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Yeah, it's awful how neglectful Universal is towards SLIDERS.

Here are the samples of all nine episodes Season 1. It's all the end-scenes (the conclusions of each episode, right up to the producer credits) except for "Eggheads" where it's Arturo's scene with his wife. See the sliders fleeing the Russian mob in crisp HD 1080p! See Quinn and Arturo engage the FBI in... less crisp, approximated HD.

https://mega.nz/folder/b9x0AabS#fvf1LxhBxNaFWgBdtE7ZMg

All the episodes were detelecined to remove the aliasing. After that, the saturation was increased on each episode from 15 - 30 per cent. The Pilot was upscaled to 1080p via Topaz deblurring. The rest of the episodes were simply deartifacted with Topaz but left at 480p and with film grain texture added. Then they were scaled to 1080p via a bicubic algorithm and the codec 'tuned' to retain film grain.

I actually increased the film grain on "Luck of the Draw" by more than the rest by about 25 per cent more than the other episodes. This was to offset the episode being significantly blurrier than the rest, more than Topaz could sharpen up.

It's imperfect, but it's significantly better than what I had before with previous upscales when Topaz didn't have a deblur option yet.

**

It's interesting what RussianCabbie says about smeared text. This is an anomaly in many upscaled video files done with Topaz 2020. However, I'm running an upscale of Season 2's "Time and Again World." The out of focus text of the Lamplighter bar sign looked really smudged under Topaz 2020's preset for removing compression. However, the 2021 preset for deblurring just leaves it out of focus... but still in HD.

Outside of the Season 1 episodes after the Pilot, upscaling SLIDERS is drag and drop. NBCUniversal could easily do it for most of the episodes and use a slightly more complicated process for the problem episodes of Season 1.

I got a question for you guys.

Is a "remastered and restored" version of SLIDERS the worst pitch for a Netflix?  Or would the public just kinda laugh at that.

Well, hello!
It's been a long time since I've posted here (I did "Think of a Roulette Wheel," lol).
Anyways, it's the Big Anniversary tomorrow, and I wanted to at least mark the occasion with something, anything.
I had been working, sort of, very slowly, working on making Think of a Roulette Wheel into a book, with updated essays and fresh takes on some old faves. I technically am still working on it, but who knows when of if I'll actually finish it. I'm feeling a little exhausted on the topic of our old friend Sliders, a little bit like I've said all I need to.

But! I wanted to at least put up a lil' something for the event, for all y'all keeping the flame ALIVE!

So here's the New & Improved, Revised Season One of Think of a Roulette Wheel, Better, Longer, Stronger—

http://violetmice.com/ThinkofaRouletteWheelS1.pdf

Enjoy! Love on ya! See you in five for the big 3-0!

—Annie

Part of my initial reluctance: it was taking anywhere from 1 - 2 hours to CPU encode the files with increased saturation; the GPU codec kept crashing and the queue would get stuck.

A new GPU update has reduced it to 10 - 15 minutes each and I've just put them all in the queue.

Thanks for the feedback, RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan!

This one was a passion project of sorts. Hopefully it will help get more people inspired to take action on the Bring Back Sliders petition with more of a "proof of concept" of sorts.

This Sliders Intro Sequence fan edit I created provides (somewhat) of an answer...

https://youtu.be/bv-2NaNH5kI

Here's the opening of "Fever." One of the things I have always admired about Jerry O'Connell as an actor: he is very good at fake eating. In both "Prince of Wails" and "Fever," he fake eats very convincingly even though, intellectually, I know he's not eating anything. Check out his fake eating in "Fever" in this upscaled sample here:
https://mega.nz/file/m94kQahB#vvrU5ndfc … PQ9BQGZ2ZE

Okay, Handbrake has a (very slow, CPU-only) process for 'tuning' a video to maintain the grain.

"Prince of Wails." The sliders meet Hurley! Again! This is Turbine, upscaled via Topaz Artemis High Quality (deblur) with film grain added after the upscale.
https://mega.nz/file/L5JigBLI#M6ZAtduC_ … Lp6S0d4CUY

I just reviewed the new "Prince of Wails" 1080p upscale and it looks good -- but still a little 'bare.' I'm running it again now but increasing the grain by another 10 per cent. I would like to show you a sample, except I'm running into that problem I had earlier: when I extract a file via Handbrake, I find that the H.264 codec, even at the highest file size, filters out the Topaz-added grain texture! Even when the full episode is 5.8GB and the extracted five minute sample is 3.6GB, it doesn't look any different from what I posted last night.

I'm always surprised by the sound of Kari's voice when I haven't heard it for awhile. It's higher-pitched than I remember. I don't think poorly of her post-Season 3 acting, but she'll never be a favourite for me. Certainly, she never turned up on camera drunk like, say, Jerry O'Connell.

**

It's strange: for Universal DVDs and the Turbine SD blu-ray release, the video quality across the individual non-Pilot episodes of Season 1 are not consistent.

Universal DVD:
On the DVD (which uses the NTSC masters): some episodes have serious aliasing issues where lines that should be straight and smooth are instead jagged and pixelated, and when the camera moves, those jagged lines become further pixelated (the term is moiré pattern). The episodes that suffer from this: "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw."

"Prince of Wails" is glaring when the sliders encounter the army in Oakland: the humvee and the car suffer severely from jagged lines. "Fever"'s scenes in the drugstore are really pixelated with the racks of herbal medicine. "Last Days"' opening shot of the quiet residential streets are distorted. "Eggheads" looks especially bad with the scene where Arturo meets his wife. "Luck of the Draw"'s fashion display looks hideous.

I'm not sure why these five specific episodes have these aliasing issues more severely than the other three non-pilot episodes on the Universal DVD. It may be a DVD authoring issue where the interlaced format for those four episodes had the incorrect settings for encoding the video with odd and even fields, a mistake that the Turbine release didn't repeat.

Turbine SD blu-ray:
These jagged edges in the NTSC DVDs aren't in the PAL-sourced SD blu-ray from Germany, although these versions of the episodes are blurrier. But "Summer of Love" is strange: it is so much blurrier than the other seven non-pilot episodes and severely desaturated, missing almost half the colour from the NTSC DVD version. This is odd because the other non-pilot Turbine episodes of Season 1 are not as blurry or colour-drained as "Summer of Love."

Episodes 103 - 108 Turbine episodes of Season 1 ("Prince of Wails" to "The King is Back") are suffering only from about a 10 - 15 per cent loss of colour and about a 15 - 20 per cent loss of contrast. "Luck of the Draw" from this set isn't missing any of the colour compared to the Universal DVD, although it has the same lack of contrast as the previous episodes. And 103 - 109 are all, compared to the Universal DVD, missing about 20 - 25 per cent of the Universal DVD's sharpness (which wasn't that sharp to begin with).

I'm guessing that the NTSC analog videotapes were duplicated to PAL and stretched, and analog copying creates a faded second generation copy; "Summer of Love"'s PAL master may have been made from a copy of a copy of the NTSC tape.

I'm now wondering if Turbine's versions of "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" might be a better bet for low-gain upscaling. The AI could try to sharpen the SD files to be closer to the Universal DVD version while still leaving it at 480p to avoid all the AI distortions, and then Avidemux could use bicubic or Lanczos scaling to bring it to 1080p while also moderately increasing the colour and contrast.

Well, they've been upscaled in two different ways and Topaz is a crowdpleaser for a variety of reasons.

Lanczos upscaling operates on a specific mathematical algorithm that I don't actually understand except to say that the extra pixels added to make the image bigger are blended smoothly into the final version. Where bicubic scaling can add pixelated edges to the larger image, Lanczos scaling is softer, more forgiving, and also has the effect of mildly diminishing the noise in a grainy image.

Topaz AI upscaling, however, looks to me like it's composed of multiple algorithms for a wide variety of textures: skin, hair, grass, pavement, metal, sky, clouds, wood, fabric -- with specific models applied to specific portions of each frame. (The ability to recognize the texture and apply the right model is the AI part.) The models are dependent on using film grain as a guide to reconstruct the image at a larger size and to re-render that grain as pixel detail. As a result, Topaz upscaling is sharper than Lanczos because Topaz is actively re-rendering the film grain as a rebuilt pixel-based image. Most grain-reduction methods operate by blurring the image, but Topaz converts that grain to sharpen the picture.

In contrast, Lanczos is simply stretching, but with its single-algorithm serving to make the added pixels (mostly) smooth. It isn't re-rendering film grain, so the grain stays intact, just slightly faded out. It offers a mild level of sharpening with added contrast at the edges, but mostly in a way that offsets any new blurriness from stretching.

Topaz is generally better for closeup and medium shots. However, for wide shots, there's a smudged, painted look because the film grain is only serving to render an undetailed, distant image and the AI tries to sharpen detail that isn't present. The same wide shots in Lanczos, however, maintain the original blurriness and graininess so that it doesn't look like a watercolour mishap. Season 1 episodes stored on low-res analog videotape also do better with Lanczos because there isn't any film grain to use for sharpening.

Because SLIDERS was composed largely of closeups and mediums for television, most people will prefer a Topaz AI upscale for the digital videotape episodes.

I watched them both on my 55 inch HDTV, played on my Android TV box.

The Topaz enhanced version looks okay/good enough in mediums and closeups, but poor/terrible in wide shots. The Lanczos version looks okay in all shots, fuzzier and with a heavy level of what seems like film grain (but is really compression noise). The wide shots are still blurry and undetailed, but the film grain look makes it look consistent with the mediums and wides. It is consistent whereas the Topaz version keeps jumping back and forth between not-bad to terrible. Even if the episode is only looking okay, at least it looks okay from beginning to end. You get used to the visual quality and then you can get into the story.

It doesn't look as good if you're watching it on a computer screen and studying the image closely, but it looks good when played on my Android TV.

Another thought -- I wonder if the Universal files might benefit from scaling them to 1080p via Lanczos before running Topaz over them.

Loading the raw Universal DVD files into AVIDemux now to try upscaling them to Lanczos at which point I'll try running them through Topaz Artemis HQ to see if that creates any improvements. My soul can't rest without knowing.

Took some time to review the Topaz deblocked-denoised Universal DVD Season 1 files after scaling them to 1080p bicubically and then with Lanczos. Watched scenes from each of the eight post-pilot Season 1 episodes on my Android TV.

Lanczos worked out well with "Summer of Love," "Fever," "Last Days," "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back," scaling the image a little more forgivingly than bicubic and bringing out the detail a bit better than bicubic.

However, "Prince of Wails" had wide shots that looked really bad via Lanczos; it seems to be Topaz AI trying to sharpen up wide shots that weren't in soft focus and Lanczos blowing up that damage. In contrast, bicubic scaling added some pixelation at the edges that obscured the problems while also adding a bit of blockiness to medium shots while close ups looked as good as Lanczos.

"Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" were also blurrier than the rest on the Univeral DVD; Lanczos pixel blending made them even blurrier whereas the bicubic scaling added pixelation that made it seem sharper.

It'll be neat to see how the Universal files look when scaled via Lanczos with no Topaz deblocking/denoising, and then to find out if Topaz can do anything to improve those files.

It's interesting: I was reading that the blu-ray and HD streaming re-release of THE X-FILES (Seasons 1 - 9), despite being composed of rescanned film, has many shots and entire scenes that are unfortunately fuzzy SD footage stretched to HD resolution for at least Seasons 1 - 2. Some are establishing shots, some are special effects -- but some are entire scenes that production would have shot on 35mm film. Why are these in SD videotape for an HD release? Why weren't they at least upscaled?

I imagine FOX must have lost multiple reels of film and could not fully reassemble every episode from film. Also, the effects and any stock footage are upscaled SD videotape. THE X-FILES' first two seasons were 1994 and 1995, so both would have, like SLIDERS, been film transferred to analog videotape for editing and effects. For the missing sequences, the HD versions of THE X-FILES would use SD footage that, like SLIDERS in Season 1, lacks the lines of resolution and/or film grain needed for an effective upscale.

Are there missing film sequences for Seasons 3 - 9? Possibly. But I imagine that by Season 3, THE X-FILES would have switched from analog to digital videotape and any missing sequences (as well as effects and stock footage) could be upscaled effectively, if not via AI, then through Lanczos and spline algorithms.

Back to SLIDERS: Just to see, I encoded the Universal-disc copied, Topaz deblocked / denoised "Prince of Wails"  from 480p to 1080p with bicubic scaling. Then I played the 1080p file on my Android TV at 55 inches and watched the first 10 minutes. Then I played the 480p file on my Android TV and watched the first 10 minutes. I couldn't tell the difference. The cleaned up DVD file at 480p looks a bit hazy, but without the compression artifacts getting in the way.

The Lanczos version looked even clearer for close-up and medium shots, but wide shots looked jagged and ugly because the SD image had no detail for effective pixel blending. The bicubic version hides these issues with a pixelated fuzziness, but that fuzziness is present on all the shots, so if you get used to it after a few minutes, it isn't jarring.

I think I'll just leave the files at 480p; there's no point inflating the file sizes from 1.5GB or so to 3 - 5GB if the video output results are the same.

In terms of process: the only reason to run Topaz AI over these fuzzy Season 1 episodes is to remove DVD compression. However, I don't think the original NTSC master tapes would suffer from DVD compression; the blurry quality is due to 250 line analog videotape and the PAL masters are blurrier due to being copied via an analog process and stretched from 480 pixels high to 576.

I don't believe there's any gain to running AI processes over non-DVD compressed masters; they aren't effective on a 250 line videotape image. If they have to be put into a 1080p video file, they could be scaled bicubically. The Lanczos version is a little nicer than the bicubic version for medium and close shots -- but really not by much.

The pilot and Seasons 2 - 5 can be dragged and dropped into Topaz and upscaled via Artemis HQ to 1080p. They have sufficient film grain in the digital videotape for the AI to render the grain detail into pixel detail at a higher resolution.

Not really SLIDERS-related, but RussianCabbie noted that he doesn't feel all Season 1 episodes are at the same video quality and that "Fever" and "Last Days" actually look worse than the rest. While I do think they all look bad, I've personally rated "Luck of the Draw" as being the fuzziest among them all.

I've noticed something odd in THE DEAD ZONE. I was watching "Playing God" (Season 2, Episode 12, aired in 2003) and my HD upscale looks great, the picture of a digital film scan (or rather, 16mm film transferred to digital videotape and upscaled to 1080p via AI). However -- there are a couple shots at the end that are extremely fuzzy when Anthony Michael Hall and Ally Sheedy are having an argument. The shot with Hall and Sheedy in the same frame is really blurry. This master shot is intercut with single shots of Hall and single shots of Sheedy. The singles look like 16mm film / high quality digital videotape that upscale to HD perfectly. But the master shot looks like low resolution analog videotape. It cannot be upscaled to look like an HD shot.

I assume there was some sort of mistake in transferring the master shot to digital videotape, that the bitrate was accidentally reduced. It was probably spotted but ignored because in 2003, THE DEAD ZONE was being broadcast in standard definition to cathode ray tube TVs. No viewers would have noticed.

I wonder if SLIDERS' digital videotape episodes have any such errors.

Now this is interesting. "Prince of Wails," scaled to 1080p via Lanczos, had really messed up wide shots which looked like broken stained glass due to the algorithm being unable to blend in the new pixels effectively. But "Summer of Love," upscaled to 1080p via Lanczos, doesn't have the same problem; the wide shots look about the same as they would through the bicubic algorithm while the medium and close up shots look okay / forgivingly scaled from 480 to 1080.

This speaks to what RussianCabbie pointed out: the Season 1 episodes are in poor video quality, but even within being poor, there are degrees of visual failure with some episodes being worse than others. "Summer of Love"'s wide shots weren't as bad as "Prince of Wails" for pixel blending.

Avidemux only takes about an hour to encode each episode to 1080p bicubically or via Lanczos, so I'm going to set a queue to encode each of the low quality eight Season 1 episodes to 1080p twice, once bicubically, once in Lanczos. And then I can compare and see which one yields better results and whichever ones look good in Lanczos can be retained.

Topaz Artemis HQ for removing DVD compression (noise, artifacts), but leaving it at a 480P file.

Close-up and medium shots from this denoised, deartifacted version are effectively upscaled to 1080p via Lanczos.

Wide shots are best upscaled bicubically.

The Lanczos algorithm turned out pretty well for taking the Topaz Artemis HQ deblocked-denoised 480p file of "Summer of Love" and increasing the resolution to 1080p (although it took a 1.8GB file and made it 5.5GB). The Lanczos 1080p video file looks a little better than my blu-ray player or Android TV bicubically scaling the 480p file to 1080p; the added pixels are smoothly integrated into the image to avoid jagged edges.

My upscaling blu-ray player, when playing the disc, toned down the DVD compression artifacts, and bicubically stretched it to 1080p, creating some pixelation at the edges of any objects or people. Topaz AI has been able to remove remove that compression from the DVD file completely. Lanczos has taken that denoised, deblocked file and smoothly stretched it to 1080p without creating any pixelation.

The cleaned-up/Lanczos stretched version doesn't look HD, but the low quality SD flaws of compression and pixelation have been removed. The AI issues of jagged, flickering edges and watercolour distortion are avoided. Admittedly, the underlying image remains a 250 line analog videotape instead of a 540 line digital videotape, but the artifacts and pixelation issues were a massive distraction from the story. Now they're gone.

I did have to turn off all Lanczos sharpening functions.

Lanczos on my old home theatre PC was fine for upscaling early 2000s standard definition TV because all those shows were shot on film or digital HD and simply downscaled to SD, so Lanczos was merely restoring the sharpness inherent to the file. SLIDERS in Season 1, unfortunately, is a pretty fuzzy image devoid of grain detail, so there isn't much for a sharpening filter to build upon.

Most blu-ray players and TVs will scale an SD video to HD with a bicubic algorithm that increases pixel contrast at any edges within the image in adding more pixels. Lanczos blends the added pixels into the image more smoothly, and is a more forgiving scaler, but because it's CPU-demanding, it's more than what a blu-ray player or Android TV box may be able to offer.

My old HTPC used an i5 processor and a dedicated GPU to make it happen. Sadly, I don't have it any more after a power surge. In most use cases, Lanczos is best applied when encoding a video so that the gains are contained within the file itself.

The AI deblock-denoise takes about seven hours per episode and Avidemux using Lanczos in stretching the video to 1080p takes about 90 minutes per episode, at least on my hardware. I wonder how much that would factor into a future upscaling effort from a home video distributor or streaming service.