Legacy LD5

In This Topic: Phailing At Photoshop!

Sometimes, YouTube is our only source for classic cartoons with plenty of sprotchy content. I attempted research at how to touch up stills from such cartoons to bring them from TV to DVD-ish quality, preferably with Photoshop.

First I found this, which showed various blending methods on a Transformers cartoon, but the author is not clear on the techniques actually used to clean up the "noise" or even how to apply "Inverse Telecine Correction" with a standard DVD player.
Then I found this, which is a plugin for VirtualDub, a video recording and editing program. It's only as effective as a single Unsharp Mask filter on Photoshop, but presumably it would have an astounding effect on full motion video, while I was testing with a still. You really don't want to hear how hard it was to test the filter on a still frame when the program only loads AVI files.
Finally, I came across the AKVIS Noise Buster. This is available as either a Photoshop plugin or a standalone program, and appears to be much smarter than the standard sharpen/contrast options.
Below is my first test of the Noise Buster. Images are in sequential order.
Upper-Left: The original image, snapped from an episode of "Super Mario Adventures 3: The Series." This was the best-quality video I could find of this episode on YouTube - it wasn't even in English.
Upper-Right: After applying Auto Color. (Auto Levels and Auto Contrast produce similar results)
Lower-Left: After fiddling around with the Noise Buster. It felt much like giving myself an eye exam... the part where the massive binocular mask is covering my face and I'm asked over and over again which of two "sights" is clearer.
Lower-Right: Added another Unsharp Mask for kicks, and higher contrast.

Here's the kicker: the registration fee for the Noise Buster is roughly $45 USD, and I honestly can't decide if it's worth it. Who around here would benefit the most from this and how? I could pick up an older version from Ye Olde Pirate Baye, but I doubt it would be as smart or as strong...

Interesting. It's a fairly impressive process, but like with anything it's really hard to put stuff into the picture that wasn't there to start with.

As for your specific case here, I have the episode on DVD. If that's at all useful, I offer up my services. I also note, if there's anything else, I've made it a life mission to collect the best versions of quite a lot of obscure things. Y'know, in case anyone was looking for something.

I can't help but wonder what the results would have been if you had gotten the original in the best quality possible...e.g. store-bought VHS or DVD of the episode, and then tried the magic.

I've had similar thoughts about such things myself...like what's the best codec for cartoons, but I never really pursued it. Problem with cartoons is that they're really not different from encoding any other TV show. There's really only one important difference -- sometimes, in cartoons, you have vast swaths of the same color, but more often than not, it's the same as Real-Life(tm) video, where you have painted backgrounds or all manner of vidya complexity. I guess make it two differences -- cel drawn animation has a specific frame rate that's lower than a TV show, so there are two things the Perfect(tm) cartoon codec would pick up on...handling the large areas of single color properly without tons of edge jagginess (and keep that info from frame to frame), and to sync in on the true frame rate of the cartoon, saving a ton of data by storing the same exact identical frame a few times in a row instead of catching the slight broadcast differences when the same cel is shown over multiple NTSC frames and bothering to encode that crap. The ideal would be to identify all those similar frames and merge the best of the bits of the broadcast differences to actually enhance it more than it actually is in a single frame. Now that would be genius.

But then I thought...nah, I don't think anyone has tweaked an encoder to handle that right. I realized it's not a matter of codec, really, it's encoder. A good encoder will do the above with ANY codec. Maybe I can make money with a shareware MPEG-4 encoder that's specifically made for animated hand drawn cel shaded cartoons.

The bottom right pic is too much, in my opinion. Stick with bottom left.

*nods* Bottom right looks definitely a bit too much, and already bottom left suffers quite from that blocks-of-color-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-line effect. I'd have to agree that trying to get the very best quality to start with is a good idea. I dont know if the software comapares adjacent frames, but find those also tend to hold lots of information, like in each frame a line often is not nearly right, but when the video runs the averaged-out mix of a few frames looks decent to the eye and gives a very well-defined line.
I find in general stills of recorded videos always look astoundingly worse than the actual playing video.
(at least on my old tape records and many a digitized video file)
But... I just read that Dino said that already.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ABJATHE6

The episode in question. I finally stopped being lazy. That should be a better source than YouTube.

Decent enough, but it doesn't really compare to the older Mario series, especially the Koopzilla episode.

This is a pain I know all too well! I have the same problems with images from my collection. I have tried using Paint Shop Pro to correct the noise, but I hate the result. I also experience the same problems with my vision. It can become difficult to tell the difference after prolonged viewing of the images.

I think the bottom left image is the best.