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6th February 2015, 03:44 | #21 | Link | |
Semper Tiro
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It does look promising, and I'm looking forward to seeing results. Unfortunately my first attempts resulted in VirtualDub crashing or running out of memory, but that will be a subject for another thread if I can't solve it. |
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6th February 2015, 10:32 | #22 | Link |
Angel of Night
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One other thing I just thought of -- LCD overdrive naturally tends to sparkle, and if there's a little shimmer in the video, that'll probably lead to a lot of sparkle with overdrive. Most TVs don't give you any way to change overdrive, but a few nice units do. Overdrive basically creates a frame (or two) of ringing when a pixel changes, because the overdrive pushes it beyond where it needs to go to make it change faster.
It's not nearly as much of a problem now that response times are much faster across the board than in the 2000's, but it still crops up as a problem from time to time. That's something you can't do much about. |
7th February 2015, 05:29 | #23 | Link |
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the samples are very noise and I would say the quality is pretty poor. tested on my 3D LUT calibrated TV and that is not sharp or denoise at all.
do you have a lossless sample part? and this has nothing to do with how motion is handled on my TV is is easily visible on a still standing picture. |
7th February 2015, 22:26 | #24 | Link |
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Yeah, huhn is right.
Give us a sample lagarith lossless file to toy with. I watched your "high bitrate" file on two computer monitors and a standard flatscreen tv. It looks like crap even on an old CRT monitor. Noise all over the place. Try more bitrate and/or different x264 settings. Or try Stereodude' suggestion and calm the grain/dirt down before encoding. |
8th February 2015, 04:57 | #25 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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Huhn, Taurus: Thank you very much for testing, it is much appreciated! Interestingly your opinions appear to be somewhat different from that of previous testers, so now the big question is if there's an actual difference or if you are just more critical.
Take a look at the following two screenshots: VLC without sharpening VLC with sharpening This illustrates the difference between what I see on my end and what my friend sees on misc HDTVs. Both images have issues, but the question is: Does the noise you're seeing resemble the non-sharpened screenshot (softer, smoother) or the sharpened one (harsh w. artifacts)? And what make/model are your TVs? Here's the Lagarith lossless AVI, which is the source of the MP4-clips: Lossless AVI file (483MB) Bear in mind that this is before noise reduction - purposely, I'm trying to establish why the noise looks so different depending on playback setup - and that shooting aurora footage is a compromise. Noise and softness simply cannot be avoided if you want fluid footage. Last edited by flyvholm; 8th February 2015 at 06:18. |
8th February 2015, 11:05 | #26 | Link |
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Downloading your clip right now.
Tomorrow I have access to a calibrated 27" monitor. Will report later on. And yes, it looks more like the sharpened image on the TV flatscreen. It's a Phillips 6000 series 32" (I think). Specs unknown. All settings on factory defaults for the test. Way too much oversharpening this way. Without color enhancement/sharpening much better, but still not pro level. Will report on tuesday if you are still interested. |
9th February 2015, 04:26 | #27 | Link | |
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http://stereodude.net/title_x264.zip |
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9th February 2015, 06:19 | #28 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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@Taurus: Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, and I'm quite interested in what else you find. On the other monitors you tried and when disabling color enhancement/sharpening on the TV, do you get an image similar to my screenshot without sharpening? Or is it still looking worse, one way or another?
The source is soft/noisy, but it doesn't actually bother most people as long as the noise looks "natural". However, the sharpened noise is highly disturbing, so all the HDTVs with default, excessive sharpening make a real problem. The noise reduction I've done isn't sufficient to deal with that, so I have a lot of work ahead of me trying to minimize noise while also avoiding too obvious artifacts. @Stereodude: Thanks a lot. You've used higher bitrate, and as should be the case it looks better - when displayed properly. Unfortunately, the much more detailed noise goes all nuts on those TVs with excessive sharpening. My friend suggests that in terms of the noise the poor HDTVs look like VLC w. sharpening cranked up to the second bar. That's just torture, but it's what I'll have to deal with, because it seems like that is what a lot of people are going to see. You'll see that your MTCD-treated version doesn't even cut it. I made a version that seems to have the noise sufficiently controlled via MCTD("high") and high compression on top: Denoised with MCTD (high) I prefer the look of your sensibly denoised/compressed version, but I'm afraid I'll have to go harder with noise suppression. Still experimenting... |
9th February 2015, 14:30 | #29 | Link | |
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I also played all the clips back with the sharpness properly set. When set correctly I liked the title_crf18_nr.mkv the best. The noise is significantly reduced, but not completely wiped. title_crf18_nr.mkv looked acceptable with the sharpness at 50. There are plenty of commercial blu-ray discs with more noise / grain than it that will have similar problems with noise / grain accentuation by the cranked sharpness. Those sorts of people probably just think there's lots of "detail" in their HD. I should probably also mention that I sit closer to my TVs than most people. My head is 8.5' from the 64.5" plasma. |
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10th February 2015, 21:29 | #30 | Link |
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Hi flyvholm,
yesterday evening i had access to a calibrated monitor. The good thing is: Your files look better than expected. Much less visible noise and distortions. The bad thing is: I guess about 90 % of all TV's are misaligned. Same to PC monitors. The only thing you can do is, find your sweetspot between sharpness and blurring. Your material is quite demanding. I have tried some (avisynth) degrainers/denoisers on it. Nothing really impressed me. I saw your post in the avisynth thread about MCTD. I dont think this will do the trick. I'm not so familiar with MCTD. The last time I used it is maybe 4-5 years ago. It needs a high learning curve (Haha, I read about your crashes). One suggestion: Try the neatvideo plugin for virtualdub (payware). Simple to use and in my opinion better than all avisynth plugins that I have tested on your lagarith clip. But maybe some of the avisynth gurus will drop by and give a helping hand. I wish you good luck on your project. If you have further questions: just go on |
11th February 2015, 08:19 | #31 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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@Stereodude: I'm getting the feeling HDTVs are highly variable in this respect. The Sony Bravia I have here is extremely well behaved with the footage looking ok even at max sharpness. I would guess what my friend has been seeing is on the other end of the spectrum, and he hardly cares about what looks best on good displays because all he sees are bad displays. So based on his experience he wants to denoise/compress as hard as needed for the footage to look acceptable on those because he believes that's what most people will see. And maybe he's right. I can offer two versions, of course, but the question is what I should go with as the default choice for John Doe.
@Taurus: Thanks a lot for your feedback, I pretty much agree with everything. Indeed, Neat Video looks like a very good proposition, especially because I can get it as an After Effects plugin so I can easily integrate it with the rest of my post processing - would save me a ton of work. The color space conversions required for the Avisynth filters aren't doing the footage any favors either. Even if Neat Video looks like a winner, I owe the good guys here at Doom 9 to investigate the Avisynth options too, crash as I may. |
11th February 2015, 16:20 | #32 | Link | |
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John Doe has no idea about video compression, artefacts, or others (in fact, some people even once told me that they couldn't see a significant difference between the VHS recording and the BD version of a movie [I don't remember which], though I'd estimate that this was rather an extreme case as well), but you should then clearly make the higher-quality version noticeably available (perhaps with a caveat that it might look worse on badly set-up screens). |
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12th February 2015, 04:01 | #33 | Link | |
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the problem is already in the source. the source is pretty blocky and noise. the blocks are easy to see in the top right just go 1 by 1 frame looks like "noise" blocks.the picture is so noisy it looks like it is dithered to 5-6 bit. I guess this just a limitation of the used camera or even camera in general. the title_crf18.mkv encode from Stereodude looks decent while the title_crf18_nr.mkv looks fake. the uneven noise is kind of weird. not sure about the Title-MCTD-high.mp4 it looks really blocky. I guess I prefer title_crf18.mkv. I wonder this is just a problem in these dark scenes. |
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12th February 2015, 08:57 | #34 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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@DarkSpace: That is likely what I'll end up doing. I'm just hoping that I can do well enough with noise reduction that I don't have to squish the content too much for poor HDTVs.
@huhn: I also prefer natural looking noise over footage that looks processed and artificial. Unfortunately I think a processed version with much lower noise is going to look better to the average user with a poorly calibrated display. The heavy noise is a result of using ISO 3200+ in night scenes (this clip is ISO 8000 IIRC). May not have been clear, but the film is timelapse produced from DSLR still images. Higher ISO -> shorter exposures -> better time resolution in timelapse -> much smoother aurora footage. Daytime footage with low ISO is no problem. |
12th February 2015, 20:02 | #35 | Link | |
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13th February 2015, 01:51 | #37 | Link | |
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You're probably seeing image processing crap turned on in the TV. Is it in the Movie mode? You mentioned Sharpness is off, what about Noise Reduction (I think Samsung calls it Digital Clean View). All the stuff turned off? |
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13th February 2015, 16:02 | #38 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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Problem is, I don't see any noise artifacts on the TV I have available for testing. But by now I think it's clear that the problem is indeed poor internal processing in the TVs. My friend who tested a bunch of TVs couldn't even make the footage display properly if neutralizing all settings. It was a choice between ugly, sharpened noise or an image significantly softer than the source. I'm sure that for some TVs neutralizing settings will work. Regardless, the problem remains. Even if I sell the film with an advisory about TVs, I can't expect the average user to dig into the TV settings. So I must do what I can to make the footage look decent on common, default HDTV setups - bad as they are.
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13th February 2015, 16:53 | #39 | Link |
Semper Tiro
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So I jumped in and bought the Neat Video plugin, which appears to be a good decision. I'm able to get rid of most of the noise and make the remainder static so it is less distracting. The downside with the sample I chose is that it looks completely "dead" now (could have been a still image). Can't have it both ways. Most importantly, I don't see objectionable processing artifacts, but some may disagree. You can see the noise-reduced sample here:
Sample processed with Neat Video |
13th February 2015, 21:37 | #40 | Link | |
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I agree that title_crf18.mkv isn't perfect. It could be better. Some of the noise / artifacts are static and don't change frame to frame so MCTD won't clean that up since that's not the type of noise it works on. However, in general my preference is to remove the fine dancing grain/noise that rides on top of video footage since it doesn't add anything to the content and hinders compressibility. |
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artifacts, hdtv, noise |
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