Starlight Mini Post-Enhancement

Starlight mini is certainly fantastic at restoring older SD footage. Personally I’m using it for upscaling DVD’s (Interlaced 480p). I’m assuming that it’s recommended to run the video through deinterlacing BEFORE upscaling it through Starlight mini. In my particular case I use Dione DV. Now my question is really this: Starlight produces a very soft output video. I’ve been going in afterwards and touching it up with some sharpening and detail enhancements with the Proteus model. Any other recommendations on Post-Starlight enhancement techniques or methods? Preferred models?

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You will want to deinterlace the video before loading it into Starlight Mini, at this time it can not handle an interlaced file.

If you are wanting to continue to process it after running Mini, you can definitely do that. For some sharpening and detail work I would recommend Proteus or Artemis as options. The model can be swapped up based on the video content and your desired results.

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Yup. That’s what I figured. Thanks.

Iris MQ, Artemis, Rhea, pending on results but also try just sharpening in third party software, it’s less invasive.

About Deinterlacing, I use urix.lookin QTGMC settings in Hybrid, gives me best deinterlacing by keeping detail levels and grain, do it as in the screenshot Video AI 7.0 - NEW Starlight Mini (Local) AI Model - #604 by Mayday

To sharpen up starlight, do you find better results with Rhea or Rhea xl?

Personally from my experience Rhea takes away from the natural look of faces and skin textures. Gives people this plastic look. I shy away from Rhea altogether actually. For post-starlight sharpening I’ve just been using manual settings in Proteus. It takes some experimenting of course.

Plastic look is also a sign of “you reached the max enhacement”, yes sounds strange but a noisy unsharp image will never become plastic look. Of course the effect is not intentional but a consequence of this is that you have reached enhacement limits and what is missing now is adding grain so that the plastic look disappears.

I don’t give up RheaXL 1x because I like what it can do with Starlight footage for some scenes, the level reconstruction look is unmatched, but yes RheaXL very difficult to use it is always Beta stage model that can destroy your image and often (but not always produces artifacts and familiar alien faces.

I find out now RheaXL has included “Recovery Orig Details = 20” and and this is largely responsible for making it look unnatural and it strongly enhances plastic look and pronounce alien faces.

So what I do often RheaXL without “Revocery (Orig) Details” by using the CLI in TVAI, copy the output code and paste it into cmd, then at the end of the string simply change the value of Recover Details from 20 to 0