Color Correcting the Dragon Box - 3 Part Spectacular

[Ajay]

Looks very nice. Could you upload a clip? The grain removal actually looks nice which is a damn rarity in fan work. I'm interested to see it in motion.

[Enigmo]

i've moved on from video stuff lol i'm trying to work on audio.

theoretically, if we have the japanese audio track playing and then another track with only the music and sound effects, there should be some way for a program to recognise the exact frequencies where the voices are and extract them for us....lol someone can try this if they're desperate to work on the japanese audio, it's beyond my patience.

tip: you can get voice-less japanese tracks from the orange brick' 5.1 track. don't use the blurays, their 5.1 track isn't as good as the orange bricks'. i tried this, but couldn't get the jap audio and voiceless audio to match because one of them either needs time stretching, or i ripped incorrectly.

[Ajay]

It's been done before - http://www.mediafire.com/download/g1700 ... 006-5B.mkv

It works okay, I guess. It's not mixed very well, though. I believe Kojiro Sasaki did it as an experiment a couple of years back.

[Enigmo]

any links to where he published the test? i wanna see how similar/different it is to what i was thinking

edit: just heard it. tbh, i don't think he did the vocal extraction thing. it's pretty complex and i don't even know if it can be executed. but yeah, he seems to have put the 5.1/stereo music playing over the jap audio, but the voices sound quiet now

[Ajay]

It's here - http://www.kanzenshuu.com/forum/viewtop ... 60#p862005

It's not exactly what you were thinking, I must confess, since he didn't remove the music from the mono audio. He just mixed in the high quality Kikuchi tracks in the background.

My theory is that the mono audio isn't going to be high quality enough to extract the dialogue without compromising the fidelity or leaving a load of horrendous audio artifacting behind.

As for execution, you can do it in Adobe Audition; either through the sound removal tool or the center extraction tool for stereo and mono tracks. I could try it at some point over the next few days and post it up if you want?

I did the same thing with my Kikuchi Super video. As you can hear, the dialogue sounds very thin since the removal tool kills the low-end and it's impossible to throw it back in there without making it sound horrendous.

[yugidmx5]

damn man, nice script

Only the first little bit does the color cast removal. The junk at the end is my own custom function to alter the hues without creating the visual artifacts that are mentioned in the beginning of the guide by pushing the colors too far. You most certainly can adjust the hues as much as you want... but it needs to be handled 'properly' to keep the visual artifacts from appearing. So I made a generic function I could alter slightly from scene to scene if needed... one for the green skys and the other for the red skin tones.

Nice use of filters! Could you give some kind of guide on how to make that custom function for the script if it's not too complicated to explain?

[ect5150]

Looks very nice. Could you upload a clip? The grain removal actually looks nice which is a damn rarity in fan work. I'm interested to see it in motion.

Me? Yeah - those are the eps I have been working on recently (it goes slow for me... for some reason I've been playing a lot of Civ V lately instead). I have those eps on the harddrive, so I'll upload a high quality clip (high bitrate clip) before too long.

On that note... the grain removal certainly isn't mine... someone else on the forums had a script and it was part of their script (they weren't the original author though - I think). But it's not as overpowering as a lot of things out there. Just enough to take the edge off (in my opinion). not like those deen filters... and not like the FUNI blurays.

Although I primarily take the grain off in that fashion for bitrate purposes when I make my own encodes. The grain removal makes the script slow as the devil though. The rest of the script isn't so intense it slows it down too much.

[ect5150]

Okay!

Here is the clip...

The website has a stupid captcha... but what are you gonna do for free space, huh?

[Enigmo]

Love the look of the clip.

and oh wow, yeah I just tried the degraining script you used and it's quite slow indeed.

Here's an example of some grain removal i done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL-LCt7UYSs

It's youtube, so not the best place to observe quality stuff, but watching it in 1080p (and fullscreen) might help. imo it looks okay but you guys tell me if it looks unnatural and whatnot.

[Ajay]

Okay!

Here is the clip...

Very nice!

Definitely going to take some work to encode that thing properly, I imagine.

Here's an example of some grain removal i done:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL-LCt7UYSs

Can't make an accurate judgement due to YouTube abysmal compression. But if it's the same as what you posted here, then it's not great.

I feel like you should just avoid trying to upscale if you're doing serious work, too. It's rare anything good comes of it, and you usually end up with high-res bitrate starved content, or simply bloat. MadVR's upscaling in MPC will do a fine job of upscaling well-encoded SD content.

I'd just steal what ect5150's been using to degrain if you're serious about it. Those results are nice, and chances are, you may be able to scrub harder if your goal is to remove it all. I feel like what you've shown so far always look far too watery.

[Enigmo]

http://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/166577

I'd carry on using what I'm using simply because of its speed

[Ajay]

I wouldn't.

Look at all that horrendous artifacting you've got going on there. It looks awful.

[Enigmo]

That "horrendous artifacting" didn't come from the degraining though

let me show you the other person's degrain script over the original grained version of mine

Original: http://i.imgur.com/DeqZ3NB.jpg
SMDegrain: http://i.imgur.com/BgmRSZb.jpg
The degrain I used: http://i.imgur.com/XL9xFoH.jpg

Now, SMDegrain might not be working properly here since it's being done on a sharpened upscale, but regardless of that, it still slows done the rendering a LOT. So yeah, simply because of speed I'd stuck to mine

[ect5150]

Original: http://i.imgur.com/DeqZ3NB.jpg
SMDegrain: http://i.imgur.com/BgmRSZb.jpg
The degrain I used: http://i.imgur.com/XL9xFoH.jpg

I'm going to fuss here a second. If we are to compare details about grain... then we should not use JPEG. At all! Use PNG since it's lossless. The compression is JPEG can make the details in an image misleading.

Also, yes... I use SMDegrain with these settings for my grain removal:

Code: Select all

SMDegrain(tr=2,thSAD=800,search=5,pel=1,blksize=8,RefineMotion=true)

Here is SMGrain on the level sets (with slightly higher settings since the resolution is higher).

1080P images here:

Spoiler:

Okay... I now need to go cry since everytime I look at the Level Sets it reminds me of what could have been...

[Enigmo]

Oh no, I did do PNG. But this isn't the first time that, for some reaso,n imgur has converted them to JPG. (and screenshotcomparison wouldn't let me upload those images either)

Spoiler:

And as for SMDegrain, yes, I'm sure strengthening it makes it work effectively on 1080p, but that just slows it down all the more, right? It's effective, but like you said it can be slow

[genjosanzo8]

i am surely sick but i love to see grain on dbz like in these screenshots it is not so annoying

Spoiler:

[Ajay]

I'm vehemently against excessive grain removal, so you're not alone. While Kai looked nice, it was too much. The Dragon Boxes were fine, and I really like the filtered Level set shot posted earlier.

[genjosanzo8]

logic he just reduce grain it is not as aggressive as other filter we can seen on internet.
So bad that the better encode like his could not be found for buying or on ddl

[Enigmo]

Damn, just found these on some japanese site. didn't know this level of cc was possible:



It's like she turned it into a snapshot from the movies

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I've decided I'm gonna start my own business where I acquire old film stuff and give them the enigmo-treatment then release them on bluray. once i've got enough capital to take DBZ away from FUNimation, I will give it the enigmo-treatment too. wish me luck. guys.

[Ajay]

Gi colour is close, but she's pulled a Boo Kai and gone way too green. The aura should be yellow.