HBB Think Tank

Upscaling Video

2011-11-26T18:29:00.002+01:00

Upscaling Video: What Is It

Upscaling is the technique to increase the image resolution without recourse to an actual source of higher definition. Any video sequence will be upscaled for display on a screen with higher resolution than the video itself. Upscaling a video to be encoded will give control over the automated upscaling done by the output devices (television sets or computer monitors). Unless a video has the exact resolution defined as standard for a given output device, the video will always be rescaled. Thus (proper) upscaling will increase the image quality on a high-definition screen while not reasonably change its quality on a standard-definition screen. Yet there is a downside: a higher resolution means more pixels per image that may or may not increase the bitrate required for optimal compression.
In short, the increase in quality generally (as in: for most people) does not justify the increase in file size and the additional time spent on preparing and doing the encoding. But you may think it interesting if you are watching low resolution video on a high definition screen.

Proposed Web Solutions

There are few solution proposed on the internet.
Robert Martens has written a whole guide, providing the necessary tools and a his own autoloaded AviSynth script SimpleSlugUpscale but it does little more than deinterlacing and resizing the image. But that it does well!
gyroshot.com - SimpleSlugUpscale

Meanwhile Jean Brünn has made a comparison of AviSynth resizers that are commonly used for upscaling videos. Winner in his little test was tritical's NNEDI filter. NNEDI apparently stands for something like neural network edge directed interpolation.
Upscaling in Avisynth – Comparison of Resizers
tritical's AviSynth Filters

Upscaling a Progressive Video

Here is my proposed solution for a video with progressive scan. Progressive scan is today often used on Blu-ray or PAL DVD video. Obviously not deinterlacing, that is reverting interlaced video to progressive scan, is required on this sort of material. Robert Martens' SimpleSlugUpscale and tritical's series of edge directed interpolation filters were created for deinterlacing and upscaling. But NNEDI3 has a special function that does just the upscaling of the image and that's what I'm going to use.

To give you the basic idea, here's an outline of my approach. AviSynth is a frameserver program acting as a non-linear video editor. It does not have a GUI but is controlled by scripts written in the AviSynth scripting language. It is inasmuch a frameserver that any program able to open AviSynth scripts will actually see an uncompressed AVI file. But reduce the workload on the computer VirtualDub can be used to actually create a real AVI file before continuing processing the video. To reduce the filesize a bit, I will use Lagarith for lossless video compression.
The AviSynth script will load the source video, do some pre-processing before converting it into the YV12 color space needed by most AviSynth filters like NNEDI or WarpSharp. NNEDI will do the major upscaling before cropping, sharpening, and resizing it. VirtualDub then will encode the script.

List of the Tools

AviSynth 2.6.0 (still in alpha release)
AviSynth MT 2.6
VirtualDub 1.10.1 (experimental build)
If either version does not work or crash, use the stable releases 2.5.8 and 1.9.11, respectively. To install the MT package (adding multithreading capabilities to AviSynth) follow the instruction that come with the archive (in case you use the stable version of AviSynth you'll need the proper MT package).
Lagarith Lossless Video Codec 1.3.26
Next are the necessary filters that are not included in AviSynth:
DeDot and Checkmate are optional for the pre-processing in case you have older video transfers that may reduce rainbows, dots and dotcrawl.
nnedi3 and WarpSharp are doing most of the work, though the sharpening filter is optional, both in its use and in its choice.
Since sharpening the image may also increase some unwanted grain, I'll apply a denoiser, the VagueDenoiser.

The AviSynth Script

Turning on multithreading for the script must come as the first line:
SetMTmode(5,0)
After loading your video you may do the pre-processing (and you'll speed up multithreading):
SetMTmode(2)
Checkmate()
DeDot()
ConvertToYV12()
Next is NNEDI3. I have included most options even if I use on some the default so that I could have left them out.
nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, nsize=3, nns=4, qual=2, etype=1, pscrn=4, threads=0, opt=0, fapprox=0)
Next I do the cropping. Why now and not before? It basically depends on the source material. Older transfers have often black bars all around that are relics of the scanning. They are not necessarily straight vertical and horizontal bars so it is better to see where they actually are. Modern digital video usually does not have that kind of bars unless it is letter- or pillar-boxed. In this case the cropping should be done before the upscaling.
Crop(1, 2, -3, -4)
The values will depend on your source video and is in the order 1=left, 2=top, 3=right and 4=bottom. They are always integers.
After that comes the sharpening and denoising. I have used the default setting on WarpSharp but actually you can pump it up quite high.
VagueDenoiser(threshold=2, method=1, nsteps=6, chromaT=2.0)
WarpSharp(depth=300, blur=100, bump=128)
VagueDenoiser(threshold=2, method=1, nsteps=6, chromaT=2.0)
Yes, I use the denoiser twice. Once to denoise the source material and then to smooth out side effects of the sharpener.
And finally the resizing to the target screen resolution.
Spline64Resize(960, 720)
But why use Spline64Resize, you might ask. Well, NNEDI only upscales to an enlargement factor that has a value between 2 and 1024 and has to be a power of 2. The target resizing is done by the internal resize filters of AviSynth and of those Spline64Resize appears to be the best. But so that it works best, I will enlarge the original image to something quite larger than my target resolution so that the resizing is actually a downscaling.
The script will be excruciatingly slow (about one frame each two-and-a-half seconds on my Windows XP with 3GB RAM on an Intel Duo at 3 GHz) but you'll have upscaled your video and improved sharpness a bit. Most usual sharpeners will fail, while sharpeners using warp technology can easily distort your image. You may increase speed by reducing NNEDI's enlargement factor rfactor to 2 and reduce WarpSharp's depth and blurring but you will most likely increase speed at the cost of increasing warping the image. Multithreading has increased the frame rate by maybe 60 per-cent.

Finalizing

After creating the script you will load it with VirtualDub. To limit any further conversion you will set in the Video menu the Color Depth to "Autoselect" for decompression and "Same as decompression format" for compression. And in Compression you chose Lagarith as your codec and configure it to "Use Multithreading" and "Prevent Upsampling When Decoding". The resulting video file will not play on most video players, including VLC or Media Player Classic, but still can be loaded into AviSynth using AviSource. If playback is an issue, try unchecking "Prevent Upsampling When Decoding" or use another codec (or no compression at all, though that will increase the filesize).

Conclusion

This script is definitely not for your everyday needs. Its speed is so slow that you have to think twice. In many situation you may want to leave out the sharpening effect or even just use a Spline resize (there exists nowadays a plugin for AviSynth that use 10 or even 12 sample points instead of the 8 used by Spline64Resize).
Above all this script is a play to see how far upscaling can be taken. If you know of a way to achieve an even better upscaling with improved sharpness while limiting or even removing any warp effect, let me know!

Une Cerise au potager

2011-09-17T00:17:00.000+02:00

As usual - long wait, no see…

But now for something completely different.

A long while ago I was asked to do a website. Since I am working, and maybe due to some lack of energy, it took me some time to get it done.

But now it's ready. It's a French website on breeding English and German Angoras rabbits. There is still something to do (and a website is never finished but ready to be published and polished and updated later on) but we felt okay to go public.

So here it is…

Un Cerise au potager .:. www.rosebrossut.fr

Halo Effect: the Early Years

2011-05-26T13:44:00.000+02:00

As a fan of pretty much all music that is electronic and a bit beyond the main stream of the public world, and a fan of databasing, it was fun to look out for official downloads of the earliest releases from Italian synth-pop band Halo Effect.

Founded in 2001 by the Italians John Andrew Peverieri, Alessandro Polinori and Federico Rosi, joined in 2003 by Marco Cattani, they have made their way from self-released demos and eEPs, to their first two albums released through online download stores and renowned netlabels to the point where finally their next album will be released later this year (as it appears) to hardcopy (that's a CD for you).

But where to find the first releases from the earlier years? Two demos, a live release and an EP. On MySpace, they say. But finding those links is a bitch, as they are hidden within the blog, dating back to July 16^th, 2008. And their blog has seen much more activity than mine ever has.

So, here is the blog entry: OLD DEMO: free download!!!

And since MySpace blocks the links to the downloads, here are the four official and thus perfectly legal download links:

Past Continuous
Days of Silence
Rome Effect
Schwarz EP

Links
Halo Effect MySpace
Halo Effect Rate Your Music
Halo Effect Discogs
Halo Effect MusicBrainz

Dom i Nacija // Umilenie

2011-05-21T22:12:00.001+02:00

Today's entry is a simply promotion for an Argentinian artist called Umilenie. A modern instrumental electropop project of Luciano Quiroga aka DJ Null who also operates the releasing netlabel NullRepublik Records, the first album collects tracks from several years before it was released May 2009.

The title is a continuing play of words that takes the Macedonian/Serbian homonymic play on доминациjа and дом и нациjа that translate as domination and home and nation (or dominacion and hogar y nacion in Castillian Spanish). It's a Romanized transliteration of Home and Nation...

You may download this album from the Internet Archive.

Links
Umilenie Official Website
NullRepublik Records Argentina (netlabel)

Dead Market // Haujobb

2011-05-20T01:45:00.001+02:00

And while we're at it, within an hour a second post.

While I was surfing on Facebook I found a comment by VNV Nation on Haujobb.

Upon reading it and following the links I came about the great news that Haujobb has finally went back to the studio (well, under the moniker Haujobb anyways) and will release on June 17^th the ep Dead Market (via BandCamp).

Dead Market by Haujobb

Go get it, Tigers!

Links
Haujobb Official Website
bandcamp : Haujobb

Red Flag: Communism // Проект: Распатор

2011-05-20T00:32:00.004+02:00

Well, it has been more than a year since my last entry and you wouldn't have been the only one to think it was dead (yes, I meant you, my non-existant reader) but here we are, back...

While it isn't exactly the main reason for this comeback, my discovery that I want to share with you is as good as many subjects to write about. Some may seem more important in the scheme of things but we need circuses as much as we need bread.

For quite some time now I have discovered the delights of... no, not the Mirror of Erised... no, of legal music downloads. What are the Creative Commons for, eh?

At the moment Jamendo and the Internet Archive are my primary addresses. And now I'v come upon a Jamendo release that I've finally uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Проект: Распатор (aka The Project: Raspatory, or simply Raspatory) is a Russian techno-industrial project created in late 2008 by Andrej Tereshhenko. After a months-long break Andrej started writing again and in January 2010 released his album Red Flag: Communism on Jamendo.

Unfortunately, for reasons unknown, this album has since been removed from Jamendo, so I've decided to upload the album to the Internet Archive as it was released under a Creative Commons license.

You can download all MP3 files from the Internet Archive for your listening pleasure.

Generating an XML Document, Part One

2010-01-19T23:45:00.004+01:00

PHP is a powerful tool to create dynamic web pages but its official documentation lacks some style.

As I am an application developper (in training) this may be just a thing that I can amend here. It's a think tank without limitations to its contents after all.

Here a first example of what I am up to right now.

Creating a dynamic web site using PHP with XML usually is about parsing existing files or writing new ones. But I happen to have come upon a problem that demands to create an XML document using PHP and then parsing it in PHP code. Some might say that this a waste of resources and it may turn out that they were right. But for the time being we'll assume this is perfectly alright and a sane thing to do - if only for educational purposes.

Generating XML from an Array

PHP has a module that makes operating on XML documents simple, hence its name SimleXML. It turns an XML document into an object providing structured access to the XML that can be stored in a variable.

To create a new XML document you need to store the XML elements and values inside a PHP array whose structure mirrors that of the XML document and then to iterate through the array while printing each element with appropriate formatting.

$wrapper = array('element1' => 'value1',
                 'element2' => 'value2');

As each element may contain multiple levels of sub-elements, so can each value be an array with its own elements and values plus even more sub-elements.

$wrapper = array('element1' => 'value1',
                 'element2' => array('element3' => 'value3',
                                     'element4' => 'value4'));
A simple foreach() functions will iterate through a simple onedimensional array but as XML documents may have multiple levels, so we need a function that iterates through multidimensional arrays. We will call this function foreacharrayparser().

function foreacharrayparser($funcarray)
     foreach($funcarray as $funcelement => $funcstring) {
          print " <$funcelement>";
          if (is_string($funcstring)) {
               print htmlentities($funcstring);
          } else {
               foreacharrayparser($funcstring);
          }
          print "\n";
     }
}

Now, in order to create the XML document, we'll have to call the function once.

print "\n";
foreacharrayparser($wrapper);
print "";

Now we should have a valid and well-formed XML document if we had done our homework for both the array structure and the remaining PHP code.

Source
Sklar, David (2004). Learning PHP 5. Sebastopol: O'Reilly.
ISBN 978-0-596-00560-3

Mary and Max

2009-10-16T15:16:00.009+02:00

1976

Mary is a lonely girl of 8 from Australia with a mother that cooks a lot with sherry and a father who works in a factory and stuffs dead animals.

Max is a lonely man of 44 from New York with a fish, a canary and a cat, no friends and a half-blind neighbor who occasionally cooks for him.

She hates the birthmark on her forehead. He is member of the Anonymous Overeaters.

She is inquisitive, brainy and imaginative. He is atheist, logical and literal. Both are lonely.

So when one day she picks a name from a phone book (though it would be unlikely that an American phone book can be found in an Australian grocery store) and writes him, it's the beginning of an unusual pen friendship across the continents.

Review

This film is truly a gem among animated movies. It has more laughs then some comedies, but it isn't one. It's moving and sometimes very sad, yet it's not a tear-jerker. It features a chubby girl and a weird older man, but somehow it never crosses any lines (though it may step on some). Its design seems to be made for children, but the film - in expression and themes - is most definitely aimed at an adult audience. If follows the ups and downs of the exchange between Mary and Max, as she grows older and he grows wiser, well, and vice versa.

The film features wonderful voice performances by Bethany Whitmore and Toni Collette as young and adult Mary (respectively), Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max and narrated by Dame Edna Everage... uhm... I meant Barry Humphries. Written, directed and designed by Adam Elliot, who won the 2003 Acadamy Award for Best Animated Short Film (Harvie Krumpet).

Advice
If you like clay animation and adult subjects dealt with humour, honesty and openess, then I strongly suggest watching this film.

Trailer

For promotional use only.

Links
Mary and Max Official Website
Adam Elliot Official Website

Converting Quicktime Videos

2009-10-08T20:21:00.005+02:00

I am a movie fan and I like watching trailers. I feel it's a shame that too few of them are freely available in good quality, and even more of a shame that theatres show too few of them before the main film. I always wondered why they show a few trailers and a lot of commercials and then they make a pause. They could easily show a few more trailers or at least play a part of the score. Ah, that was great when a movie opened with a musical overture before even the projectors started up! Star Trek: The Motion Picture comes to mind... Well, one of the best scores ever made. Shame too that it didn't win the Academy Award. But no, the Oscar went to A Little Romance. Does anyone remember that film, or the score?

But still, you can find a decent number of trailers on the web. Two addresses are Apple Movie Trailers and Yahoo! Movies. Alas, those trailers are in the Quicktime format and hardly any freeware video software can work with those.

So I looked hard to find a way to convert quicktime videos (i.e., the well-known MOV extension) to AVI videos. Pretty much any software, from open-source to high-end video suites, can open and write those. Since at least the now standard OpenDML version no limits in size are inherent to this container format. And it can contain pretty much any video codec (even MPEG-2 I read somewhere), so it is quite multiversed.

But which codec should one use? It basically will come down to what you gonna use the video for. I want to create a DVD. Of course, I could try use the Quicktime movie as direct source for encoding to MPEG-2, but I found out that most import filter have some problem with Quicktime. Either they don't get the ratio right or will insist that the frame rate is different (or both). By converting it to an AVI file, which I can edit much more comfortably, I circumvent this problem. And since I want to re-encode the AVI later, I want a lossless codec, and right now the best open source codec is Ben Greenwood's Lagarith Lossless Video Codec.

Still, we need to convert the Quicktime. The first choice seems to be Bink Video's RAD Video Tools. And why not? It's fast and you can encode the video using your favourite codecs. But there's a hitch! It relies on Windows to create AVI files and so can not create files larger than 2 GB. Normally that wouldn't be a problem as well all know that an entire movie can be made to fit a CD-ROM which has little more than a third of that space for storage. But if you want to use lossless video, then even a minute can reach that limit, especially when dealing with high-definition video content.

But there's another way to work with Quicktime videos. And you'll just need open source software. The solution lies in AviSynth, an open source video editor. Unfortunately AviSynth does not operate with a fancy graphical interface but is instead script-based. But for our needs a very simple script is sufficient. Open a simple text editor (like Window's own Notepad) and type in the following code:

QTInput("yourQuicktime.mov", color = 2, quality = 100, audio = true)

Best is to include the full path for your Quicktime movie (like "C:\Trailers\yourQuicktime.mov"). You'll need the QTInput filter for this to work. Extract the filter to the plugin folder in the AviSynth installation directory. Save the text file with an .avs extension. Now you can open it was any video editor that supports AviSynth scripts. My obvious choice is VirtualDub. Now you can do anything that your editor will allow you to do, including encoding it with the codec of your choice.

HBB Think Tank Opens the Gates

2009-10-02T09:31:00.002+02:00

Hello Everybody,

so finally I have decided to start sharing thoughs and finds, review and insights, all from my personal, private or professional, perspective.

I might address any subject, but I might do that infrequently.

The reason it happens today is that I found two blogs allowing you to download a bootlegged version of the soundtrack of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, on of my all-time favourites. I definitely hope that one day an official soundtrack album will be published, in crisp sound quality.

Until this happy moment arrives, we will be left will bootlegs.

It is a bootleg, so the quality isn't the best. But so far, this is all we got.

Links to the downloads
Dartman's World Of Wonder: It's 2008 Ban-a-zai!!!!
Egg City Radio » Blog Archive » “Buckaroo Banzai”

Additional links
Banzai Institute
World Watch OnLine
World of Soundtrack: Michael Boddicker - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - Across the 8th Dimension (Bootleg)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (Wikipedia article)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (IMDb entry)