1 Reply by sarah

(3 replies, posted in Using SVP)

Thanks for the reply. This was very helpful  & informative. smile


The idea is very simple: lighting is changing in real time while you're adjusting all those sliders and the effect of adjusting is visible immidiately.

Me culpa: I didn't even think to try this. I usually adjust it with the video stopped. You're right: it's fine how it is if they take effect immediately. (Though I suspect I'm not the only user who won't figure that out with a button named Apply.)


power users can [save their own lighting settings] right now with simple text editor

Cool, thanks for the instruction on how to do this. smile This will be useful.


we should do something with color banding (you mean it by "large rectangular regions", right?)
it's cubic in horizontal direction and linear in vertical

Yes, I'm talking about the banding. It sometimes looks to my eye like the steps are bigger than those you'd get from bit-depth, so I assumed it was an artifact of the algorithm. I guess I was wrong about that. neutral (Someday I will learn about writing when I'm tired … but then again maybe I won't.)


mmm, well, no, it's not [open source]

Interesting. Do you mind if I ask why? Do you guys sell OEM solutions? (I am not a Stallmanite: closed source software is the right of the developer, and has an important role to play. It's just unusual to see free software with no ads that isn't open sourced these days.)


Thanks again! Sarah

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2 Topic by sarah

(3 replies, posted in Using SVP)

I have three requests (below) around the ambient light system. This is a great feature, but I think it could use some improvements. I'm always willing to bribe to get my way, so I'll be happy to make another donation if any of this stuff is fixed.  wink

These issues notwithstanding, this is a fabulous project. Thanks to all those who work on it: I have turned several other people on to its magic.

Sarah


1. A real Apply button for the custom lighting settings.

The first is a simple UI request. In the most recent version of the SVP Manager, the custom lighting settings have an Apply button that acts like an Okay button, closing the dialog box. This means that if you want to experiment to find the settings you like, you have to go back through the menus after every adjustment. I would suggest that you follow standard UI design and have the traditional Cancel, Apply and Okay trio. At the very least, please just make it so Apply doesn't close the window!  mad

Making things worse, the menu item is now buried in a sub-sub-menu. The way it overlaps makes it frustratingly difficult to even open it without accidentally closing the submenu. Having to navigate all this every time makes finding the settings you like a real chore.  sad

2. Save my custom lighting settings

Not all types of video really want the same types of settings. It would be great if we could give our settings a name and add them to the list next to the current Type 1–4. (Incidentally, it would be nice to give those more descriptive names.)  cool

3. Higher quality lighting effect

The first rule of ambient lighting is that it should not distract. The lighting area is broken into large rectangular regions. The human visual system is designed to notice high frequency boundaries like this. For horizontally letterboxed video, the effect is so bad as to make the feature more or less unusable.

This can be easily solved by using any reasonable interpolation algorithm rather than the current nearest neighbor approach (nearest neighbor arguably has no place in any kind of image processing  roll). Preferably the interpolated values should be subject to a true random dither: patterning can be quite apparent for large-area gradients like those used here.

I'm actually quite interested in this feature, so I would be potentially willing to take a shot at improving the algorithm if somebody can point me toward the code for this feature. (I assume this project is open source, but I didn't see any links to the sources. And I don't speak Russian….  smile)

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3 Reply by sarah

(3 replies, posted in Using SVP)

I just want to chime in and second this feature request. It would be extremely useful for anybody who watches animation. It would also be nice to be able to temporarily change the profile without saving it. (E.g., sometimes a badly encoded or poor quality video needs some different settings, but I don't really want them to stick.)

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4 Topic by sarah

(7 replies, posted in Using SVP)

Hi,

I'm wondering if somebody can explain (or point me to a paper) exactly what is going on with the two "Bad areas artifacts" options?

I think I understand the general premise of a bad area: a block for which an accurate whole-block motion vector can't be found and that can't split into two moving regions (contour artifact).

Further I think I understand that the "suppression" setting turns off all interpolation for areas identified as "bad."

However, I'm not that clear on how the different masking types operate. (I understand masking in general, but sharp vs. light seems like an apples-to-oranges scale, and I'm not quite seeing how these masks would be defined.)

Regardless I don't have too many problems with artifacts, except with window blinds, which always seem to have really ugly artifacts.

Thanks for all the hard work. SVP is an amazing project and I've been happy to donate in the past. I'd love to see a "tech details" documentation section that really goes into algorithmic details, links papers, etc. I'm fairly familiar with video compression and graphics so I can grok most of what SVP is doing, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested and curious to know more.

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5 Reply by sarah

(12 replies, posted in Using SVP)

Thank you MAG79, your suggestion of setting SVP to 2.5x and ReClock to 25 -> 24 was really helpful. It didn't work at first, but disabling the "blend to refresh rate" setting did the trick. I appreciate that you read and understood the question instead of just telling me to blindly change all my settings. As promised, I have put in a donation. :-)


Kriim, I have two suggestions:

One, you might try looking at an app like gpu-z in addition to resource manager to see if you are just running out of CPU/GPU resources.

But also, if you are using madVR along with an NVidia display adapter, you may be one of the many people who are having judder or skipping, especially in combination with 60 fps video. There are two things you can try here:

   1) switch from madVR to VMR-9 (renderless) and see if that helps.
   2) most people seem to have luck going into the madVR settings and disabling "present several frames in advance" in the "Exclusive Mode" settings.

This seems to be the result of a change in behavior in recent NVidia drivers (the last few months). No one is certain whether the fault lies with NVidia or madVR, but there is some kind of bad interaction.

I am still able to use madVR with perfect video output as long as I make the settings change I described.


PS: I don't want to start a debate, and I am thankful for your help with DirectShow, but it is technically correct to refer to video using Hz. A frame of video is a (reconstructed, filtered) sample. It is standard practice to describe sample rates using the Hz unit, and in fact any periodic phenomenon can be described using Hz. If you look at the writings of Jim Blinn on computer graphics and video, he uses expressions like "29.97 Hz frame rate" constantly. (I'm not sure there's any higher authority than Blinn.) Frame rate is a frequency like any other.

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6 Reply by sarah

(12 replies, posted in Using SVP)

I am already using MPC-HC and MadVR. smile The skin is ugly compared to Windows Media Player, but it's worth it for the improved video. I tried PotPlayer once but I can't remember why I decided I liked MPC-HC better.

I could get rid of ReClock, but do you have some other idea on how to correct the videos that claim the wrong framerate? I don't like the sped-up effect when someone has taken 24 fps but and encoded it as 25 fps. The pitch shift makes the voices sound weird and the too-fast motion looks phony and bizarre, especially with SVP enabled.

For now I can use ReClock to fix the framerate, but I end up at 57 fps instead of 60, which looks okay but obviously isn't optimal. (Plus it's a nuisance to have to reconfigure ReClock every time I open a new video since it can't detect the real underlying framerate.)

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7 Topic by sarah

(12 replies, posted in Using SVP)

I don't quite understand how to work with DirectShow graphs, so I apologize in advance if should be obvious.

I have quite a few videos in my collection where someone has taken a 24 fps source and just sped it up to 25 fps. This really bugs me: the audio is pitched too high and the motions are too fast. All I want to do is slow this back down to 24 fps, then feed it into SVP for interpolation to my LCD's refresh rate. (I am using ffdshow as well: the postprocessing is indispensable.)

I would think that this is exactly why ReClock is included with SVP, but it seems to be at the wrong place in the rendering pipeline.

It seems to go
   ffdshow (incl. SVP) -> ReClock

I want it to go
   ReClock -> SVP

Is there a way to make this happen? (Or is there some alternative I can use?)

It seems like there's really no point using ReClock in conjunction with SVP otherwise, except maybe to do audio pitch correction.

I also find that ReClock gets really confused and can't tell the original framerate when SVP is running: it thinks everything is 59.849 Hz because that's the output of SVP.

I will really appreciate any help with this.  smile  I've spent enough time trying to figure it out on my own. (I promise I'll make a donation if someone has a solution and/or can explain this all to me so I understand.)

(One thing that really confuses me is that DirectShow seems to just treat ReClock as an audio renderer even though it can modify my video playback.)

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