Massacre Survivor - how it was restored (technical!)

[falkor]

Toby often does video editing and DVD authoring through his experience with running his own DVD labels. I also worked for Toby between 2003-2006 on various Vengeance Video and Rarescope projects (mainly authoring). None of us are experts with video editing, but here's the story of how Massacre Survivor was restored via Toby sending me clips back and forth...

There are approximately 4 types of video:

*Progressive

*Interlaced

*Field-shift/Phase-shifted

*Field-blended

For video to be resized with software video editors, it must be progressive. Converting the first 3 types to progressive is a doddle, but Field-blended is near impossible without a serious trade-off in quality. Most professionals will completely avoid any blended sources:

Restoring the original frames when you have a blended source is very difficult and although attempts have been made to try and correct this kind of source, nobody has yet come up with a completely successful way of doing so.

Source: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/videogetb2a.html

Unfortunately, you guessed it: Massacre Survivor is Field Blended, in fact, one of the worst types of sources ever seen:

Your source is a though one though ... all those artifacts and distortions could easily mislead an automated filter.

In short: because your source is particularly crappy.

It was already said that all that illness in your source can easily mislead an automated blend remover. One major point is that the blended frames are spatially distorted (stretched in vertical direction - seems there was field jump on the original source, and that field jump then got incorporated into the field blending), and the lot of other artifacts won't exactly help on the matter.

From what I've seen, there may be no automated way of deinterlacing helping with this footage.

But manually it is possible. YATTA people have to go though this as well...

My guess: this film has been transferred using a misaligned flying spot scanner.

Point is that your source/s is nothing but one huge catastrophe!

So how do you deal with such a poor source? There is basically 2 methods:

*Restore24 (old)

*Srestore (new)

Restore24 Restore24 is an AviSynth filter that is able to do the nearly impossible: Restore 24fps FILM out of a fieldblended FILM -> Telecine -> NTSC -> Blendconversion -> PAL - Video.

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Srestore

Restore24 works on Massacre Survivor, but only a modified version.

With your source, it's basically the very same. The difference is, your source is so much broken that no deblender can make it *really* smooth playing. Also R24 makes a good amount of mis-guessings, there is quite some blending going on, and the result is smooth enough to be acceptable and watchable, but in no way it is really fluid.

The more modern Srestore works and has been used for the final DVD, but has it's own problems:

*jumpy frames--pretty much constant

*ghosting--pretty much constant as well

Technically related, I see my initial suspect was correct. For whatever reason the blended fields are jumping so funnily, they make the usual blenddetection via lokal temporal comparison quite unreliable. (because many supposed-to-be-stationary pixels in fact are not stationary). Luckily, Restore24 has several blenddetection modes, and the one suggested by Scharfi is the correct one here. It's basically the oldest of the three modes, which does the detection via the global-edge-energy mode. This mode doesn't care much about stationary or not-stationary pixels, hence it is not affected by the jumping fields.

Darn. I really had hoped that Restore24 would R.I.P. Seems there are still cases where it deals good.

though, after having a 2nd look, R24 doesn't catch everything correct, either. It mistakes some blends with good frames, too. ...-But hey, the source is so dirty, I can't even reliably decide with my own eyes which are good frames and which are bad. There's so much broken stuff in there, which could be either this or that. If man's brain has difficulties to decide, then the automated tools will fail more regularly. That's a known.

However, without having to rely on the older Restore24, it was possible to get SRestore to work in the end:

bob(-0.2,0.6).reduceflicker(strength=1)

SRestore()

Yes the bob is necessary. The bob isn't built-in because of the countless number of different available bob-filters that people potentially might want to use. Therefore it's easier to leave the bobbing completely up to the user.

(Also, there are cases of progressive-blended sources where you don't need to bob, but that doesn't apply here.)

Now, ReduceFlicker does even-out most of that field wobble, so Srestore has a more clear input to make decisions on.

"plugin for reducing temporal oscillations from video clips"

http://home.arcor.de/kassandro/ReduceFlicker/ReduceFlicker.htm

So that was the best way of getting Massacre Survivor from Field Blended to Progressive, in order to carry out the resizing and remainder of the processing (see below).

To reveal the subtitles, a script was purchased from http://www.dvd-manufactur.de/

adjustY("spline(Y, 0, 15, 16, 16, 127, 120, 200, 180, 220, 195, 230, 202, 240, 210, 250, 220, 255, 235, true)", false)

I heard it works by treating the 2D picture like a 3D or 4D picture!?

Modify the 200 until you catch only the subs.

Modify the 120 to determine the shade of grey they should appear in.

Of course this will only work if the subs stay the brightest part in the picture.

If sky gets brighter, well, then it would take a mask for the subpic area

and some hope that it won't get brighter there...

Too technical for me.

Colour correction:

ColorYUV2(autogain=true,autowhite=true,cont_u=128,cont_v=0,off_v=0,off_u=0,gamma_u=0,gamma_v=0,levels="PC->TV")

autowhite can be true or false. This setting will use the information from the analyzer, and attempt to center the color offsets. If you have recorded some material, where the colors are shifted toward one color, this filter may help. But be careful - it isn't very intelligent - if your material is a clear blue sky, autowhite will make it completely grey! If you add "off_u" or "off_v" parameters at the same time as autowhite, they will not be used!

autogain can be true or false. This setting will use the information from the analyzer, and attempt to create as good contrast as possible. That means, it will scale up the luma (y) values to match the minimum and maximum values. This will make it act much as an "autogain" setting on cameras, amplifying dark scenes very much, while leaving scenes with good contrast alone. Some places this is also refered to as "autolevels".

# Recovers visibility on "very bad" recordings:

ColorYUV(autogain=true, autowhite=true)

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/ColorYUV

#Adjust contrast slightly

Levels(15, 1, 255,0, 255, coring=false)

Shapens up the picture and darkens the white balance.

#Crop away side borders and junk

crop(60,0,-50,-0)

PAL:

#Resize for 2.40:1 (16:9) PAL

BilinearResize(720,426)

#Add Borders for 2.40:1 (16:9) PAL

addborders(0,75,0,75)

NTSC:

#Resize for 2.40:1 (16:9) NTSC

BilinearResize(720,356)

#Add Borders for 2.40:1 (16:9) NTSC

addborders(0,62,0,62)

Finally, clearing up the picture (done before the resizing).

The following was considered:

TUnSharp(strength=200, type=5, thresholdL=1, thresholdU=25, map=0, radius=1)

DeHalo_alpha()

FixChromaBleeding()

In the end we went with:

#Spatial-Temporal Denoise and Sharpen

PixieDust(5)

MSharpen()

This is it. This is the standard, the spatio-temporal compression monster to which all others were compared for a long time. If you're really desperate to get your AMV packed into the smallest file possible, you should not ignore this filter.

http://www.aquilinestudios.org/avsfilters/spatiotemp.html

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THE END

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[thundered mantis]

I´ve read the post till the point my head began to hurt badly. I did a bit of aficionado video/sound/DVD authoring a couple years ago (DM2, DM, Magnificent Butcher and Warriors Two) and I gave up after those ´cause it was too time consuming and my natural good humour was rapidly going down the toilet, so I know what´s to be doing that job and not being an expert. Avisynth plugins and scripts are the devil!

The result on the caps looks simply terrific! Now, let´s see how it looks rolling!

[falkor]

The result on the caps looks simply terrific! Now, let´s see how it looks rolling!

It's fine, mate! Looks extremely smooth to me... Have only flicked through it because I am busy preparing to send your packages and have to get up for work.

[j0shuakane]

i kinda wanted to see it all red and jumpy

[thundered mantis]

I know exactly what you mean.