Anti-Aliasing Filters/Scripts?

[Xcandescent]

So I've been playing around with capturing cartoons using my cheapo Pinnacle PCTV card, and attempting to postprocess the results into something that looks reasonable. My captures look fine, but tend to have hum bar artifacts (which I've read has to do with ground loops; the one thread I saw mentioning that did not have favorable things to say about anything short of installing an additional grounding rod). Convolution3D seems to take care of most of the interference artifacts, so I'm not worrying about that for the time being.

The problem I'm having is that most/all deinterlacers introduce quite a bit of (unavoidable) aliasing, and it's particularly noticable in the cartoon I'm capturing, which uses CG cel-shaded models with strong black outlines. The outlines are rendered completely jaggy (mix of black + surrounding color) by every deinterlacer I've tried (Decomb/FieldDeinterlace, SmoothDeinterlace, TomsMoComp, KernelDeInt). The closest I've gotten to reasonable is using mf's SSTomsMoComp script, or bilu's TMC script (which are more or less interchangable for my material), but they still leave behind quite a bit of aliasing. Adding mfToon v0.52 seems to help with edge darkening and shading, but it's still very aliased (but with no additional artifacts).

Recently, I gave SangNom a try, and was extremely impressed with the results. It fixed most/all of the edge aliasing ... but also introduces quite a few artifacts of its own (as has been noted elsewhere). If it wasn't for the additional artifacts, SangNom would be a perfect solution for me -- but as it is, I find myself having to trade-off between something that looks more like the source (but is heavily aliased), or something that looks much sharper/crisper (but has lots of small black line artifacts from misdetecting non-edges).

Short of hoping that SangNom gets more development (which seems unlikely), I'm wondering if there's any other work being done on cartoon/anime anti-aliasing filters or scripts?

-XCN-

[stickboy]

I think one of the usual methods to anti-alias things is to do the operations at a higher resolution and then to downsample.

So, at a huge speed penalty, you could try scaling the video up, filter, and than scale back down.

[Mug Funky]

could you post a sample pic or maybe a short video of the noise you're talking about?

(i have no idea what "hum bar" artefacts are...)

[rfmmars]

Hum is a result of ground loops. The method I have used is to have all the equipment connected to one A.C. stript. Now all the equipment must have a three pin AC plug, if one doesn't you may try grounding that unit to the metal case of the AC strip.

You could isolate all the units by using a 3 way plug to 2 way adaptor on the end of every AC cord.

Sometimes a wall transformer is the problem. For my 12 volt telecine camera, if I use a regular wall transformer, I always have hum in the capture.

To solve the problem I took a computer power supply and used the 12 v supply that would noemaly be conneted to a hard drive. Since these are switching power supplies at a high frequency, there is no 60 or 120 cycle hum.

richard
photorecall.net

[mf]

What are hum bar ARTIFACTS. Your explanation is just like saying composite crosstalk is interference between chroma and luma signals, but that doesn't help you any further if you want to remove the artifacts. To clarify further: what effects does hum have on the video, how is it visible, what are the characteristics of the artifacts? Is it diagonal patterning? Horizontal decorrelation? Sync-based interference (horizontal stripe sliding down over the image) ?
What does it look like? :)

[zettai]

Originally posted by mf
What are hum bar ARTIFACTS.

bar hum bug?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[Xcandescent]

Originally posted by mf
What are hum bar ARTIFACTS. Your explanation is just like saying composite crosstalk is interference between chroma and luma signals, but that doesn't help you any further if you want to remove the artifacts. To clarify further: what effects does hum have on the video, how is it visible, what are the characteristics of the artifacts? Is it diagonal patterning? Horizontal decorrelation? Sync-based interference (horizontal stripe sliding down over the image) ?
What does it look like? :)
My apologies for not being clearer ... as you can tell, I am a newbie, and unfamiliar with the terminology.

The interference isn't as obvious in stills as it is in a video clip. I could try to post a compressed snippet of something just deinterlaced with SSTomsMoComp and no other filters, but I don't know what codecs to use ... HuffYUV gives huge file sizes even for only a few frames, and Pegasus PicVideo MJPEG is a commercial product. XviD produces a decent file size, but reduces the artifacts.

The type of interference is similar to what's shown on this page (http://www.epanorama.net/documents/groundloop/video_isolation.html), but less severe -- think lots of shimmering horizontal bar-like noise that moves around randomly within a limited vertical space (not scrolling), but without the distortion on the borders of the picture. Dunno if this is an artifact of deinterlacing, or caused by ground loops as that site suggests.

In any case, Convolution3D does a good job at getting rid of most of the noise, so I'm not worried so much about that as I am dealing with the aliasing issue -- which isn't too bad after using SangNom (with low AA) and mfToon, but is still noticeable. Also noticed lots of shimmering edges and dot crawl artifacts ... need to do some more reading on composite video and Y/C crosstalk (capture card is using internal tuner, which I've heard is basically the same as composite input) before I tackle that.

-XCN-