Trying to establish a workflow for enhancing 640 x 480 30fps video from a very small sensor digital flip camcorder from the 2000’s. I have been testing the upscaling on Video AI and am very impressed, the issue of course is that the video gains quality but there is not any way to enhance brightness/saturation/contrast in Proteus Fine Tune so of course my end result is a much more detail very dark video ;> I assume the solution is to pre-process the video with an app that will let me adjust those values and then upscale with Video AI. Hoping someone has conquered this particular issue and has a workflow/app recommendation for this issue? Secondly, any solutions for reducing the VERY large file size after a 4K upscale? The file sizes seems out of line for the length of the clips.
I have similar situation. what I found works best for me is, Upscale using x264 180/Mbps
Then compress it to x265 and adjusting colors, etc., using the free Avidemux tool with it’s built-in filters, before you actually press the “execute” button to compress the video.
that particular workflow should answer for both your issues you raised.
(I personally like the MPlayer eq2 filter to adjust brightness, contrast, etc., but you can try all of them, they all have preview, so you can preview live before you actually re-encode your video to x265)
NOTE: In H.264 and H.265, CRF ranges from 0 to 51 (like the QP). 23 is a good default for x264, and 28 is the default for x265. 18 (or 24 for x265) should be visually transparent; anything lower will probably just waste file size. Values of ±6 will result in about half or twice the filesize.
NOTE: Use the Medium Preset, anything slower is becoming already diminishing return.
Going from medium to slow, the time needed increases by about 40%. Going to slower instead would result in about 100% more time needed (i.e. it will take twice as long). Compared to medium, veryslow requires 280% of the original encoding time, with only minimal improvements over slower in terms of quality. Using fast saves about 10% encoding time, faster 25%. ultrafast will save 55% at the expense of much lower quality.
veryslow helps about 3% compared to the slower preset, slower helps about 5% compared to the slow preset, and slow helps about 5-10% compared to the medium preset.
Reference: Encode/H.264 – FFmpeg
Thank you very much for the thorough and detailed reply. I am following your suggestions and will report the results after I do a few test runs. This has saved me sooooo… much trial and error.
