anime and smart smoother hiq

[midiguy]

ok, I'll get to the point. I have some VERY EXTREMELY noisy dragonball z DVDs (the worst funimation has procuced) and I need to filter heavily to get rid off the noise. Question now: which mode is better to use in sshiq? "average pixels" or "weighed average"? It reccomends the use of average pixels for animation materials and weighed average for regular materials. this is because average pixels blends uniform colours better while weighed average takes into consideration things like shading and what not. however, I did some tests, and it seems that average pixels mode is way too fast to jump the gun and start blending. It was really messing up some of the backgrounds in the episode, blending them too much. If I lowered the settings (threshhold and weighted with difference) too much then the BGs would be okay but it wouldn't blend enough, and a lot of noise would remain. weighed average mode did not have that problem. it seemed to do a pretty good job, and retained much of the video details (backgrounds especially). the author of this filter recommends average pixels mode for animation. have I come to the right conclusion here or is there something I am doing wrong? thanks. and we need an "Anime Encoding" forum, too many of these threads floating around everywhere.

[manono]

Hi midiguy-

I agree with you completely. I think Sh0dan must have been referring to American style cartoons like the Simpsons with big areas of solid color when he recommended Ave. Pixels for animation. You get the finely detailed backgrounds of anime and Ave. Pixels just kills them. So I also believe thet Wt. Ave. is the one to use for anime (even if it's slower than usual).

[Acaila]

I would suggest to keep the radius quite small (3 or 5) and instead increase the threshold. This will hopefully increase the smoothing without too much blurring.

For anime I would recommend a spatial smoother in combination with a temporal one. Since the change between frames is very small (coz I believe they all come from 12fps originally) it will help clear a bit more noise. TemporalSmoother(1) is definately recommended, maybe even a (2).

[midiguy]

Originally posted by Acaila
I would suggest to keep the radius quite small (3 or 5) and instead increase the threshold. This will hopefully increase the smoothing without too much blurring.

For anime I would recommend a spatial smoother in combination with a temporal one. Since the change between frames is very small (coz I believe they all come from 12fps originally) it will help clear a bit more noise. TemporalSmoother(1) is definately recommended, maybe even a (2).

yup, I do both spatial and temporal smoothing. I use a temporal smoother of 2 (or 3 in some very extreme cases) But for sshiq, I use a diameter of 7 in weighed average mode. it seems to do the best job for me. and you said that putting the diameter lower and increasing the threshold will help prevent bluring? I don't think that is true. I think it is the exact opposite. A diameter of 7 looks at more pixels to make its decision of what to smooth and what not to smooth. it does generally smooth more because it is more precise. by using a higher diameter and a lower threshold, you are smoothing more effectively, and less unwanted blending will occur (unless I am totally wrong?)

[Acaila]

For "weighted average" mode I believe that indeed increasing the radius gives the filter a better ability to determine what should be smoothed and what not. But for "average" mode it judges every pixel equally, so in that case decreasing the radius will stop from blurring more things together.
That's the way I see it anyway.

But since you were using Weighted Average you are correct.

[DJ Bobo]

FUNimation has done excessive edge enhancement for their DBZ DVDs, I saw some french DBZ DVDs and they don't have that noise at all, the original image is indeed quite soft.

So you'll need indeed a very high diameter to get rid of all noise, so 7 is good.
But I think , it's not really necessary, BilinearResize is sufficient. May be you get amused now but after a while you'll get bored, because SmartSmoother is slow like hell.

[midiguy]

Originally posted by DJ Bobo
FUNimation has done excessive edge enhancement for their DBZ DVDs, I saw some french DBZ DVDs and they don't have that noise at all, the original image is indeed quite soft.

So you'll need indeed a very high diameter to get rid of all noise, so 7 is good.
But I think , it's not really necessary, BilinearResize is sufficient. May be you get amused now but after a while you'll get bored, because SmartSmoother is slow like hell.

hey there. bilinear resize doesn't do it for me.. have you seen the DVD that hsa episode 118 (subbed #) on it? those are the noisiest DVDs that I have EVER seen. as for the movies, they are much less noisy. since they were made in Japan as theatrical releases, they must have been done a lot better with quality in mind, and funimation must have a higher quality source for them.. they are significantly better over in terms of video quality over the episodes (especially the trunks saga eps like ep 118 on the DVD)... but even the movies, I like to filter mildly or even a bit more than mild. DBZ can handle it too... as long as you don't get too carried away..

on another note, I like to correct the frames in aviutl (smears, spots, burning at the bottom at scene changes, etc.).. all the dvds up to ep 200 or so (excluding the new cell DVDs coming out) are in great need of correcting flaws in the video... thing is, I want to use IVTC with decomb.. and aviutl won't open my AVS..... any suggestions?? I mean, I guess I could frameserve again with an AVI.. but damn.. then I have to frameserve once AGAIN after aviutl... too much from frameserving.. if anyone has a way around my little problem here, let me know! thanks!

[DJ Bobo]

Well, burning and such stuff isn't annoying for me, I rarely notice it. I don't have time to clean those small fishes anyway.

I ripped that particular #118 episode with BilinearResize & TemporalSmoother(2,1) only and it looks very good:

[midiguy]

that looks pretty good, but there is still a significant amount of noise around edges and what not.. also, if you get some fast motion scenes, the noise levels are very extreme. with dbz particularly, spatial and temporal smoothing is good to do.

[DJ Bobo]

What you're talking about isn't noise anymore, but compression artifacts. For these you'll need SmartSmoother of course.
As said, I don't use it mainly because of lack of time (and other small fishes), SmartSmoother is indeed damn damn slow.

little bit off-topic:
Just wondering about the perfect DBZ DVD:
1) Digitally Remastered
2) FILM encoding instead of 29,97fps interlaced
3) Higher bitrate in the range of 9xxx kbps on double layer DVDs
Man, that would be nice :rolleyes:

[midiguy]

Originally posted by DJ Bobo
What you're talking about isn't noise anymore, but compression artifacts. For these you'll need SmartSmoother of course.
As said, I don't use it mainly because of lack of time (and other small fishes), SmartSmoother is indeed damn damn slow.

little bit off-topic:
Just wondering about the perfect DBZ DVD:
1) Digitally Remastered
2) FILM encoding instead of 29,97fps interlaced
3) Higher bitrate in the range of 9xxx kbps on double layer DVDs
Man, that would be nice :rolleyes:

damn right it would be. funimation blames their incompetence on Toie. They claim that the episodes and movies that toie gave them were in bad condition and have errors. How much of that is true, or if it is true at all, we will never know.... unless someone could steal those masters from funimation....??

[DJ Bobo]

Well, it may be true that the masters aren't thaaat good, but:
1) it's funi that is sharpening the videos => much more noise, much harder to compress videos
At least after sharpening, they could remaster a bit (see movie 1 to 3 done by pioneer, almost perfect image quality)
2) it's funi that is encoding them, not only interlaced but also with a rather low bitrate (not even 5Mbit/s avg) because they are too stingy to use DVD-9 discs. Even the DVD-5 discs they are using now have most of the time over 600MB free space -.-
And the movies DVDs are the last: about 2GB free space left! why? because they're too dumb to encode it CBR at full bitrate -.-
And not only that, they encode the japanese track in 2.0 instead of 1.0 and the last Movie5 DVD, english is encoded 2 times, one time in 2.0 and one time in 5.1, as if the Dolby Digital decoders can't downmix the 5.1 tracks to 2.0... the spanish track was also done in 2.0 instead of 1.0
What a waste of bitrate!

But I should also thank god that they are properly telecining the videos, because if they were like Trigun or Evangelion, I don't know what I would have done!!... and that we could have DBZ on DVD uncut in japanese :D
And... yeah, the subtitles are excellent! especially that they use the whole -sama -san -kun and stuff, really cool from FUNi!

[midiguy]

the subtitles are all that is good on those DVDs.. they charge SO much money for 3 episode DVDs with no extras.. and the DVDs are just soooooo bad. they are really ripping everyone off.. it would be cool if i-channel could do some DVDs or liscense there copy to some other company and have them do PROPER DVDs.. I am dreaming.. i-channel does own a license to DBZ (db? gt?) am I not correct?

[DJ Bobo]

Well, actually, the DVDs are properly done, but too conservative, understand what I mean? DVD-5, interlaced encoding for TV (here again thanks god that it is proper telecining), the minimal possible bitrate so that the episodes fit even if they put tons of their trailers on the DVD, etc
But they are not done the best way possible (except the subtitles, I think, FUNi makes the best english subtitles in the world!), and I don't think any other company will do a significantly better work in the US: till now, I've never seen an anime DVD encoded 100% in progressive mode (I don't understand where their problem is?!), and never seen a US DVD with 4 episodes or less done on a DVD-9, however 3 episodes encoded at full bitrate can already take over 5GB!
Just take a look at the french DBZ DVDs: 6 episodes per disc (DVD-9 of course) & progressive encoding (25fps PAL speed-up). But no japanese track and edited version -.-
See, every version has its weak points... :o

[midiguy]

there are supposedly some very rare official japanese DBZ DVD... I know that some chinese company mastered some DVDs from some crappy laser discs but the video quality is really stinky and the colours are very dull (I got a teeny bit of a VOB of it..)
but, the rumor is, that there are in fact some OFFICIAL japanese DBZ DVD out there, they are just very rare... I wonder if that is true..

[DJ Bobo]

No, there is no official japanese DBZ DVDs.
There is only the DBZ movies & TV specials on VHS and LD, but not on DVD. The Series aren't available in any format.

[midiguy]

Originally posted by DJ Bobo
No, there is no official japanese DBZ DVDs.
There is only the DBZ movies & TV specials on VHS and LD, but not on DVD. The Series aren't available in any format.
awww.......:(