zee944

Thanks.

I'm still surprised. Maybe it's the price you have to pay for a nice antialiasing (on Team Blu's work).

Maybe it's just because of the frame, or the difference of the frames, but the raw super resolution looks better to me than the current script. No kidding.

I've noticed it's not your full script, but I still expected to see the gains easily. Could you please post a comparison between the raw SR and your final result with the same frame?

Now this is strange.

In the earlier comparisons this Obi-Wan cap looked like a standout moment where there were immediately noticeable gains. Now I can't see much. WTF?

I've got the screencaps, thanks DrDre.

I received 8 comparisons. No doubt, all of them has extra details compared to the traditional method.

In 5 of them, the gains are tiny. I guess these frames represent the average gains in the whole movie, and sometimes they're more (than tiny), sometimes less.

In one of them (6398), the gains are more than a tiny. But possibly the brighter levels on Team Blu's play a part in the difference.

In the last two (6403 and 6409) the gains are impressive. I assume these are stand out moments. The close-up of Obi-wan was posted in the thread twice already, once zoomed in, and by far looked the most convincing. It still looks good. Man, I wish the whole movie would look like these two caps!

Thanks for letting us see the difference between the two approaches.

@ _,,,^..^,,,_,

I've written many times that SR works to an extent in "daily" use. PanUp works too. My point was that, on a commonplace material like GOUT it has very little edge over a well done denoising and sharpening. And that should be the reference point.

I don't want to repeat everything I've written in my earlier posts, it'd just lengthen the debate more and more. I've addressed everything you said... and actually, I agree with your post.

@ DrDre, 

I'm glad we're starting to more or less agree on something. Great news, can't wait to see the new caps!

@ DrDre,

We could argue over and over what happened, but I want to cut it off finally. There weren't Team Blu comparisons posted nor promised (except for one image), although materials were easily accessible. That was my point.

The openings of the two stormtroopers mask on the right is indeed visible on your work. And they would probably never appear without SR. So you're right about that. The grill opening on left stormtrooper is there on Team Blu's too, only it's not as sharp. Your result is sharper overall, and if Team Blu would sharpen more his result, it'd come very close in details. There are tiny extra details on your work, but it's quite close anyway.

I even think that on certain other caps there could be more evidence of SR working.

I've just stated what happened so far. There's nothing agressive about it. You could have immediately made me silent with a fair comparsion or at least a promise of it.

On the single screencap you've posted the results were quite close to each other.

@ DrDre,

It's carefully chosen sample material to sell supersampling. You do everything in the book to avoid the comparsion with Team Blu's GOUT.

@ _,,,^..^,,,_,

Infognition site, well, that's old, of course... what's about the PaNup technique? Spend two minutes to register, and five to read it, and let me know what do you think.

I've checked it. It is image registration and merging. What do you want to hear? It's a decent idea but reminds me of SuperResolution. The theory is much more exciting than the reality. But to be honest, I've never tried this one - if you achieve something wonderful with it, please post a comparsion. After all, if you find two *really* different copies, it should work.

About SuperResolution: [...]

Show me it on the GOUT in comparsion with the traditional methods... it's all I ever wanted.

@ DrDre,

The reason I was defensive is, because you claimed you could achieve the same result with sharpening and denoising, without anything to subtantiate that claim.

Are we back on square one?

I've said *most* of it could be achieved; and there was something to substantiate my claim: Team Blu's project that was already present for a comparsion (but any thought out projects with the same goal would do too). It's all there in my very first post.

As for the caps, I quote myself again: "I've only posted a few caps to show that the [illusion of] resolution improvement can be easily there without SR. Once it is accepted, how can you tell where the sharpening/denoising ends, and where the superresolution begins?"

@ DrDre

There's no evidence without fair comparsions with some refined, but traditional methods. That's what I suggested in my first post: to compare your work to appropriate projects, and not only to a simple resize. I'm not the only who requested it. I, personally, would be curious to see what extra details you achieved via SR! If it's a lot, I will be excited. If it's just a little bit, well... that's what I expect. And I never said it would be your fault. It would be the fault of the accessible SR methods.

I was never talking about myself or my "method". I've only posted a few caps to show that the [illusion of] resolution improvement can be easily there without SR. Once it is accepted, how can you tell where the sharpening/denoising ends, and where the superresolution begins? You're experimenting SR because you think it can churn out more from the GOUT than the usual methods, right? Then wouldn't it be important for you to find out how much the "more" is?

I've tried the summarize what I requested from the very beginning as politely as I can. I hope it's not misunderstood in any way.

PS: I wasn't asking the difference there... I was trying to point out (sarcasictally) that deblurring makes the image sharper.

@ DrDre,

I fearfully ask, doesn't deblurring make the image sharper?

I never intended to mispresent anything you've stated. But you do it all the time, and talk about things that are either evident or irrelevant.

I didn't dismiss the scientific literature. I even said SR works to a (small) extent. What you fail to understand that it doesn't matter what is possible theoretically or with inaccessible devices. You can only work with what is available, and you can't gain much with that.

Another thing you don't want to understand, that, say, 80% of your gains can be duplicated with denoising and sharpening. You don't want to hear about that. You act like every "new" detail is because of the substantial part of SuperResolution. That's wrong and harmful too.

And the third thing you don't understand that it is not personal and I have no conflicting interest with SuperResolution. I have plenty of footage I would love to improve with a well working method. But crediting SuperResolution for getting details you can also get with denoising and sharpening... that's not about finding out what your SuperResolution technique is capable of. That's something else.

I've seen the site Laserdisc Master posted. It's old stuff.

Comparing apples and oranges? Remember your words when you're comparing a simple resize to SuperResolution...

@ _,,,^..^,,,_,

Can you tell me what should I see? On the forum link, I can't find description about your method, nor the screencaps of The Abyss, The Thing etc. the posters talk about. Is it about image registration and merging?

I've taken a look at the SW comparsion. Do you say it's as big improvement as I achieved on the Twin Dragons caps, or better/worse?

@ DrDre,

The problem is that for this methodology no sharpening has been applied.

Maybe it wasn't called "sharpening", but it has been sharpened. If it's not sharpened, sharpen it. It will look oversharpened. Why? Beause it's already sharpened.

The fact that another method may be able to also retrieve these details doesn't take away from this fact.

Does that mean you acknowledge that a traditional denoising and sharpening can achieve (virtually) the same improvement? If it does, there's no point arguing any more, since that's what I was saying from the very beginning.

My problem was that you're happy to compare the results to a simple upscale, but struggle to compare it to more refined methods. If you're so sure of the superiority of superresolution, why's that? But if you're not, it's fine.

Now if you want to argue that super resolution has very little to offer, and that it is mostly due to sharpening and denoising

That was practically my first sentence in this thread...

It's been scientifically proven time and time again that super resolution can retrieve details better than most other methods.

Yeah, on very specific materials. Or maybe NASA does have something that works fine. For us, average humans, it's proven when you can get the thing yourself (the device or the software), take a perfectly average material, run it through, and end up with a result that is impossible to achieve with traditional methods. I've yet to see that happen. At least once... all I and everyone on the video processing forums have seen so far is just papers, theories, and magical results with specific materials noone could duplicate on other sources.

With that being said, there can be gains from superresolution here and there, but very little overall. I really wish it would improve videos significantly, I really wish... I have plenty of materials I could use it on. If only I would be proven wrong!...

You argue my comparison in my last post to the Avisynth Spline64Resize is unfair, but you forgot to mention that I also compared it to the true HD frame. This to me seems like the fairest comparison of all.

I didn't forgot, I was focusing on the unfair comparsion only. The other is fair in its method, but doesn't prove anything. The SW Blu-rays aren't very detailed unfortunately, and your processed frame is oversharpened, so you can't really compare them.

@ DrDre,

You were careful enough not to acknowledge anything specific. :) I've posted those Twin Dragons screencaps to prove my point. The improvement on them is very impressive, as you stated too. If I'd have started a thread here similar to yours about superresolution with those caps, no doubt I'd have got reactions like "whoa, superresolution is at work, awesome". Especially if I would've done the same thing to GOUT.

And I couldn't even blame those posters. It indeed looks like resolution has improved and tiny new details appeared that weren't there before. And yet no superresolution was used. It's just denoising and sharpening. Of course, it needed lots of tweaking and experimenting. My point is, that it's nearly impossible to draw the line where denoising and sharpening ends and where superresolution begins. That's why fair comparsions are important.

I can't try out my "method", these are old caps. That's why I suggested Team Blu's project, they have done similar things, already put a lot of effort into it and they've done all of it on the GOUT. They have everything at hand for a fair comparsion.

It doesn't matter they've altered the colours or the contrast; the detail enhancement would be still comparable.

In your last post, you once again compare with your results with a very simple AviSynth resizing. This is not fair at all! One line of actual coding versus days of work? That's not a proof of superresolution concept. It's just a proof of more work.

DrDre said:

@ zee944

They look much improved. There seems to have been some deblurring done among other things, but I may be mistaken. Some detail has been lost on the walls, but very impressive nonetheless. Did you develop this methodology yourself?

Some details on the wall appear to be lost, yeah, although it may be mostly noise that looks like texture on still images. But there are new details weren't there on the originals, do we agree?

As for I developed the method... yes and no. I've used functions and plugins written by others.

DrDre said:

Again details are reconstructed in Vader's chest plate that simply are not visible in the GOUT. As a rule of thumb sharpening and denoising can only enhance details that are already visible. Details that are not visible are beyond retrieval with such methods. Super resolution uses information from multiple frames to reconstruct these details, increasing the true resolution of the frame. With sharpening and denoising details may be enhanced, but the resolution stays the same. That's not to say super resolution doesn't have it's drawbacks, but as far as detail reconstruction there is no comparison.

I did not say that super resolution is not working at all.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125491

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/125492

What do you think of these?

The result of your "superresolution" method does look better than the original GOUT, but I'm unsure if it comes from the actual superresolution part.

You guys forget (or avoid, I don't know) one important thing to do: to post comparsions between your, Team Blu's or some other denoising+sharpening method that was done with at least some effort. It's very misleading to post comparsions with a simple AviSynth resizing (one line of actual scripting?); it should be a good resizing *AND* a good sharpening to make it fair.

I'm not saying there's no improvement. There is indeed some. I'm saying there is little to gain from the "superresolution" theory and it's more about temporal denoising and sharpening. It'd be important to see where the gains are coming from, and if those are bigger than in the earlier projects.

ilovewaterslides said:

Yo guys!

Look what I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlPTtdj49Wo

I want a digital copy of that thing!

If anybody here speaks Russian, maybe this dude could cap the movie and share it...

The package itself would be nice to put on the shelf, but why on earth would you want a digital copy of the movie?

"But all are at best only slightly better than DVD. Despite the 1035i resolution MUSE is displayed in, it loses a lot of resolution when horizontal motion is on the screen. During mostly static shots it looks extremely good. But it can't hold a candle to Blu-Ray by any stretch of the imagination."

And I believe we've even seen this master already broadcasted and captured into mkv format...

Where can I see that "flawed Japanese HD broadcast" mentioned in the first post? Or at least full resolution caps from it? In this thread there aren't any, only resized small ones.

I've tried to search for "The Abyss DC_BSHI.mkv", with no useful results. Can anyone help me out?

borisanddoris said:

So I have always felt the DVD's 5.1 track sounded better than the Blu-ray.  I've ripped it but having a hard time syncing the track.  Anyone want to take a crack at it or point me to a simple guide for syncing a DVD AC3 track to Blu-ray.

I'm guessing it may have to do with NTSC nonsense...

You can adjust the delay with delaycut or eac3to. You have to adjust the delay, because the movie starts at a different point than the DVD. And I believe the movie itself is 1 frame shorter or longer than the DVD version, so the AC3 will never be perfectly in sync, only almost.

If the AC3 is from a PAL DVD then there really is a problem. You can't adjust the playback speed without extracting and reencoding the AC3.

But does it worth all the trouble? It seems very unlikely to me that the AC3 would sound better.

Am I right to assume that the best source of the Special Edition is currently the Japanese LD?

If so, will anyone take the Japanese LD and the current Cinemax broadcast and do a mix? Or we are waiting for the Blu-ray release which may not come?

DoomBot said:

Well you can use tsMuxer to add a delay or -

I've demuxed the DTS with gMKVExtractGUI and it said there were no delay added.

DoomBot said:

Yes the DTS was from the blu-ray and it's easy to sync it, not that one needs to if they get this other version.

Well, how can you sync it? I'm worried if the DTS is reencoded.

Anyone knows that the "DCP" version's DTS track is from the Blu-ray? I'm asking it because in the DCP version the movie itself starts at a different point than the Blu-ray, so the DTS track had to be modified to match...

Jonno said:

zee944 said:

Does it mean it's a genuine remix?

 There's an oxymoron for you.

On genuine I mean it doesn't introduce new sound effects and places the old ones where they should be in the space by looking at the movie. So a good remix which is faithful to the movie's original intenion. But I suppose it's clear how I meant it anyway.