REQ: Guide to Upscaling/Restoring Anime - Video and/or Audio

[ameanberg]

Hey everyone.

As the title suggests, I'm looking for a decent guide to upscaling anime RAWs. Quality is my major issue; time I've got plenty of.

So, if anyone has/can write up a comprehensive guide to upscaling anime I would be grateful.

Incentive? I hope to upscale Trigun (Awesome anime) completely to 720p. Yes I know some might be doubting the possibility of doing so but I've heard of someone who has cleaned up and upscaled Battlestar Galactica in 720p (For those who don't know; that show had ALOT of noise in the source). Yes it's a non-animated show but I think I've stressed the point.

And if anyone has similar guides for audio I would also be grateful.

[Koby]

There really isn't any type of guide for this as with anything the filters you'd need to use and the settings required differ per source. You just have to try out different scripts until you're happy with the result. Some series I've done didn't require anything other than resizing, while others have required several filters. It's never the same settings if you plan to get the best results possible.

[ameanberg]

There really isn't any type of guide for this as with anything the filters you'd need to use and the settings required differ per source. You just have to try out different scripts until you're happy with the result. Some series I've done didn't require anything other than resizing, while others have required several filters. It's never the same settings if you plan to get the best results possible.

Ty, but can you clarify like how you'd go setting up each filter for use with upscaling; the programs required etc. Just a rough guide would suffice I think. Thanks.

But if you could, could you point out like suggestions for what filter to use in what situation (i.e. The anime source is blurry, which filters/combination would you use; resizing methods etc.)

[† L4ugh]

I don't really know of any guides that would cover this, and like Koby said it wouldn't necessarily be as easy as following a guide either. I think the best filter for the resizing would be Lanczos4Resize. I would also recommend trying MCTemporalDenoise, LSFmod, ToonLite, and DeHalo_Alpha. If you are wanting to encode it into Hi10 you will most likely also want the complete Dither package.

Anything encoded with MCTemporalDenoise will be slow but it's a very powerful filter with a lot of parameters you can play with to help remove any unwanted noise. It will also require a bunch of other filters you will need to dl just to get it working properly. It took the better part of a month for me to find them all and figure out how to get it working correctly.

I am assuming you're wanting to use avisynth+x264 for the encoding since you haven't really specified any programs/video format you're wanting to use. If that's the case, I would use AvsPmod for creating the scripts and MeGUI for pretty much everything else. If you want to encode it to Hi10 you'll be better off piping it directly into x264 via avs2yuv using the command line.