rudiger__sf wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 10:52 amDepending on feedback, perhaps I can update this post with other videos as I get round to them.
As someone who has little experience with modding, but with video compression, I have some feedback to leave.
It's a good start, but FAR from perfect.
The main issue has to do with frame rate. You mention the Vita MP4s are 30 fps, and that makes sense. Anime is always finished at 24 fps to meet the film standard, but because games in NTSC run at 60hZ, even at 30 fps, the video will have to be interpolated to 30 fps to actually match the game standard, so there's already interpolation in the cutscenes as-is. HOWEVER, even though the scenes were composited at 24 fps, that doesn't mean they are native 24 fps. Anime is generally animated on either 2s or 3s, which means frames are doubled or tripped, so either 8 or 12 fps for animation. So, within the 24 fps final composite, we have frames being doubled or tripled to meet 24, then we have interpolation applied to meet the 30 fps requirement for NTSC games, and THEN you decided to interpolated the already interpolated and doubled or tripled video up to 60 fps.
Interpolation to 60 fps drives me crazy, so I personally am not a fan of that choice. Because we have frames being doubled and tripled to 24, which are then interpolated into 30, which is then interpolated into 60, we get bad artifacting like this;
Gallery here;
https://postimg.cc/gallery/ZygmBJn
So please, keep the cutscenes at 30 fps with zero interpolation.
One other critique I have is the use of the H.265/HEVC codec. The Vita cutscenes are MP4s, which use H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and as such are 8-bit video by nature. HEVC is 10-bit video, which means two extra bits of video meant to better show off colour are being wasted here, and because there is more colour at play in HEVC, the chances for incorrect colour reproduction is higher.
That said, on frames that don't have these issues, it looks great, if a bit smoothened out;
I don't know your waifu2x settings, but I would leave noise reduction to zero, as it causes a smoothing, Q-Tec like smearing effect.
I'm sorry that this is mostly negative, but I see very good potential here in the frames that don't have the issues. If you can leave noise reduction to zero, keep it at 30 fps like it is on Vita, and use MP4s with H.264 like Vita, then you'll be golden (ha, see what I did there?!).