Digital Enhancement of Episode 16

[Zeruel48]

Might as well post here. I've been working on my own version of episode 16 for a bit, and while it's changed over time I think it's starting to finalize itself. The current form of my project is an upscale of the genesis 1997 DVD as the base, with USBD footage placed sparingly where the upscaler fails. The upscale utilizes a custom ESRGAN model trained for this specific purpose.

Some screenshots (not color corrected):




And a comparison between the Gkids blu-ray, Sephirotic's release, Pwnsweet's 720p release, and my current version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY_8s-OvBNo

[Hakyra]

SPOILER: Show

Might as well post here. I've been working on my own version of episode 16 for a bit, and while it's changed over time I think it's starting to finalize itself. The current form of my project is an upscale of the genesis 1997 DVD as the base, with USBD footage placed sparingly where the upscaler fails. The upscale utilizes a custom ESRGAN model trained for this specific purpose.

Some screenshots (not color corrected):




And a comparison between the Gkids blu-ray, Sephirotic's release, Pwnsweet's 720p release, and my current version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY_8s-OvBNo

Wow, your AI uspcale actually looks insane, it almost looks like the other episodes!

i also tried to AI Upscaling it with pretrained models using Pwnseet's and Sephirotic's cleaned version, although the result looks pretty digitalesque, and nowhere near as good as your attempts:

SPOILER: Show

Even adding grain to it to hide some of the imperfections (specially on the blacks) it still bad

SPOILER: Show

I'm curious, how did you pretrain your model Zeruel?? i'm not sure if i would be of any help, but i would love to help you since i really wanna see EP16 fixed and as closely as possible as the other episodes.

[Asugran233]

I'm actually also make my remaster. This image during rendering. https://drive.google.com/file/d/11GvzHgo9iawyMR6N15fT0dwq0gwXVRVD/view?usp=sharing

[HARVEST]

I wonder how an AI upscale taken from the Renewal DVD source would look...

[Hakyra]

I wonder how an AI upscale taken from the Renewal DVD source would look...

Well you would lose all the details in the blacks and it wouldn't look very good probably, although i believe the final result will look better than the official "HD" master.
Since you asked, this is how it looks using 2x_LD-Anime_Skr_v1.0, and with 1x_Fatality_DeBlur_270000G to sharpen out some details that might look blurry otherwise:

(note, I used PAL Renewal DVDs with AVS deinterlacing applied with corrected framerate, video size is 768x576 resolution, i only had those laying around, but they're pretty good and they should be enough for a quick comparison)

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click on open image on a new tab to see them in the original resolution.

Apologies if i went overboard with the amount of images.

I personally think it looks decent, the lines are really good (some do look weird tho) The details are pretty much well preserved, although the grain is surely lacking and the blood spatter looks off.
Realistically speaking, it looks better than what we got in the Blu-rays for sure, but i wouldn't consider it good enough to be a replacement.

[Blockio]

AI upscales are an iffy affair. Cleaned up with all the film grain removed, you can get decent looking results if given enough training data on the specific kind of shot, but even there, it sometimes completely craps out; and if you want to preserve the texture that cel animation has, you can pretty much forget about it entirely, an AI is not going to make that pattern look good.

[Hakyra]

Yeah that's the problem, AI is pretty much a bit far away with some stuff, Cel animation is also very hard to nail right, maybe one day we'll get there.
Another thing that people don't mention enough is that they require an extensive amount of preparation, and a good base to work with, which sadly we don't have with this episode, i think that the best source for the original episode 16 is the JP LaserDisc which are extremely rare and i don't think that there's a rip from them online that go further than episode 8.

[HRSM]

Since you asked, this is how it looks using 2x_LD-Anime_Skr_v1.0, and with 1x_Fatality_DeBlur_270000G to sharpen out some details that might look blurry otherwise:

SPOILER: Show

click on open image on a new tab to see them in the original resolution.

It looks pretty decent, the lines especially are a big improvement over the 2015/21 BD. One of the big issues that EP16 (not limited to but pretty bad on EP16) I found was the haloing the episode suffers from. For example take Zeruel's filtered version of the USBD from July which I think does a lot to attempt to remove halos where possible:

SPOILER: Show

The issues with EP16 are so numerous that using multiple masters (Archives/Home Video/Renewal) is probably the best solution in my opinion in making a perfect version of the episode.

[Zeruel48]

HRSM is right, the best way to do this would be to (HEAVILY) combine the US Blu-ray with the original 1997 DVD/LD. The single biggest issue with anything before renewal is the nasty ass blending. Pwnsweet's 480p restored release is actually alright (despite using the inferior Archives source) but there's obviously a limit to what you can do when the information is simply no longer present at all. Something I'd like to bring up here is that the lost detail in renewal's ep 16 is most likely a human-made error. Every single episode of the series suffers from this problem, obviously to a lesser extent but even if Ep 16 had a actual remaster the infamous shadow Asuka scene would likely be nearly as crushed as what we have today. I've attached a lazy example of this from ep 20, where you can see how the brown color of Maya's hair is all crushed to pure black, along with some aspects of the background. Again, this is EVERY EPISODE.

[Shinobu99]

Is there any updates on the project ?