MSharpen port to VirtualDub

[Guest]

You Dubbers didn't think I'd neglect you, now, did you?

http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/msharpen/msharpen10-vdub.zip

[Teleri]

Heya Neuron, I read through the original MSharpen thread but wanted to know what Strength would work well for most anime's. I noticed that you used Love Hina as an example. Could you give us an idea of how much would be enough to give a very pleasing effect without making the file much less compressable?

The MSharpin plugin is godly, just need to know where to draw the line so that we dont see blocks more than what is necessary.

[Guest]

@Teleri

It's really hard to state hard and fast rules, because not only does anime come in many grades of quality, but people have differing aesthetic tastes in sharpening. So I will only advise you to do some experiments with the specific anime you have in mind and decide for yourself what you think are good settings.

Have I successfully evaded your question? :)

[Teleri]

Hmm, might I ask what you went with concerning Love Hina? Reason being is that I'm working with that one right now.

After MSharpen is applied it's encoding at 2-3 frames per second ( as opposed to 7-9 ) so it takes much more time to play with the settings than it would before. Would you suspect that the defaults may work well for Love Hina?

You do have a point with anime's varying in quality and all of that, this sharpener definitely has a much bigger effect with Love Hina than it does with Ranma... but since this is an anime that you have first hand experience with I'd like to know a *Little* more if that's doable.

If not that's cool. You definitely do everybody here immense favors by creating these filters so that we can have high quality encodes. I cant even begin to imagine how much work it would take to create something like this. My dad was an engineer, but my mind cant create things like that.

Thanks again, even if not much more info can be given. ^_^

Sincerely,
Teleri

[Guest]

@Teleri

As I mentioned in the original post, the Love Hina example was oversharpened intentionally to make the effect obvious. I think this would be good for a real encode:

threshold=15
strength=100

Let me tell you a little about the engineering of such filters. It's all about assembling little pieces of a puzzle. You pick up the pieces over the years and then you have them in your tool kit. Actually assembling them to make MSharpen was pretty straightforward when I realized that a particular arrangement of pieces would be useful. The main challenge was to make the sharpening continuously variable (strength parameter). But I had a little piece called alpha blending in my bag and I realized that by alpha blending a strongly sharpened image with the original you could continuously vary the sharpening effect.

For me the real challenge in engineering is carrying through to the last 5% of debugging and documentation; these are aspects that finally determine the success of the project.

[Popovk]

Hey Neuron, you've done a nice tool, any plan to increase speed, as this baby is monstruously slow.

[Teleri]

He mentioned in another thread that he would look into increasing the speed. Dunno how feasable it is though.

[Guest]

I still need to do the low-level optimization. There is room for speed improvement.

[DRP535]

Can you please implement an option to change the default values for Threshold and Strength? For consistency with the AviSynth version, it's curious to me why the defaults for the VDub version are set at 64 & 24 while those for the AviSynth version are 100 & 10.

FWIW I like to use Strength=80 and Threshold=10.

Thanks