White Magic... "a new hope" for x0project?

I know many of you were deeply interested in the so-called "black magic" process used by Laserman to improve the quality of his laserdisc captures, taken from the Pioneer HLD-X0... but now the project is abandoned.

During the past months I read and re-read many many threads, talking about the x0project and the fact that is a pity nothing is released, apart an image and a short clip.

So I told to myself: "can I make something like that? I mean, capture an old laserdisc and write a magical script that transforms the ugly duck in a beautiful swan? surely NOT, but I want to try anyway!"

As I posted before, I take several Avisynth scripts, tested them, picked some and put them in a single script called "white magic" (an homage to Laserman's "black magic").

The script - for now - reduce the noise, clean the image, adjust a bit of color, upscale the video from the laserdisc widescreen SD to full HD and set the framerate to 23.976 - this is because I wanted an AVCHD to put in my PS3 and BD player.

These days I made many many tests - and I'm far to finish - but the result, also if not comparable to the HD - is quite satisfactory... at least, it is watchable on my 55', on the contrary the GOUT PAL DVD is not so good...

Well, I found the famous x0project screenshot of one of the worst scenes of EP4 and I tried to make something comparable. Take a look at the images:

(the first has its original size, the others are downscaled from HD to match it)

I used the PAL Spanish LD because the colors seems better than the other SW PAL LDs I have, but the raw capture is really ugly... as said before, the PAL masters have less DVNR than the DC, but it's still present - look at the fine details over the blue sky, they are almost disappeared +and consequentially the white magic cancelled them thinking is noise (sic!).

The third picture is a mix of white magic at 70% and another resize&clean script at 30%. To me, this is a good compromise between the overly sharp image of white magic set at 100%, and the bad quality of the raw capture.

Again, I'm completely aware that the white magic is just another avisynth script that is trying to ameliorate the quality of an analog capture and the result IS NOT HD, but you can see the difference between the raw and the processed images, and it's made only with an avisynth script, not a $$$ hardware workstation!

...take also in account that I started to play with avisynth just around ten days go - then, an avisynth master is really needed to fix the script!

Thinking that the capture is taken from a not-so-really-good master and with a good-but-not-the-same-league-of-the-x0 PAL player, there is surely place for more video quality improvement.

If I could find the SWE (Special Widescreen Edition) that seems the best non-DVNR laserdisc around, I'll capture the discs with my Pioneer HLD-X9 - yes, I know it's the second best player in the world after the X0, but it's not so bad! ;-)

If it happens that you have a SWE LD trilogy lying around, let me know!

Then maybe I could merge those captures with my japanese DC and get a DVNR-almost-free version...

What do you think?

I'm surprised nobody commented, I think the bottom one looks FANTASTIC.

The technical stuff is foreign to me, but the results look good.  Of all the technical problems that this community has to deal with, DVNR just might be the worst.  I hope you get the SWE's, and I hope you make this work well.