Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 14 of 14)

The original's obviously have a haiseyness to them but when you sharpen, don't you think it kinda gives it a wobble in that particular instance.  Looking at the screenshots, I think you once called it the "teeth chattering effect"?

I am looking forward to giving it an initial review tonight

Didn't we switch you to Media Player Classic via the Kazaa Codec Pack years ago? VLC has a serious lack of hardware acceleration.

Combing, mice teeth, interlacing ... these words are all referring to the same phenomenon where field 1 and field 2 have 2 different images in them (as they are supposed to have by design).   This is definitely not the case in any of the screenshots, but there is field alignment issue and that will be made more visible by sharpening.

How I like the the image to look is not necessarily what anyone else will like.  Some release groups add their own sharpening to their videos and imo that is a bad decision - better to let the user decide how much sharpness they want (unless it's artistic intent of the director/producer of the content).

The PAL version is softer and doesn't have those high contrast 1px pattern on the Jeep grille to begin with - they've been smudged out by whatever equipment Universal used to create the PAL version.  If the PAL version was sharper and resolved all the resolution in the grille, you would get the same issue with TFM detecting the grille as combing and switching to bwdif for those frames which causes the issue with moving parts of the image dropping to interpolated 240p with aliasing / twitching on moving pixels. 

Perhaps you would prefer some stronger QTGMC repair smoothing:

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

# medium smoothing
QTGMC(InputType=1, TR2=2, preset="slow", Sharpness=0.0, FPSDivisor=1, EdiThreads=CPUcores/2)

# high smoothing
QTGMC(InputType=1, TR2=3, preset="slow", Sharpness=0.0, FPSDivisor=1, EdiThreads=CPUcores/2)

# max smoothing
QTGMC(InputType=2, TR2=3, preset="slow", Sharpness=0.0, FPSDivisor=1, EdiThreads=CPUcores/2)

Although the image will look pretty soft at max smoothing so you might need to set Sharpness to a nonzero value.

If it's this scene then it's the same issue as the Jeep grille

Again same issue as the Jeep grille - TFM sees legitimate image data as combing. 

That section has a completely different issue - the studio deinterlaced that section to 30p using their own bob-weave filter similar to bwdif in Avisynth.  Because the camera is wobbling ever so slightly it keeps creating small amounts of motion that keeps tripping their bwdif into bob (interpolation) mode for moving parts of the images - all the twitching / flickering lines are pixels dropping to 240p for a split second.  QTGMC repair mode works wonders on that section - video here

It's hard to say as it depends on the subjective quality of what you prefer in the image.  If the PAL/Turbine version looks better to you then you'd want to investigate smoothing the image more with those QTGMC settings, and then if the image looks too soft, adding some sharpening.

Another option is to just QTGMC deinterlace instead of TFM+TDecimate but you'll get moire on high contrast 1px patterns.

Contrast Adaptive Sharpening seems to be decent - ported from AMD FidelityFX.

Preview: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10HEOoD … share_link

Would recommend viewing at normal viewing distances.

Script:

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

# 60fps IVTC
DoubleWeave().TFM(mode=0, scthresh=100, micmatching=1, ubsco=true, mmsco=true,
\   display=false, slow=2, PP=3, metric=0, cthresh=9, MI=80, hint=false,
\   clip2=propdelete("_FieldBased").bwdif(field=-2, thr=2, edeint=nnedi3(field=-2)))

# QTGMC repair - high strength, no sharpening
QTGMC(InputType=1, TR2=3, preset="slow", EdiThreads=2, Sharpness=0.0, Rep0=13)

# Contrast adaptive sharpening - 90% strength
CAS(sharpness=0.90, y=3, u=2, v=2, opt=-1)

# 4x AI upscale to 1920p
nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, nns=1, nsize=0, cshift="Spline36Resize")

# Downscale to 1080p
Spline36Resize(1440, 1080)

Well, I set the sharpness for that one on my PC monitor and it looked "just right" there, but on the lounge TV it looks overly sharp.   

That particular episode looks ok to me.   If you want to add some saturation, see ireaction's script for how to do it with the Tweak() function.

The colour conversion doesn't actually change the colours that you end up seeing, it just ensures you get the same original colour when the media player decodes it with the HD colour matrix.   Otherwise you would be getting SD colours decoded with HD colour matrix and the colours would be wrong.

Hmm that's weird, CAS is almost free on my desktop system (i5-4570 4 cores @ 3.4ghz).  AMD claims it's "highly optimized".

QTGMC and nnedi3_rpow2 are very CPU intensive... try commenting everything out except CAS, toggle CAS on/off and compare CPU before/after (give it about 10 seconds of playback for buffers to fill... after that my CPU usage settles around 7-10%). 

If you're still getting high CPU try playing with the opt parameter (opt=0/1/2/3) in case the default setting (-1) isn't correctly autodetecting your CPU capabilities.  If it's a mobile CPU that might have something to do with it.  The slowest should be opt=0, fastest should be 1 or 2.

Avisynth can also suffer from bottlenecks depending on what order you call filters in, eg. if there is a slow filter higher up the script, that can grind everything under it to a halt, but I don't think that's an issue here.

edit: also QTGMC's stronger smoothing (TR2=3) is very expensive on my system - I'm seeing a 30% increase vs default (TR2=1).

Well, I feel safe in saying it's probably QTGMC and TFM and the 60fps framerate, then.

I've processed 1.02 - 1.09 with the new script, although I dialed down the sharpness to 80 percent. They look a bit better than before, although I haven't had the chance to watch them on an actual TV. I'm impressed by how "Summer of Love" looks a lot better. Of course, "Luck of the Draw" still looks very fuzzy because pneumatic is a person, not a god. But at this point, anything even approaching reasonable DVD quality for 1.02 - 1.09 is a minor miracle. :-)

One silly thing I'm doing: I'm currently encoding 1.09, "Luck of the Draw", into the 540p format with added noise and maximum contrast adaptive sharpness. I'm wondering what Topaz AI can do with it with whatever remnants of grain being sharpened and augmented. (Probably not much, but my soul won't rest without knowing for sure.)

I found that Topaz AI made the grained up, max-sharpened video files look like a clumsy AI-generated animated movie. I tried turning on the video stabilization module and what I saw was so disturbing, so fundamentally antithetical to life and existence and sliding as we know it, so mentally cataclysmic that I gave serious thought to giving up SLIDERS and getting into STARGATE instead.

I don't know what the hell is going on up there and I don't ever want to see it again.

Actually, would a Black & White version of that be so bad? 

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/shop … p;usqp=CAc

Had a look just now with just TFM.TDecimate to see the raw frames, and I can't really see anything exceptional apart from the 1:1 sections at around 11:00 - those will look terrible with stutter and combing as TFM wasn't designed for deinterlacing 1:1 sections (still working on my adaptive deinterlacing script to solve this... around 1500 lines so far).

The field alignment seems no worse than something like Eggheads, and there's definitely 480p to recover from the source after IVTCing with TFM.TDecimate, judging by the smoothness of diagonal or curved lines.

I am sharpening the image with MadVR though - subjectively I find standard definition unwatchable at 0 sharpness.  For maximum effect sharpening should be applied before upscaling otherwise the sharpener is looking at soft upscaled pixels which don't sharpen as well.

Is the issue that the image doesn't look sharp enough?   Or too noisey/grainy?

The latest version of TFM (v1.0.27) appears to be broken when feeding it 60fps via DoubleWeave(), which is what the script I posted here uses.   

For some reason v1.0.27 fails to fieldmatch a 60fps doubleweaved input, whereas the previous version (v1.0.26) succeeds.  This is the version I've been using since last year.     

I tried using all the fieldmatching modes but they all produce the wrong result - either failing to fieldmatch or producing the wrong output cadence (2:2:2:4 instead of 3:2).

Failure to fieldmatch means combed frames which triggers deinterlacing, so if you were using v1.0.27 you'd regularly be dropping to 240p on moving objects.

All episodes.   I think 1.0.27 isn't detecting the alternating field order produced by DoubleWeave() - I've reported it to the author.   I just happened to update to 1.0.27 today so I mistakenly thought it was just this episode.

Anyway I was looking at Luck of the Draw some more and I'm starting to see what you mean - it does look quite soft and blurry at times.  Some shots look ok though, others look like they've been through some kind of degradation of sharpness

Unsharpened , CAS sharpening , MadVR sharpening

CAS seems to bring out the contrast in the ground's brick texture more, but has fatter edges (MadVR sharpening includes edge thinning).  I think CAS + thin edges might look nice.

To counteract the softness I tried skipping the QTGMC repair to try and let more detail through at the expense of more noise and aliasing, and then readjusting the CAS sharpening a bit lower to compensate (80% instead of 90%).  Clip: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JiHrjX … share_link

A better strategy might be to thin edges before NNEDI3 AI upscaling.  That way NNEDI3 has thin smooth edges to work with and can make better guesses at what the higher resolution edge would look like.   Whereas if you give it a soft fat edge it doesn't really see that as a high contrast edge and won't do much with it.

I would say that the scenes that stand out to me as blurriest in "Luck of the Draw" are the wideshot during Wade's voiceover in the teaser, the horseback riding shots, the fishing sequence, Wade and the Professor arguing about walking Henry the Dog, and the two shots of the Lottery Police detective after the sliders depart with Ryan and Henry.

I have to ask: at this point, would it be better to just stick to TFM and TDecimate on all the episodes and just omit QTGMC due to how it smooths out an already blurry video image? Would it be better to accept a litte aliasing and moire here and there? In my case, I prefer noise to smoothness.

Right now, I'm re-running all the encodes with TFM 1.0.26 on your most recent script -- except I turned QTGMC off for "Luck of the Draw". I haven't added DePanStabilize to the script for "Luck of the Draw", but I might after reviewing the episode without it.

Here's a clip of Luck of the Draw PAL DVD (remuxed, no transcoding, no processing at all)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xsgovx … share_link

You might notice their voices are chipmunked due to the 24->25fps speedup - this can be reversed with AssumeFPS(24000, 1001, true) to slow the video and audio back down to 23.976fps same as the NTSC version.

Stunt actor

Did you mean the PAL version?   Because I didn't do anything to it.

I don't think I understand your meaning. When you say you "prefer to let as much resolution through", is that via the magic of QTGMC? Or do you mean using QTGMC minimally and only for combed frames?

I ran all the re-encodes with QTGMC enabled as per pneumatic's settings (except for "Luck of the Draw" where I turned it off). It seems best to do things pneumatic's way before making any changes for personal preference. I'll next run the encodes with QTGMC disabled for all of them (except for "Luck of the Draw") and compare them when time permits.

My understanding (and let's use the word "understanding" very loosely) is that QTGMC is interpolating the field frames together and smoothing out discrepancies which creates blur, but blur that that can usually be sharpened. Meanwhile, disabling QTGMC at this point leaves some aliasing and moire and noise, but might leave us with more image texture. When an episode is in okay condition like "Prince of Wails" and "Fever", QTGMC's smoothness is fine. When an episode is fuzzy like "Luck of the Draw", it has so little detail to lose that QTGMC makes it worse. I could be wrong and maybe pneumatic will correct me.

I doubt "Luck of the Draw" was incorrectly filmed with out of focus takes used in the final edit. I'm not saying SLIDERS' Vancouver team was devoid of human error, of course, but we've seen what a version of SLIDERS is like when the crew have completely given up. That's an attitude you see in Season 3 where episodes are missing sound effects or actors are shown missing their mark when jumping into the vortex or misdelivered lines are left in the episode, but I don't feel you'd get that in Season 1 or 2 (aside from some of the issues in "Time and Again World" due to the episode being shot before production was fully organized).

I think it's more likely that "Luck of the Draw" was edited on a particularly low-grade videotape that caused the film to suffer more image degradation than any previous episode. I guess we could say that the crew at the time didn't care, but the reality of 90s CRT televisions is that the diode pattern on such screens would have made all the episodes look equally sharp. I can't find fault with the creators for not anticipating that their show would be watched on HD screens at home in the decades to come. That's also why Jerry O'Connell's stunt double's face can be seen in the episode; the expectation was that the face would be obscured by the haze of a cathode ray tube.

Stunt performers are also an artifact of low resolution television that is found in STAR TREK. Watching the HD remaster, the stunt performers for William Shatner look nothing like him. Watching the SD version in the 90s, the mismatches were also glaring and hilarious. But in the 60s, TVs were so small and the colour so vague and the transmission so fuzzy that for the average viewer, it didn't matter.