VR.5 - AI Upscaled Edition

I’ve long been frustrated that one of my favorite canceled shows, VR.5, was only ever available on VHS. And not even commercial VHS - fans have had to rely on home recorded copies. The best ones I was able to find online were at 320x240 resolution. After finding some open-source AI upscaling software (Video2x) that’s about as easy to use as Handbrake, I decided to see how much I can clean up the video. The audio sounds pretty good anyway.

This is going to be somewhat slow, but I should have the first episode ready within about a day. My computer is a 12th-generation Core i5 with a GeForce 1660 Super in it, and 32GB of RAM. It can play any game I want, usually at maximum settings for 1080p. And Video2x is using Vulkan for upscaling, which should mean it can use as many of the video card’s cores as it needs. But still, it runs three passes for each file, and each one takes 8 or more hours. Still, after seeing what AI upscaling was able to do with Xena: Warrior Princess and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I am cautiously optimistic that this will be a good deal better.

I’ll post some Dropbox links to screenshots when I have them.

I’m also color-correcting and sharpening the video with VLC. I’m using the copy from the Internet Archive, and some of those episodes have some serious issues with brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation, etc. This is going to be a fairly big project, but I’ll probably learn a lot.

I have the Russian TV rip, which is the version from Internet Archive. The first episode was very yellow and I couldn’t fully fix that with VLC. It also has a lot of VHS artifacts in the VR scenes, especially on the bus. I found that too distracting, so I’ve been working on upscaling a different lower-resolution copy that doesn’t have these issues. It does look like the other Russian episodes don’t need color correction nearly as much.

I did order a VHS tape of this episode recently, but it hasn’t arrived yet. I think some but not all of the episodes were released on VHS, but maybe I’m wrong about that. The big issue is that they are very hard to find now. I was only able to locate 3 episodes available for sale. Planning to pick up the tape with the other two after my next paycheck comes in.

What I would really like to do is get a copy of all the tapes available, make full 480p scans of them, and then upscale those. Maybe someone who has the VHS tapes would be willing to lend me them for this, or make copies and send them. Any chance that somebody would be you?

The first episode is now on its 3rd pass, which is estimated to take 29 hours by itself. It currently says it has a little over 12 hours left. The preview images look very crisp, but they are also small. More information when I have it.

Different restorations for different scenes may be beyond my current abilities. Could you explain a little more about why that would be necessary?

This has been taking a good deal longer than I thought it would, but I’m finally getting really good results. But I have been able to enhance faces, sharpen lines, smooth out curves, and enhance colors. I’m using HitPaw Video Enhancer for face enhancement and Microsoft Clipchamp for color enhancement. HitPaw is very very slow compared with Topaz, even when using GPU instead of CPU… but it makes far fewer mistakes on denoising and faces. However, it hallucinates a lot of detail if you try to upscale low quality video with it. But if you use HitPaw to get your video up to solid medium-quality, Topaz’s “Proteus” AI does a great job with upscaling it from there.

Here is the full set of steps I used on the first episode:

1. Had to add a lossless video codec to Topaz. This is pretty easy to do, since you just have to edit an XML file. I used FFV1, since that’s what the guide I found on Google recommended.
2. Run the video through HitPaw’s Face Quality model at 100 percent scale (no upscaling yet).
3. Run your exported file through a color enhancer. The one that worked best for me on this video was Vaporwave, from Microsoft Clipchamp. Turn the Effect and Grain all the way down on this preset and adjust the intensity slowly, and it’s like the yellow cast is magically removed from the video. Now you can see (for example) how blue Louise Fletcher’s eyes are. I also had to play around a little with the sliders for color temperature, contrast, exposure, and saturation, to get rid of all the yellow tint. I had ClipChamp save the file in 720P resolution, so that HitPaw and Topaz won’t have to do as much guessing.
4. Changing contrast and exposure revealed a moderate amount of new noise in the dark areas of the image, so I waited to de-noise and upscale the whole picture until this stage. The video was already clean enough for Topaz to treat it as medium quality video, so I was able to use Iris with Manual settings:
   a. First, crop to remove the black bars on the right and left of the image. (Microsoft ClipChamp had no option for 4:3 video, so I used 16:9.)
   b. Set a custom resolution, with height priority on. Set the height to 1080.
   c. Set Iris’s video quality setting to Medium.
   d. The rest of the Iris settings should vary some from video to video. For this one, they were Fix Compression 28, Improve Detail 75, Sharpen 40, Reduce Noise 1, Dehalo 65, Anti-Alias/Deblur 1, Recover Detail 90. The easiest way to find these settings is to set Iris to Manual and use the Estimate button on several scenes that look very different. I suggest using one bright and one dark indoor scene, one bright and one dark outdoor scene, and one VR scene. Then set each slider to the median of the estimates for those five scenes, and fine-tune using 5 or 10 second previews from there.
   e. Play around with adding a little noise under the Iris settings. This helps remove color banding that makes people look cartoonish. Also try the Grain setting, below that. These two together can help to add shading back to faces that have been over-smoothed by the upscaling process. My settings were Add Noise 4 under Iris, and Amount 3 and Size 5 under Grain.
   f. Export your file using h.264 or h.265.
5. Run the exported file through HitPaw’s “Eliminate Flickering” tool under Repair. This got rid of the lingering VHS artifacts that weren’t removed by noise reduction earlier. Maybe this is the first thing I should have done. Will test it on other episodes and update this post.

Now what I have is a decent approximation of 1080p. Still need to experiment with interpolation to get the framerate up to 60, but it looks really good. PM me if you’d like to see.

A complete copy of the main 13 episodes (not including the movie version of the first two, together) is now on the Internet Archive. If you search for “VR.5 Upscaled”, you’ll find it. I focused on sharpening faces first, then scenery and props.

You may notice that only the first episode has had any color correction applied to it. I’m still tweaking that, and exporting afterwards takes a long time. So the upload date of the rest of the color-corrected episodes is still TBD.

zenarch said:

A complete copy of the main 13 episodes (not including the movie version of the first two, together) is now on the Internet Archive. If you search for “VR.5 Upscaled”, you’ll find it. I focused on sharpening faces first, then scenery and props.

You may notice that only the first episode has had any color correction applied to it. I’m still tweaking that, and exporting afterwards takes a long time. So the upload date of the rest of the color-corrected episodes is still TBD.

I’m looking at this now - most of the audio is still in Russian, how would I go about watching it in english? It seems theres 2 separate sets of files - H.264 IA and MPEG4, which should I download? The MPEG4s are huge in comparison.

photonic said:

zenarch said:

A complete copy of the main 13 episodes (not including the movie version of the first two, together) is now on the Internet Archive. If you search for “VR.5 Upscaled”, you’ll find it. I focused on sharpening faces first, then scenery and props.

You may notice that only the first episode has had any color correction applied to it. I’m still tweaking that, and exporting afterwards takes a long time. So the upload date of the rest of the color-corrected episodes is still TBD.

I’m looking at this now - most of the audio is still in Russian, how would I go about watching it in english? It seems theres 2 separate sets of files - H.264 IA and MPEG4, which should I download? The MPEG4s are huge in comparison.

The non-H.264 files are the ones I made. I didn’t remove the Russian audio tracks, but the English is there also. You’ll need to download them and play them in a player that lets you select your audio stream, like VLC or Plex. The H.264 IA ones were automatically generated by the Internet Archive, and they automatically stripped out all but the first audio track. I saw no way to prevent this.

I’m willing to make H.264 copies of my own and upload them, if you like. just tell me what file size or bitrate you want.

Doctor M said:

VR5 was released commercially on VHS in the U.S… (Although some music was changed to save money.) I have my old VHS tapes from back then…

Do you have RHINO home video VHS release, or you have TV broadcast VHS records (in SP mode) from Sci-Fi channel? It’s worth to made a proper video capture of this with VHS-Decode (Domesday86 Project).

I wonder if someone (from Virtual Storm community) had made SVHS recordings from Sci-Fi channel back in the day (1997 - 1999)? It would be pure Gold if the TV signal was clean with no interference.

MADDRAGON said:

I’m wondering who owns the copyright at this point.

Copyrights is somewhere between CBS and Vine Alternative Investments.

Doctor M said:

I recorded it from my cable provdier when it originally aired on Fox. They are SP.

These recordings from FOX channel has closed-captioned in it. There is english subtitles only for first 6 or 7 episodes can be found online.

Doctor M said:

Are you requesting the captions? I can probably easily rip them, but not the episodes in good quality and I don’t have time to sync and delete any subtitles from the commercials.

Well, if you can rip captions - that would be great, even with commercials.

All of them. It’s interesting to compare with existing subtitles.

Even for closed captions alone the higher quality is better.

Doctor M said:

I’ll see what I can do.

Any luck with VHS-ripping?

Hey so i know I’m new to the conversation but. Seeing as this is one of my favorite childhood shows and professionally I was a compositor for years in the film and tv industry thought I’d offer some assistance w this process. I want a high quality copy to watch also 😃 anycase how can I help things like noise color correcting etc etc etc. . That’s all what I’d deal w daily… so how cab i help whats the best version were currently working with?