details will start dancing around. Now, that works better with some filters than with others, but generally they all share that problem in some way. Here is an example using "DFTTest(prefiltered, sbsize=5, smode=0, alpha=2, swin=10, twin=9, ftype=0, f0beta=1.5, tbsize=5, zmean=1, nlocation=nlocationKNL)"
https://i.ibb.co/Gc441Z4/dancing.gif
You'll probably also want to see an example of the unaltered grain:
https://i.ibb.co/R266cv6/Grain.gif
Or, if you want to take a look at the video yourself:
https://easyupload.io/v0dif6
How would you veterans do this?