Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 12 of 16)

I've transcoded episodes 102 - 109 with TIVTC and QTGMC. I had a look at them earlier and pneumatic's recommendations have yielded much-improved files. The video quality has gone from severely aliased (DVD) or blurry (Handbrake-detelecined-DVD) to... soft. Soft focus, but watchable and adequate.

My suspicion is that this is probably the upper limit of video files sourced from late-1994 to early-1995 era analog videotape. Season 2's digital videotape episodes, while having a softness to them, were also covered in blocks and grain that an AI upscale could mine to rebuild a facsimile of the original film image.

With the Season 1 episodes, pneumatic's tips have avoided the blurriness that Handbrake created in decombing the files, but I don't see the Season 2 level of grain or the Season 3 level of sharpness needed to bring it to AI-generated 720p. The image is too soft, although better than what's on the disc.

However, I've still loaded everything into Topaz AI for a 720p upscale just to see what happens. My soul won't rest until we try. My expectation, however, is that it'd be best to just put the files in Topaz AI for 540p output so as to add a bit of AI sharpening and film grain but not add more pixels.

It would be interesting to see whether you think the original topaz upscaled files is inferior to Pneumatic's method with topaz sharpen and no upscale.

Also, while not likely, is it possible that a different topaz upscale algorithm would provide better results on pneumatic's method than was previously used?

In a perfect world, perhaps an aglorithm could add grain back into the image based on lighting and assumed contouring of image.  And then you use the added grain to upscale.  Of course, perhaps an upscaling algorithm could guess upscaling technique based on assumed light/contour shaping as well.   I guess something like that doesn't exist now, because this sort of content (flat without grain) is a smaller use-case for the upscaling marketplace.

I'm just happy that pneumatic's experimentation and explorations have yielded something I didn't think we could have: an acceptable DVD image from the Season 1 Universal DVDs.

Yes, the image still looks like a standard definition analog videotape from 1994 because that's what it is. But it's clear of jagged edges, it isn't obnoxiously distracting me with interlacing lines flashing across the screen, and at living room distance on an HDTV, it looks like an okay DVD.

I don't even think my new transcode to 1080p (with 3GB files per episode) is really even necessary; it just seems better to have the file brought to 1080p with a pixelation-reducing rescaler (Lanczos) rather than my TV doing a linear stretch.

Yeah, it's probably better for us to produce 1080p files as it takes out of the equation the unknown upscaling quality of the end user's media player or TV, which could potentially be poor.   

These are the scalers included with Avisynth: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Resize

The most popular ones seem to be BicubicResize, Spline36Resize and LanczosResize.  They can be tuned for sharpness:

BicubicResize(1440, 1080, 0.0, 0.75) means upscale to 1440x1080 with blur=0.0, sharpen=0.75

LanczosResize(1440, 1080, taps=4) is sharper than LanczosResize(1440, 1080, taps=3), the latter of which appears very close to Spline36Resize.

There is also this Sharpen() filter included with Avisynth: http://avisynth.nl/index.php/Sharpen

There are a bunch of third party sharpeners here http://avisynth.nl/index.php/External_f … Sharpeners which I'm sure can do a much better job than Sharpen(), but I haven't delved into them as I do my sharpening through the media player (MadVR).

If we upscale to HD we must remember to convert the colours to HD otherwise they will be quite off:

(animated .png)

In Avisynth...

# convert colourimetry from NTSC to HD 
z_ConvertFormat(                        
\ colorspace_op="601:601:170m:full=>709:709:709:full",
\ resample_filter="spline36",
\ dither_type="ordered",
\ interlaced=true )

AI upscaling:

nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, nns=1, nsize=0, cshift="Spline36Resize") # AI upscale 4x (720x480p -> 2880x1920p)
Spline36Resize(1440, 1080)                                       # downscale to 1080p

Preview:

QTGMC + AI upscaling (1080p60).mkv
TIVTC + AI upscaling (1080p24).mkv

I'm sure Topaz can do a better job than nnedi3, I just don't have $300 USD to spare right now.  Although I see they have a free trial version so I'll check it out for sure.   

edit: unfortunately I cannot use it as it's Windows 10+ only.

I'm getting some moire patterns where there were previously jagged edges. This screenshot from "Eggheads":

Any recommendations from pneumatic for what addresses this? Or is it best left alone?

*

On the subject of Topaz AI -- I think it's a little overhyped. The upshot of Topaz AI and all the experiments in this thread is this: if a video looks good in standard definition at 480i, Topaz AI can make it look good in high definition at 1080p. If it's sharp in SD, Topaz AI can make it sharp in SD. If it's blurry but grainy in SD, Topaz AI can resolve that grain into HD detail.

This isn't actually that meaningful, useful or worthwhile.

If you have a video that looks good at 480i, you can likely upscale it in less taxing ways than $300 upscaling software and still get decent results; if you produced a video that looks good at 480i, you likely have the original materials to produce a high definition version. Why would you need Topaz AI if you could go back to your original film or HD digital masters?

Meanwhile, Topaz AI can't seem to do very much with an SD image that is blurry and lacking in film grain.

AI upscaling could be highly effective in specific use cases that I think are incredibly insular and a bit silly. FOX lost a ton of film and effects shots for THE X-FILES, and a lot of their HD release of the show has used upscaled videotape where the original film could not be rescanned. BABYLON 5 and LOIS AND CLARK had film rescans for HD releases, but the effects were pulled from the standard definition master tapes.

An AI upscale could have helped out a lot there. AI upscaling might be good for a few shots here and there or for 90s effects work that was always a bit painterly. BABYLON 5 effects looked like video game graphics. AI could increase the size of those without degradation.

And sure, if you're an obsessive fan who really wants to watch "As Time Goes By" in 1080p (which I am) and an on-the-fly upconvert isn't good enough for you (and I wouldn't mind better), then yes, Topaz AI could make your dreams come true with that episode, one that was edited on 1995-era digital videotape that preserved the film grain for the AI to reconstruct. And if you're really not happy with your Mill Creek DVDs for Seasons 4 - 5, then Topaz AI can make that grainy image look HD even from those overcompressed discs because of the 16mm film grain.

And yes, RussianCabbie's brother got his footage back, but it was produced in HD in the first place and transferred to a format where that the HD elements were downscaled but not lost.

In the case of episodes 102 - 109 for SLIDERS, they were edited on analog videotape. This unfortunately creates severe generational loss. And for analog videotape, Topaz AI has been pretty useless. Topaz AI can't rebuild what isn't already there either as standard definition detail or film grain, and analog videotape clearly has neither.

Topaz AI is a bit like the Holy Grail: it seems enticing and everyone wants it and thinks it's a magic solution, but its usage turns out to be incredibly limited. It is only useful within a cave of specific situations, and it maybe wasn't worth all the effort and stress and agony that Indiana Jones and his dad put themselves through to find it, even though it was good to see John Rhys-Davies back again.

Thanks. I'll stick with the moire patterns. It's fine. I'm redoing all the encodes again with Lanczos at four taps.

I don't know why, but I don't like the results with the Nvidia encoder. GPU acceleration is fast (7 - 10 minutes per episode), but image just looks dull and fuzzy to me, even though when I take screenshots, I can't see any difference. I'm sticking to CPU encodes (an hour per episode) for this.

I may need to design some artwork for SLIDERS: SEASON 1: THE PNEUMATIC EDITION.

New discovery...QTGMC has a separate "repair progressive" mode which can provide a significant improvement when applied to all frames post-TIVTC.  This mode doesn't deinterlace at all, it just "repairs" progressive frames in a way that reduces deinterlacing artefacts, aliasing, moire, shimmer etc. without smudging out any resolution in the source. I ran it through a resolution test pattern and 1px alternating white and black lines retain full contrast.

The downside is that it doesn't provide any benefit to video that was already deinterlaced by QTGMC, but it greatly reduces post-TIVTC deinterlacing artefacts such as:

1. "Eggheads" the moire on the wall shingles are suppressed - clip
2. "Prince of Wails" the Jeep radiator grille is now perfectly rendered
3. "Last Days" opening street scene with the tree branches is perfectly rendered

Because it only works post-TIVTC, you have to forfeit the perfect 60fps frame pacing that you would get with QTGMC deinterlacing only, such as the scenes in "Eggheads" where they're playing Mindgame (comparison: QTGMC 1080p60 , TIVTC + QTGMC repair 1080p24)

Anyway, I'm super stoked with this discovery as it means I don't have to worry so much about false positives with TIVTC's combing detection, as those frames will come out looking nice after being repaired by QTGMC.   I'm also using it on Rugrats (streaming service version) and it beautifully smooths out all the deinterlacing artefacts baked into it.

Looks better overall to me.   Compared the two files (qtgmc.mkv to this one)

One question, when you compare the reds between the two videos, are they the same for you?

edit: here's a before/after:  https://imgsli.com/MTY1NDY1

For  reference, look at Arturo's skin pigment and red coat.

I'm using VLC, which is obviously a pretty sophisticated media player..

In the old SD one, are you suggesting that it isn't doing shades of colors well, so it sort of averages out a given tone to the nearest SD color (which may be more pronounced)?

Here's that first qtgmc preview again, but this time tagged with SD colours - specifically "-colorspace 6 -color_primaries 6" in ffmpeg (6 = rec.601/smpte170m)

qtgmc 720x540p60 Rec.601 tagged.mkv

I'd expect VLC should read the tags and do the conversion properly.  Without the tags VLC probably just assumed nothing and didn't do any conversion, which is fair enough.

Or was the non hd color version more how it played on the old tube tvs?

clip = "C:\S01E08 Eggheads.mkv"   # produced from the disc using MakeMKV (lossless remux)
CPUcores = 4  

video = LWLibavVideoSource(clip, stream_index=-1, repeat=true, cache=true)
audio = LWLibavAudioSource(clip, stream_index=1, cache=true)
AudioDub(video, audio)

TFM(mode=0, slow=2, scthresh=100, PP=3, metric=1, cthresh=9, MI=128,
\    clip2=PropDelete("_FieldBased").bwdif(field=-1, thr=5, edeint=nnedi3(field=-1)))

TDecimate(mode=0, cycleR=1, cycle=5, hybrid=1, viddetect=2, vidthresh=4.5,
\    denoise=true, chroma=false, hint=false)

QTGMC(InputType=1, preset="slow", Sharpness=0.0, FPSDivisor=1, EdiThreads=CPUcores/2) 

z_ConvertFormat(                      
\ colorspace_op="601:601:170m:full=>709:709:709:full",
\ resample_filter="spline36",
\ interlaced=true,
\ dither_type="ordered")

LanczosResize(1440, 1080)

# Optional: the following Trim command will output only a short snippet, useful for quick previewing:
# Trim(0, 240) # outputs the first 240 frames only (10 seconds @ 24fps)
# Trim(240, 480) # outputs frames 240-480 
# Trim(480, 0) # outputs frames 480 til end
# ShowFrameNumber() # overlay frame number onto video

Prefetch(CPUcores)

edit: alternatively, if you want the same moire reduction as above, but with original 60fps frame pacing (smooth on spinning earths, Mindgame sections etc.) just delete both the TFM and TDecimate lines and put instead:

propDelete("_FieldBased").bwdif(field=-2, thr=5, edeint=nnedi3(field=-2))

The downside is that all frames will be deinterlaced, so you'll only get true 480p resolution on static elements but not on moving elements.

All in the one job, otherwise image quality won't be quite as good due to multiple rounds of compression.  I'm just opening the windows command prompt, changing to the ffmpeg folder with "cd c:\program files\ffmpeg\bin", then pasting this and hitting enter.  ffmpeg takes the Avisynth script as the input and produces the mkv file as the output.   

ffmpeg -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 -i "C:\TheAboveScript.avs" -c:v libx264 -tune film -b:v 8000000 -pix_fmt yuv420p -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 "TIVTC + QGTMC repair.mkv"

Happy to help, and thanks for everyone's help as well.

Well the show would have been produced with rec.601/smpte-170m colourimetry, so you'd want VLC to be interpreting it as such, and that seems to be the case with the tagged mkv.  All other mkv's I uploaded to gdrive after that were correctly tagged as well. 

I'm not familiar with VLC but there should be some extra status info or debug screen to get VLC to display details about the colourimetry it's using.  Or you could take a full screenshot on the scene with the front view of the red car and compare it to my screenshot which is using correct colourimetry as indicated by the overlay on my screenshot.

That's true, but then you will have some combed frames on certain sequences like during the intro, or certain scene changes that weren't spliced correctly, or when they're playing Mindgame in Eggheads.   

If occasional combing doesn't bother you then you should use it as it retains full 480p resolution on 24fps and 30fps sequences which make up 98% of the show. 

If TIVTC had more reliable combing detection this wouldn't be an issue.  We can probably improve it for this episode by playing with the combing detection thresholds (cthresh and MI parameters) but in my experience this only tends to provide a choice between false positives or false negatives.

But it's still an improvement from no post processing at all, so try setting MI=200 which eliminates false positives from that street scene (no moire).  The highest number of combed pixels for that scene was 195 inside the square by the window, so setting MI to 196 or above would avoid moire on that scene:

Just be aware you may get other scenes that could be combed and have less than 200 combed pixels and those would go undetected (false negative) and remain visibly combed.

To get that debug overlay in Avisynth: TFM(PP=1, display=true)

Turning off PP turns off combing detection, so you should be getting more combed frames not less.

Increasing MI means there has to be more combed pixels detected within a frame before it declares the frame as combed, so expect to see more combed frames when raising it.  The default is 80 which produces a lot of false positives (like the wall texture it thinks is combing) so by default the error is biased in favour of deinterlacing artefacts (eg. moire) instead of combing artefacts.   In my experiments the highest I could go without too many false negatives was 128, which is half the pixels in a 16x16 block.

Hard for me to say what's going on...maybe Hybrid has implemented it different or wrongly?  The combing threshold option in Hybrid appears is mislabeled as "chroma threshold", maybe there are other errors in the implementation.

Sorry, looks like I had a brain fart and misread what you wrote

Na you're both artists and craftsmen and preservationists and poets!

It's thrilling to have a corner of humanity that takes on these interests and values.

Question for Ireactions and pneumatic: What are your favorite settings on Topaz? I'm planning on getting into the Sliders episode 4K conversion game this weekend. Using my Mac Studio M1 as the video conversion machine, along with Topaz AI to work on converting seasons 1-4.

I would suggest using the Artemis setting on Low Quality, Noise setting for Seasons 2, 4 and 5 and Artemis on Medium for the Pilot and Season 3. Also, it's necessary to add AI grain to the upscale to avoid a waxy quality to the upscaled image (set it to 3 - 4 on Amount and 1 - 2 on size depending on your preference by doing previews of wide shots, medium shots and closeups). I do not find Topaz AI to be effective for Episodes 1.02 - 1.09, unfortunately.

As I said before: Topaz AI is like the Holy Grail where everyone thinks of it as a magical cure-all,  but it's actually only useful in specific situations of isolated parameters and Indiana Jones and his dad probably went home wondering if it was really worth the trouble of finding it.

The issue with Topaz: it is only effective for making high quality SD video look good in HD. It can't make a bad SD video look better in HD. It can't even make a bad SD video look better in SD.

AI upscaling operates by scaling image detail with algorithms designed to recognize a wide variety of textures and add additional pixels in a manner that's suited to blend in smoothly with each texture. Blockiness gets smoothed out, sharp details remain intact at the higher resolution. AI upscaling also analyzes the film grain content and uses that to rebuild an approximation of the original film image. That grain can get refined into an overly smooth texture, so it's necessary to add grain back on to avoid the watercolour look.

Modern TVs and video player software can generally stretch SD video to HD screens well, but what was sharp and detailed in SD becomes a little fuzzier and less resolved in HD. AI helps stretched SD video maintain its original strengths, but AI can't add merits the video didn't already have.

When it comes to upscaling SLIDERS, it depends on which box sets you have. I personally think upscaling to 4K would be overstretching these old digital videotape files and have aimed for the 720p - 1080p range instead.

The Pilot was shot and edited on film, so it has a crisp level of detail and grain content in the Universal disc that benefits from AI upscaling to 1080p. This is not the case with the Mill Creek and Turbine sets. Mill Creek has overcompressed the files and there is not enough SD grain or detail for Topaz. Turbine uses the PAL masters and since those were drawn on analog videotapes, they are stretched to the higher PAL resolution and even blurrier than the NTSC version.

Episodes 1.02 - 1.09, while shot on film, were unfortunately transferred to analog videotape for editing. This low resolution format has no grain and little detail, so Topaz can't rebuild the images. It always looks like watercolour. These episodes look bad on the Universal discs, very bad on the Turbine discs and terrible on the Mill Creek discs.

Season 2, thankfully, made the switch to early digital videotape which preserves detail and film grain in a downscaled form. There's also a slightly blocky texture to the digital videotape format of the era. The Universal and Mill Creek discs of Season 2 are good enough to upscale to 720p, but results will be sharper with Universal. The Turbine version uses the higher resolution PAL masters with little compression, and those would allow 1080p output. Season 2 will be markedly improved from non-AI scaling because AI can smooth out the digital videotape texture while rendering the grain into detail.

Season 3 used a newer form of digital videotape that didn't preserve as much of the film grain but is well-detailed enough on the Universal and Mill Creek discs to upscale to 720p. The Universal-based upscale will be preferable. The Turbine version of Season 3, however, is significantly sharper and would look good at 1080p. However, because Season 3 is already quite sharp, it doesn't really benefit much from AI upscaling and the AI upscales I've done don't look significantly different from a Lanczos or even a bicubic scaling conversion.

Seasons 4 - 5 were shot on 16mm film with an extremely high grain level that's very present even in a downscaled, compressed SD image. Because of this, Topaz AI can rebuild the original film image. The Mill Creek version can be upscaled to 720p extremely well. The Universal and Turbine files can all be upscaled to 1080p. The Universal upscale will look very good and the Turbine upscale will look even sharper. It will look different from the SD files, less grainy and more resolved and detailed.

I haven't been happy with any AI upscales of Season 1's post-Pilot episodes and would just stick to pneumatic's methods (TIVTC and QTGMC deinterlacing-decombing with Lanczos scaling it to 1080p). It will look like soft-focus DVD, but that's the best that the post-Pilot Season 1 files allow.

After experiencing all of the above, I have really lost a lot of enthusiasm for AI upscaling SLIDERS. Seasons 2 - 5 on the Turbine set look fine with scaling to fill a 55 inch TV. At living room distance, the artifacts don't really matter.

I don't want to do any more upscaling with current methods because I don't want to produce a near-HD image of "The Breeder" and its like while episodes like "Eggheads", even after pneumatic's work, still only look like an 'okay' DVD file.

Considering the original state of those Season 1 files (blurriness, comb lines, jagged edges), it's a miracle that pneumatic has achieved watchable results. And until we have a way to make look "Eggheads" look like a decent 720p release, I don't really have any further interest in upscaling the rest of the show. It is a crime against culture that "Slither" can look 1080p presentable while "The Weaker Sex" looks like VHS.

I wanted to try the QTGMC repair processing, but... I can't seem to get it together.

I installed AviSynth+, dropped in the DLL files as advised, and then ran pneumatic's script in AviSynth, but I got a message saying: "Script error: There is no function named 'QTGMC'." I'm finding the instructions on the Wiki to be just... baffling. http://avisynth.nl/index.php/QTGMC

Once again, I feel that pneumatic is the only one here who knows what he's doing.

Anyway. I'm trying a new Hybrid-baased, Vapoursynth-powered transcode of 1.02 - 1.09 with pneumatic's TIVTC and QTGMC recommendations and adding some additional saturation and grain to fill in some of the soft-focus lack of detail.

**

Something I've found: the Turbine blu-ray set, using the PAL masters, has extremely blurry versions of the Season 1 episodes. All of Season 1, including the Pilot, are noticeably blurrier than the Universal set and a little better than the Mill Creek set. However, the Turbine PAL files do not have the jagged edges and comb lines and of the Universal and Mill Creek discs. Did pneumatic find this to be the case in the Via Vision PAL DVDs?

Turbine's team can't remember what they did to process the PAL files, but I wonder if they detelecined the PAL files in a manner that created image quality degradation or if the PAL files from Universal were produced when the technology had improved and didn't have the fields scaled independently from the videotapes when converting them to DVD.

Thanks. MPC-HC was the only part I got right. The Kazaa Codec Pack has always been my go-to. VLC is just too odd in how it positions itself at bizarre sizes every time I open a video file with it. MPC-HC has the sense to put itself in the center of the screen and the decency to use hardware acceleration.

When running upscale jobs, they generally had to happen while I slept. I have 32GB of RAM on my gaming laptop, so that allowed me to do my other work even while Topaz monopolized the GPU.

Currently, I have Hybrid running a transcode job on Episodes 1.02 - 1.09 with pneumatic's advised settings, nnedi3 scaling to 1080 and grain to fill in some of the fuzziness. It's taking about 3 - 4 hours per episode. I just had a look at "Prince of Wails" and "Fever" which finished, putting them on a very mediocre 55 inch LED TV.

It occurs to me that in two episodes in a row, Wade has to nearly get hit by a car to get the plot going.

They look okay to me, and as I've considered the Universal files to be awful, okay is quite an accomplishment. Most of the distortions from viewing these episodes on a modern TV (lines, jagged edges) are gone. The soft focus look is a little more deblurred now. Mediums and closeups look good. Really wide shots still betray that this is more a videotape than a digital file, but it's still okay.

The odd distortions of Topaz AI upscaling are absent. Yes, Topaz AI's closeups looked better, but the mediums and wides looked so bad that it was distractingly inconsistent. The Pneumatic Edition is consistent. The grain and the nnedi3 scaling are making the lack of detail tolerable, and pneumatic's instructions have reduced the jaggies and comb lines to the point where their occasional appearances seem acceptable. I've upped the colour a bit just to make it look a less faded.

I could live with these.

wow.  this is what i kept saying about old sliders content looking like it was poorly kept film stock or 3rd generation vhs footage.  the undulating waterfall effect, the vibrating lines.  the crappy, faded color.

that's definitely a lot cleaner & more stable.

Do Rep0=13 and EZKeepGrain require additional DLLs?

I put your DLL pack into the Avisynth folder, but it still didn't run until I added more DLLs (avsresize, BWDIF, LSMASHSource, nnedi3, TDeint, TIVTC). I can't seem to get Rep0=13 and EZKeepGrain running after adding them to your script.

I'm hoping to spend some of the Easter holiday reading up on Avisynth+ and how to use it so that I'm not dependent on the only person in this thread who knows what he's doing to type out the code.

I'm current experimenting with different Hybrid scaling solutions and grain settings until I'm happy.

Hybrid is doing a good job with most episodes except "Last Days" which remains very jagged and ugly in the opening scenes, so that's probably an Avisynth+ job.

Your original code QTGMC script works for me:

This, one, however:

Gives me this error:

Also, after the script is running, how do you save the rendered video as an MP4 file? I ran it through AVIDemux to save it as an MP4, but I'm wondering how that's handled by someone who knows what they're doing.

Ah yes, it's another dependency I forgot about - sorry.

The dll is here and needs to go in C:\Windows\System32 , as per instructions under "runtime dependencies" here.   It's not actually an Avisynth dll, it's a third party dll that does fast fourier transforms used by QTGMC.   DLL's are basically precompiled C code that any application can use by calling the precompiled functions inside them.   

I'm using ffmpeg at the windows command prompt, eg. paste the following into command prompt:

"c:\program files\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe" -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 -i "C:\YourAvisynthScript.avs" -c:v libx264 -tune film -b:v 8000000 -pix_fmt yuv420p -color_range 1 -colorspace 1 -color_primaries 1 "C:\Detelecined.mkv"

'-colorspace 1' and '-color_primaries 1' mean HD colourimetry - use this if you upscaled to HD in your avisynth script.   SD colourimetry is 6 for both.   Note there are two instances to set in the above line - the first tells ffmpeg what the colourimetry of the input file is (i.e what the Avisynth script is outputting) and the second is what colourimetry ffmpeg should use for the output mp4 file.

'8000000' is the bit rate in bits per second (8mbps)

It's a bit hard to say as Hybrid seems to be using x264.exe which is a different package to ffmpeg.exe with different naming conventions.   I can see the tune is set to grain - I'd set that to film (unless you want it to preserve more grain?  I remember trying the grain preset on an episode of Oz some time ago and didn't like the way it made grain look more chunky, but maybe it was because I didn't set the bitrate high enough - 4mbps).   Underneath I can see it's got '--colormatrix bt470bg' which means SD PAL colourimetry which would produce wrong colours if the output file is HD.  NTSC colours are 170M, HD is 709.

It seems ok.

It's working! Thanks, pneumatic.

I added the AddGrainC plugin and now I'm making various tweaks in pneumatic's script (and using Hybrid to give me the command lines needed to add into the file). I think it'd be nice to add in some film grain to fill in the blurriness and also up the contrast and saturation so that the episodes look a little less like the faded VHS cassettes they are and a little closer to the digital videotape look of Season 2 (although it'll still fall very short). Not every episode is in the same state: "Summer of Love" seems really blurry but pretty well-saturated; "Prince of Wails" seems a little undersaturated but pretty sharp; "Last Days" is downright muddy in its blurriness. I'm making those tweaks on an episode to episode basis with some thought to RussianCabbieLotteryFan's tastes for more colour.

I'm also experimenting with Lanczos4Resize or nnedi3 to bring it to a 1080p container. Which one would pneumatic use?

I know the resulting file won't be 1080p quality. But as pneumatic said earlier, it's worthwhile to avoid individual TVs or media players adding any more scaling artifacts to files that are already not in great shape. pneumatic has made them look far better than they ever have.

Huge difference!