Ok so this little project just keeps snowballing into more and more work as I move along and learn more. I’ve been using video2x to upscale the SLV clips and most of them look pretty good until I ran into some problems. Like I said before video2x doesn’t seem to do well with shadow gradients or persons with light colored eyes but my kludgy workaround seemed to help just fine until I got to title_19 and 20 (a couple of shots with Kirk and McCoy). Both of those shots had multipoint lighting and the focus was a bit soft. So the software is unintentionally ageist and does not preserve wrinkles well at all. They just ended up looking like plastic action figures. So I tried to upscale those two clips again, this time with NNEDI3 in avisynth and the faces looked better but the shots were too blurry overall and not very much sharper than just stretching the image without any upscaling. So I broke down and downloaded the trial versions of g.p. ai and video ai. Video ai failed to install giving me a warning that my system wasn’t fast enough but g.p. ai didn’t complain and installed just fine. The only caveat with this is that I have to use vlc to bust the clips into a png image sequence and move them over from my windows box (that I’ve been using for clip cleaning) over to my mac and load the sequence up into gp. All I can say is HOLY S–T! This software is some kind of voodoo BS. Now the two “problem clips” I was having the most difficulty with look waaaaaaay better than the other clips I was happy with. I mean I thought those other clips upscaled fine and looked pretty good. So now I’m going to start over and run all of the SLV clips through g.p. I’ve got 29 days left with the trial which should be plenty of time to get them all converted. Now the new problem I have is that I’m temped to run a clip through and upscale to 1080 and see how it looks. I’d be a fool to start EVERYTHING all over AGAIN but I may just end up trying to do a 1080 version later in the year. The video version of the software is pretty expensive but the one that just works on single images or image sequences is a hundred bucks which isn’t terrible. If my job turns back to normal and this virus madness calms down I might just buy a copy and then give a 1080 version a try. For now I’m just going to stick with the three projects I’ve got going all at once. I’m working on an SD SLV, a 720p SLV, and I’m also detelecining & cleaning up a 4:3 LD rip of SLV. Wish me luck!
Edit: Ok I’ve now learned that VLC is totally unreliable for converting video to an image sequence. Even with it set to where it’s supposed to dump all of the frames into the folder it still skips some of them and the longer the clip the more it skips. Should have been using virutaldub the whole time, works much better.