Doctor M

FUNKY! :O

I have NO idea what that is.

Is this what you're talking about?

If so it's called mosquito noise and it's a compression artifact. You can filter all you want, but it's coming from your encoder not your source.

Try lowering your quantizer characteristic (or your encoder's equivalent).

Mosquito noise, a.k.a. Gibbs effect
Mosquito noise is most apparent around artificial or CG (Computer Generated) objects or scrolling credits (lettering) on a plain coloured background. It appears as some haziness and/or shimmering around high-frequency content (sharp transitions between foreground entities and the background or hard edges) and can sometimes be mistaken for ringing Unfortunately, this peppered effect is also visible around more natural shapes like a human body. The VIRIS project (a Video Reference Impairment System) defines mosquito noise as follows: "Form of edge busyness distortion sometimes associated with movement, characterized by moving artifacts and/or blotchy noise patterns superimposed over the objects (resembling mosquito flying around a person's head and shoulders)."

 

 

View full size
Mosquito noise

 

It occurs when reconstructing the image and approximating discarded data by inversing the transform model (iDCT).

"Mosquitoes" can also be found in other areas of an image. For instance, the presence of a very distinct texture or film grain at compression will also introduce mosquito noise. The result will be somewhat similar to random noise; the mosquitoes will seem to blend with the texture or the film grain and can look like original features of the picture.

(From http://www.videsignline.com/howto/180207350)

This is not an actual edit in the works, that's why I'm posting in the technical section.  This has been fun to toy with though.

To be completely honest, I have not yet been able to completely watch Beowulf because the characters give me the creeps.

The reason for this is because the CG work falls into the Uncanny Valley.  (If you don't know what that is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)  The simple explaination is that as something synthetic becomes closer to looking human there is a point that we find it revolting and unnatural.

Well since we can't make it look MORE realistic, we can make it look LESS realistic.  My first idea was to go fully animated looking, but even the best version of that failed to make the mask-like rigor on people's faces tolerable:

The next tests involved going more paint brush/impressionistic and I was actually surprised by how much better it looked:

Here's a clip:

http://www.mediafire.com/?jmwyz3mdc13 (8mb)

Would I go on to make a full movie version of this?  Doubtful.  It's painfully slow to encode, I'm betting each scene would need separate settings for best appearance... and I don't know if the movie is even worth my time.

For those intersted in playing around, I used a VirtualDub filter called MSU Cartoonizer for all the work and it can be integrated into avisynth.  (The settings are customized though.)

Since your source is progressive, deinterlacing is a waste of time.  Hmm.  You've got a real headscratcher.

I'd like to see you do a straight downscaling and post a dvd clip so we can see what's going on, rather than you just describing it to us.

I'm sure this has been asked, but is there cover art of Philosopher's Stone?  I still have my disc stuffed into the case with Socerer's Stone.

My first question is what the aspect ratio should be. I'm guessing you are resizing to 720x480 (anamorphic 16x9), but it's a bit hard to tell if that's right from the sample.

The MOST important question is what are you using for your resize filter? If you are using something like bilinear you are getting aliasing artifacts from that (stairstepping along diagonal lines). Try the Lanczos3 resizer (it's the same as avisynth's Lanczos4resize), it produces a much cleaner result.

Finally, what sharpening filter are you using and why? I would never add a sharpen filter to this clip, it is absolutely beautiful. You are downscaling HD, you can't get much more detail into it than that. It will only cause more stairstepping and ringing artifacts.

Really just open it in VDubMod, add a resize filter (Lanczos3), 720x480 and frameserve right to your encoder. Don't do anything else and I think you'll like your results better.