personal suggestions for bad anime

[Deptmaster]

Well I'm still farly new to avisynth but I'm getting the hang of it pretty good. And since the only reason i was able to learn anything about it was from reading other posts i figured i should atleast post my recipe for sucess with "Slayers: the motion picture".
Let me start off by saying whoever's job was the dvd video encoding for this anime must be smoking something! Extreme interlasing, video noise & very ugly blocking in alot of frames, distored hue and color balancing, lousy contrast.

Ok, first i created my dvd2avi project file at 29fps (pretty standard)
next my I wrote the avs file that ended up like this.

LoadPlugin("path\decomb.dll")
LoadPlugin("path\tweak.dll")
LoadPlugin("path\MPEG2DEC.dll")
mpeg2source("path\project file.d2v")
Telecide()
FieldDeinterlace(true)
Decimate()
tweak(hue=+3,sat=1.5,bright=0,cont=1.4)

I'm using the default settings for telecide, fieldDeinterlace, and decimate. I experiemented countless times with the different gthresh settings but i couldnt remove all of the interlasing (mouth movement)without using fieldDeinterlacer. Decimates's default is 5, reducing the fps to 23.976.

Tweak was mainly used to up the contrast that was seriously laking and to shift the hue back from the green to a more neutral setting.

I loaded the avs into vdub and proceeded to add more filters.

red/green/blue adjust, moved blue up from 100 to 107
2D cleaner, threshold of 8 and radii or 2x2
Warpsharp, depth of 30
four fill filters, to eliminate the nasty edges on the video.
Smart resize to 640X480
Croped 66px top - 62px bottom - new size of 640X352

This approach is very slow (4-5fps), but that doesnt bother me aslong as it looks good in the end.

[Guest]

FieldDeinterlace(true) is not a good thing to do in that script. Telecide() already does deinterlacing. If it is not catching some interlacing then just reduce "threshold". Also, using FieldDeinterlace() with full=true will unnecessarily degrade good progressive frames.

gthresh is not effective unless mode=1.

Looks like you might be suffering from filteritis. :)

[Deptmaster]

Thanks for the help!
I'm going to make those changes and re-encode it tonight to compare.

[Deptmaster]

Ok, i removed the fieldDeinterlace and moved the threshold down to 8 to get rid of the rest of the interlacing with the mouth movement. I also got rid of tweak when i found out that soly using color balancing can do basically the same things i was using tweak for. Even thought the movie isn't finished I can tell from the virual dub window that the picture is cleaner and interlaced frames are few and far between.

[manono]

Hi Deptmaster-

I hesitate to jump in at this late date, as you're probably finished with it already, and are maybe sick of playing with it, but:

interlaced frames are few and far between

Do you mean actual interlacing, or the blended frames left over from the deinterlacer doing its job? Because, of course, ideally there shouldn't be any interlaced frames leftover at all. If you still have the files on your hard drive, you might try this on some of the problem parts and see if it works any better:

Telecide(Guide=1,Gthresh=50,Chroma=true,Threshold=30)
Decimate(5)

With any luck, the mouths will be taken care of, but if not, then lower the Threshold to either the default or the 8 that worked for you already.

[Deptmaster]

Well i spoke to soon about the interlacing being taken care of by adjusting the threshold down to 8. It cut out alot of it but there are still alot of weird stuff going on with the mouths in some scenes so i tossed it.
I wrote down what seemed to be the worst frames and took the threshold down slowly to see what i could get away with and a threshold of 2 is the highest i can go without geting the weird mouth effects. At that level my previous atempt with 2 deinterlacers acutally produced a cleaner image. I'm going to try your suggestion manono and I'll let you guys know how it goes.

[manono]

Hi-I hope it works for you.

The problem with taking the threshold setting way down, or making the FieldDeinterlace work on all frames is, as neuron2 said, that you will degrade good progressive frames. That is to say, it will in some cases take nice straight lines and make them jaggie. Or it may make the frames sort of start flashing light and dark. So even if those strong settings fix the problem areas, I'd look around if I were you to see what they're doing to the good stuff.

[OUTPinged_]

lol man, if that dvd is a slayers:tmp r1, then i cant get what the problems are you getting with it.

it is ok mastered and no mouth problems were in for me back when i used it with old and boring decomb 1.91 at default thresh.

is the field order right?

(took a cd and scrolled thru it, no interlaced mouths seen.)

[Deptmaster]

doh! swaped the field order in DVD2AVI and 90% of the interlacing vanished. thanks for the help everyone.