Video Filtering Opinions

[Neco]

I'm trying to decide how much to filter Gundam Seed.    Its a pretty good source on its own, however it is a tad on the blurred side, once you start sharpening it up a bit, and then go back and look at the original picture.

But still,  its easy to get carried away and lose too much fine detail, especially with lines they didn't do such a good job on.

It's about 17MB,  but its 20 shots,  randomly chosen throughout  Episode 1,  with before / after  shots.   Should be named properly so you can flip between each set easily.   Some shots are hard to tell the difference on, but the details do change.  

http://www.oldskoolgames.com/GundamSeed.rar

Would like to get opinions on how they look to other people..     Also as a general question..  Do you watch your 480p at standard size, or do you blow it up?

I've gotten some great quality and small file sizes out of H.264 tests.  File sizes coming in under 200MB  with both audio tracks in AC3.   Although its not as good if you blow them up  (still watchable though).   Just curious how others view their stuff.   Looks great on my TV though.

[namaiki]

Also as a general question..  Do you watch your 480p at standard size, or do you blow it up?

Blow it up to 1080P using MadVR, so I like as neutral a source as possible. (not too sharp, not too blurry)

[nstgc]

Nothing can fix Gundam SEED. Even if you format the drive and write random 1s and 0s several times, traces will still remain.

If you're going to resize (which you probably are doing whether you realize it or not) use Lancoz with at least 5 taps. Unless the original source is blurry, that should preserve sharpness pretty well. Certainly better than the default bilinear that most programs use. If the source is blurry I would suggest using the adaptive sharpening filter in FFDShow or smartblur combined with unsharp in Mplayer.

[Neco]

I'm not really trying to "fix" anything.   Granted the DVD's are a little on the blurred side as it is,  but  I think overall it was a fair job.  

I generally resize with Spline64,  which seems neutral enough although it tends to be on the sharp side I've been told..  in any case, the particular filter on this was  SharpAAMCmod,  which is an anti-aliasing function from AnimeIVTC,  using warpsharp and I think some other stuff too.   It really does a fair job of smoothing out jaggies, and sharpening up things.   It has tweakable parameters too  so you can get really sharp ugly looking crap or really blurry ugly looking crap,  like with most things.     It's a damn CPU hog though 

I've had a long standing goal of trying to get a better looking dual audio set to replace the aging Xvid ones,  which aren't without IQ flaws as it is, and hopefully they will be more hardware compatible for those of us who like that too.  I know in my case I can't play AHQ's  files without random stutter and sync loss except on my PC..  So I've been working on Netflixing the DVD's.    Apparently someone else has all their copies out or something cause I've only gotten 1, 3, & 4..  the others mysteriously went  "unknown/unavailable"  

Anyway.  It just bugs me that KAA's is the only high quality version... despite the fact it looks nice, I think it uses more bitrate than called for (or at least poorly optimized) and the subs are horrible.   Accurate probably,  but poorly proof-read for  a proper english reading audience.   Dub watchers deserve good IQ too :p    Not that I'm slamming AHQ,  its just an old set and has some visible bugs here and there.

For some reason I'm just obsessed with getting a better version made.   I guess I'm Psycho, stay away or I'll kill you all!  :'(

[namaiki]

I know in my case I can't play AHQ's  files without random stutter and sync loss except on my PC

edit: What's the box that won't play AHQ's files?

[nstgc]

@neco Spline 64? Is that a cubic spline? Where do you see that option?

As for splines, they are very nice. Lancoz, which is what I prefer, can produce noticeable ringing, which doesn't doesn't occur with splines. Kick the number of taps up to 10 (for lancoz) and you will be watching anime through the blood pouring from your eyes (serious ringing). It also uses 1024 coefficients as opposed to the 16 used by bicubic (not cubic spline, I'm not sure how many that uses). If you keep the number of taps to around 5 or 6 the CPU usage isn't too high and the ringing is not noticeable around anything that isn't the credits or hardsubs.

I've never gotten warpsharp to work. How are you suppose to use it? I haven't tried in a while, but I remember that it always made the picture look worse.

[edit] Another thing about lancoz and bicubic spline is that while lancoz seems to preserve details better then the spline, the spine produces nicer looking lines. Lines enlarged by a spline filter are no more blurry then Lancoz, but tend to be smoother.