I've used waifu2x but not that. I'm not sure that I would want to, it seems like it's changing how it's meant to be.

>>34181
I personally don't see much point in using sharpening or upscaling filters especially since most anime (in the SoL genre at least) consists of soft, subtle gradients rather than fine high-frequency textures. This might sound heretical (especially to the av quality-philes) but unless the art is particularly noteworthy then it's not clear – to me at least – that the marginal benefit from upscaling is really going to have a measurable impact on your viewing experience or enjoyment of the show.

This seems like an awful idea.

From what I've seen it works best with source material that is already pretty good looking. So, if you've got some nice 1080p BD release of a show you like and have a higher rez monitor, then it can look better in that scenario. Pic is split in half with upscale vs none, top and bottom. You can barely tell in a still screencap but in motion it's noticeably better. Sorry the pic is so big but I figure detail would be lost in jpg and its already hard to tell. Also I don't have a 4k screen to use, but the algorithm will adaptively scale, so it can be used for anything higher than the rez of the source, so 720p can be upscaled to 1080 etc.

Post edited on 3rd Mar 2020, 5:59pm

On the other hand, with more average quality source, like 720p tv rips, it seems to always look worse. most of the difference this algorithm makes is with object edges, and with this the lines get larger and although they have sharper edges it looks off in motion, original is better in this case. Oh and this is halved side to side instead of top and bottom, more obvious though. Unfortunately, it can't be used to make bad things look good, it's really mostly good for making already good things look a little bit better.

Post edited on 3rd Mar 2020, 6:14pm

By the way, there is an update to this (v2.1) that looks way better with lower quality files. It removes most all of the sharpening artifacts all over the previous versions and looks pretty nice with 720p and even 480p upscaling. I would recommend checking it out.

>>34244
I finally had a chance to try it out, and I'm quite impressed – not necessarily because of the quality of the result but more because having an open-source, real-time upscaling algorithm is amazing. It doesn't even require obscene amounts of compute-power, running fairly well on an old laptop (albeit with an nvidia discrete gpu).

The results are as promised, resulting in crisper edges without too heavy of an "over-sharpened" look. I still maintain that the overall benefit is marginal since it's probably not going to revolutionize your watching experience.

>>34246
I agree it is impressive this sort of thing can exist now. The way I see it, functionally, is more of a one step replacement for all of those convoluted guides on how to set up MPC-HC properly that people used to swear by for some reason. I never once noticed a perceivable difference with those or any other player side tweaking except for putting my face an inch away from the screen looking at screencaps. With this it's easily noticeable even watching normally. I think it has gotten better than the stock upscaling algorithm in most all cases so I see no reason not to use it, at least personally. I don't even really mind low quality things as much either, most stuff I watch is purposely lower res to save on HDD space.

Isn't JP doing broadcasting digitally at 720p?

>>37152
It's usually produced at resolutions between 720p-900p.

>>34249
If you haven't tried it recently, the recent generation of anime4k shaders are really quite neat. I don't care too much about the upscaling one, but there's a "restore" shader which does something similar to a combination of deband/dehalo + warpsharp except with much less artifacting. It works really well on shows that are poorly encoded, or just a tad blurry.

What's neat is that the "shader" just seems to be a bunch of convs whose perceptual loss was minimized via ml training. Given the existence of these, I'm surprised people still need to mess around with manually doing dehalo and stuff in avisynth, when you could just pass it through these and get near perfect results.

>>37156
What are the resolutions for anime on blue-ray? I'm guessing 1920 x 1080 pixels.

>>37181
They can upscale it to whatever they want, it was still produced at those resolutions I quoted.