Lucky Girl (2001) 480i to 720p upscale

Showoff Spot Video Enhance AI
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Here’s my 480i to 720p upscale of Lucky Girl aka My Daughter’s Secret Life (2001):

The amount of noise on this DVD is high. It took many tries to get a decent looking 720p. Gaia-CG 1.61 got it to 600p. Artemis MQ in 1.2.0 got it to 650p. Artemis MQv9 in 1.8.0 took it to 720p.

My process:
Using VirtualdubMPEG2, I saved it to a Huffyuv avi. I’ve had trouble with Lagarith keeping the interlace for QTGMC to work properly. I probably could have used DGMPGDec but that’s been flaky with some MPEG2 content I have (wrong frame count). The other MPEG2 source filters I’ve tried are not frame accurate (QTGMC will not work with them).

AVISource(“lg480i-29.97-huffy.avi”)
AssumeTFF()
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
TFM()
TDecimate()
QTGMC( Preset=“Slower”, EZKeepGrain=0.01, SourceMatch=3, Lossless=2, Sharpness=1.0, Sbb=0 )
SelectEven()

This is a variation of QTGMC creator -Vit-'s most accurate settings, QTGMC( Preset=“Very Slow”, EZKeepGrain=0.5, SourceMatch=2, Lossless=2, Sharpness=0.1, Sbb=0 ), which does no denoising, only deinterlaces.

I purposely ignored the warning about high sharpness settings in lossless mode, and it worked fine. Why it worked, I don’t know; this was after a month of working on this video, so rules got tossed in favor of crazy experimentation.

I removed the FluxSmoothST(temporal_threshold=7, spatial_threshold=7, luma=true, chroma=true), as that was limiting VEAI’s maximum detail. Artemis-MQv9 handled the high noise levels very well, which was a surprise as 1.2.0 Artemis MQ could not.

Save video using Lagarith compression:
01g-lg480p-23.976-720x480-qtgmc-lag.avi

In VEAI 1.8.0, output a png sequence to folder “rune”:
rune Artemis-LQv9 1440x960 200% cropoff

02g-rune-lg480p-23.976-ArtemisMQv9200-imgsrc-crop-denoise-resize-tweak-sharpen.avs
ImageSource(“u:\w6\rune%06d.png”,fps=23.976,start=000000,end=137008,use_DevIL=true,pixel_type=“RGB24”)
CropVD(20,16,0,4)
ConvertToYV12()
Spline64Resize(1280,720)
#CAS(sharpness=0.15)
vsMSharpen(threshold=6.0, strength=40.0, mask=false, luma=true, chroma=true)
ConvertToRGB(matrix=“Rec709”)

CAS causes an astigmatism effect when used with vsMSharpen in this video. In high def videos, they can work well together (not always though). So I commented it out.

x264 Placebo Film High L4.1 YUV 4:2:0 SAR 1/1 ABR 9742Kbps

Save as:
02g-rune-lg480p-23.976-ArtemisMQv9200-cropVD20,16,0,4-Spl64Res1280x720-vsmsharp6,40-9742.mp4

Two 15 second clips:

password: veai

It would be great if others would post their processes (no matter how good or crazy they may be).

2 Likes
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I edited the original post (this is 01.avs):
AVISource(“lg480i-29.97-huffy.avi”)
AssumeTFF()
ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true)
TFM()
TDecimate()
QTGMC( Preset=“Slower”, EZKeepGrain=0.01, SourceMatch=3, Lossless=2, Sharpness=1.0, Sbb=0 )
SelectEven()

I changed ConvertToYV12() to ConvertToYV12(interlaced=true) per:
https://avisynth.org.ru/docs/english/corefilters/convert.htm
I searched and if you omit interlaced=true it causes “chroma notching artifacts”, whatever that is. I may redo this one just to see if there’s any visible difference.

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I redid Lucky Girl with interlaced=true, and there’s a barely perceptible difference. The one with interlaced=true is ever so slightly more detailed and I had to do several compares to notice. I’m going to compare the same frame with multiple instances of Irfanview since I do have both tests in png format.

I have like 5 1080i to 1080p conversions I did without the setting. In one did I see extremely faint horizontal line artifacts like 4 times in an hour length video and maybe they’re artifacts from not using the setting. That one is in my redo folder for if I found anything that may have caused the issue.

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Can you make a new link? It would be great to see your work.