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Ok I think a 720p version might be a go. Video2x works without crashing in cpu mode. My windows box has a single non-hyperthreading quad so running 4 threads takes about 12 hours to upscale one minute of video. It did a much better, much sharper job than the avisynth upscale and it looks pretty good with a few caveats. It doesn’t do too well with shadow gradients which shouldn’t be a surprise since the software was primarily designed with 2d animations in mind. It also does a lot of denoising which is the default behavior and there’s no option to change it. I think I found a decent workaround though. I added artificial grain back into the images in film9 at the lowest available setting. The fake grain helps fix the shadowed areas but is a bit much even at the lowest setting because it even makes completely black areas noisy which looks unnatural. After that I ran the clip through handbrake with the nlmeans noise filter set to “ultralight” this tidied up the dark areas without removing all of the artificial grain and the whole clip looks much more natural after that. Also it doesn’t do a fantastic job with light colored eyes (they look a bit soft) but it’s not really that bad, I’m just nitpicking. The scene I upscaled was reasonably well lit so I’m going to run a dark clip through the upscaler tonight to see how that’s going to work out. If it turns out ok I’ll go ahead and commit to a 720p SLV. Wish me luck!
Edit: The dark clip didn’t turn out too bad. So I am definitely going to commit to a 720p and an SD version. I probably have a couple weeks more worth of clip cleaning and upscaling to do and then I can start stitching this thing together.
A few days ago I thought my mac’s gpu was trying to croak but I think it’s actually ok. I think a recent firmware update ruined something. I could play transport stream files in both vlc and quicktime player and then the day after I had a firmware update and later left stuff encoding all night. The next day it wouldn’t play ts video in vlc (blank green screen) and wouldn’t play audio in quicktime when both of them worked fined the day before for both a & v. I was thinking that maybe I had cooked my gpu until I remembered that firmware update. Vlc works if I disable hardware acceleration but a mystery like that drives me crazy because it worked fine the day before. All other types of media files work fine in all players and FCPX still works fine so I don’t know what happened. I’m going to continue as if nothing happened or at least until the thing either dies or it doesn’t.