This project is about the<span style=“line-height: 14.3999996185303px;”> </span>1997 Special Edition of <span style=“line-height: 14.3999996185303px;”>Empire Strikes Back. The goal is a sharp looking 720p upscale.</span>
<span style=“line-height: 14.3999996185303px;”>The German (Gkar) and Scandinavian broadcast have been considered as sources. I compared different scenes and came to the conclusion that the Scandinavian broadcast has a better picture quality. Therefore the source of this project is the Scandinavian broadcast. </span>
There are two main processes involved in this project. Upsacling and Sharpening. Both are done using Avisynth 2.5.8.
I use the BlackmanResize with default values to upscale the picture. I also tried LanczosResize with 4 tabs but this filter is a tiny bit worse than Blackman.
The picture is then cropped to remove the black bars.
After this step the picture is sharpened in order to get the HD look. This is done by using LimetedSharpenFaster in MinMaxSharpen mode with a 5x5 neighborhood. I don’t use super sampeling because it produces a poorer image of my test clips <span style=“color: #800080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 19.0499992370605px;”>
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Some sample clips are encoded in MeGUI using x264 with a crf of 16 and tuned for film. Below are two comparisions. Both are snapshots taken in VLC media player.
Broadcast: http://i2.minus.com/i0KdoUYUwehwa.png
Upscale: http://i3.minus.com/i2ugqyEn7gPk9.png
Sharp: http://i5.minus.com/i7D8tGzgipztf.png
Broadcast: http://i4.minus.com/ibo5TWUwB4nQ9g.png
Upsacale : http://i4.minus.com/ivnvg6WiH38dE.png
Sharp: http://i1.minus.com/ibgaTrrJq0mz4q.png
I also toyed around with noise reduction to see how it will affect the picture. I used QTGMC before Upsacling.
QTGMC: http://i4.minus.com/iJoxh7USELzGQ.png
As you can see, this blurs the image. It will also significantly decrease the encoding speed. I’m not really sure if I should use this filter. What do you guys think?