Shuggy said:

Hey emanswfan, any chance of rendering up a full 4k shot of something with your film grain/grade applied? These upscales look promising but I think many of us would love to see what they look like absent that nasty digital sheen. 😃

For sure, I’ve just wanted to try out upscaling with gigapixel and esrgan which seem to be the best two AI upscalers, although they do bring weird artifacts that non-AI upscalers don’t have. So I’ll still have to figure out the best method which may vary from shot to shot, or a combination of several. Previously, I’ve also used Waifu2xPhoto (AI upscaler), Detail-Preserving Upscale (Adobe, non-AI), and RedGiant Instant 4K (non-AI).

For AOTC, I will now be using Schormann’s HDTV preservation over the Blu-ray It has the theatrical/DVD colors (which saves a hell of a lot of work not having to deal with shitty bluray colors) and once denoised to get rid of compression artifacts, actually carry over more fine detail.

Bluray (original vs upscale/denoised) https://i.lensdump.com/i/WPdnTP.png

HDTV (original vs upscale/denoised) https://i.lensdump.com/i/WPdvOm.png

Of course, there is the strong possibility of a 4K release by Disney premiering this November on Disney+, and later in May 2020 on UHD Bluray. These may look better in detail by them going back to the original files and possibly re-rendering VFX. Hoping though, that AOTC has correct colors, TPM isn’t poorly DNR’d, and that ROTS just stays mostly the same.

Proper filmized screenshots should be coming soon again.

Until I build my new computer next year, I’m pretty much stuck to doing tests and samples on my Macbook Pro, but I can at least save grading work as presets for future work.