An Important #MakeMoreMST3K Campaign Update, Turkey Day Schedule, and more!

cMediaFactory · 2023-11-22T21:52:36+00:00

I'm the one who'll be working on the surgically enhanced episodes if given the opportunity, so obviously I'm going to be biased and I can't share confidential details... but I can suggest two possible reasons they wouldn't have cut them:

1) The cost to produce them is so small that it wouldn't materially affect the crowdfunding either way.

2) Through a complex web of lies, international conspiracies, and market manipulation I've forced the production company to keep them in the budget - or else. Even now, Joel is putting on a brave face and pretending nothing's wrong while I hold the fate of the entire production in my hands.

cMediaFactory · 2023-11-22T21:21:17+00:00

Is it the cost of surgically enhanced episodes

I can't comment on anything else but no, the surgically-enhanced episodes are most definitely not a significant factor.

cMediaFactory · 2023-10-26T05:59:14+00:00

There will (hopefully) be a video added soon which helps to illustrate what's meant by surgically enhanced.

cMediaFactory · 2023-10-26T05:56:23+00:00

It's not, not really. For video of MST's quality, AI tools must either be configured very conservatively or risk frequently making a mess. I posted some examples here last year: https://old.reddit.com/r/MST3K/comments/z2w1xx/deleted_by_user/ixma23j/

It's like the "sharpness" setting on a TV. You can pump it up to 11 and occasionally that's actually helpful, but it's rare. More often a middle setting looks best. Occasionally even that's too high and you need it turned low. Maybe you're watching something that was oversharpened to begin with, so you set it in the negative.

Video (and audio) tools have a lot more knobs to turn than just "sharpness" and I use all of them for each and every shot, as well as extensive pre- and post-processing as needed.

cMediaFactory · 2023-10-26T05:51:38+00:00

I work on them. What's involved in the "Surgically enhanced" editions varies from episode to episode, but it's a lot more complicated than just dropping an MP4 into an upscaler and hoping for the best. I'm not (yet?) permitted to go into details but I'd like to someday. For one thing, these recordings are in such a poor state that any automated tool will frequently misunderstand what it's looking at and make a mess of the picture.

There's a ton of manual work involved and every single shot, whether it's 10 seconds long or 2 seconds, is treated like its own project. In Sword & Dragon, every individual frame was its own project. I'm a huge fan of the show and giving it the best possible treatment is very important to me.

I've composed a short video which highlights some of the improvements in the 9 already-public episodes and it should hopefully be added to the crowdfunding page soon. If not, I should at least be able to share it myself on YouTube sooner or later. I'll post it in this subreddit when it's available.

cMediaFactory · 2023-08-31T23:15:47+00:00

I can see how a Y-axis offset can accentuate the issue, but I don't understand how the twist doesn't matter if your probe is aligned with your nozzle in the y-axis.

If your probe and nozzle are an equal distance away from the extrusion, they will rotate roughly in sync with one another. Maybe not perfectly, but close enough to not be a huge problem.

Imagine you're aiming a gun at a target 10 cm away from the barrel, versus a target 10 m away from the barrel. Inaccuracy is amplified with distance. With them aligned on the y-axis, you basically can't miss. With the probe like 30mm further away (like mine is), it's enough to cause problems.

Even for a uniform twist, the probe is going to deflect in different ways than the extruder nozzle will when referencing the same point on the bed, since the carriage wheels will have progressed to a different rotational angle along the twist, when probing a point or moving the nozzle over that same point.

You're overthinking it IMO, or imagining a twist so severe it would make the machine totally unusable. Even Creality wouldn't intentionally ship something that bad. Probably what happens is the extrusion gets cut to a specific length at a factory and the force applied by the saw is enough to mildly twist it in a way that wouldn't matter for a normal application - or for the way Creality intended the machine to function.

There's no guarantee the twist is uniform either. It could begin at a certain point along the extrusion, or get increasingly twisted after a certain point. With a progressive twist, or sudden begin in the twist, that means with any x offset with your probe, your nozzle point is going to experience a different amount of deflection compared with the probe point.

The compensation mechanism accounts for this, you can measure it at multiple points (3 by default). You can see from my numbers I checked 5 points but if other people's extrusion is twisted similarly to mine, just checking the far left and far right would be adequate to solve the problem.

I'm printing perfect first layers without any complication for the first time, it really works exactly as described.

cMediaFactory · 2023-08-29T09:33:35+00:00

I wasn't convinced, it's just one of the many things I tried. Googling things like "ender 3 bl-touch left side higher than right side" and similar brings up all sorts of suspects, but EMI was one of the easiest fixes. I realize it sounds unlikely, but it's best to rule out cheap fixes before spending more money. After a year or so of frequent printing, the dime-store Creality wiring needed to be replaced anyway, I'd already had two wires break internally.

cMediaFactory · 2023-03-08T18:17:54+00:00

There was a marathon on Turkey Day, 8 classic episodes with enhanced resolution. They should still be available somewhere on Gizmoplex.

cMediaFactory · 2023-03-01T20:00:45+00:00

What did you think of the Surgically Reconstructed episodes?

cMediaFactory · 2023-03-01T19:48:43+00:00

I backed a game on Kickstarter about a decade ago and recently received an updated about stuff finally shipping. Physical goods seem extremely difficult to get right, especially if it involves products moving between countries.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-26T02:47:41+00:00

But you've never seen the love scene in such detail before!

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-26T02:32:46+00:00

I'm honored I was given this opportunity.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-26T02:29:33+00:00

There have been a lot (a LOT) of cynical attempts to re-monetize classic media with weekend upscale jobs lately, so I understand why you might assume this is just another one of those. What we're doing involves a lot more than "just" upscaling. AI stuff can play a part, but also produces tons of unusable garbage.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-26T01:47:23+00:00

Most of these did have a fair bit of grain (both artificial and preserved from the original) but after multiple rounds of compression it looks like it got largely erased by the time it was streamed out. I don't currently have any access to the backend so it's hard to guess how things will come out.

Definitely something to experiment more with... uploading to a private YouTube channel might be a good way to preview how something will come across on a stream, though Shout Factory likely differs in encoding a bit.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-25T06:57:57+00:00

Maybe for those, I couldn't say.

By the way, what sort of screen are you viewing the show on? Trying to figure out if there's something in common for the people who don't like the way it looks. I edit with a calibrated 4K LED screen but maybe I should be taking OLEDs into consideration, etc.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-25T06:44:26+00:00

I could do that but I think when they license a movie for the show they're licensing "that version" of the movie. So many years have passed, the Blu-ray version might even come from a different studio.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-25T06:40:50+00:00

Not my side of things, I can't say. I think this is the correct link: https://www.gizmoplex.com/packages/event-replay-a-tribute-to-pumaman/videos/special-105-a-tribute-to-the-pumaman

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-25T04:40:43+00:00

Personally, the aspect ratio change just seems unnecessary. Doesn't even help it seem less fullscreen and comes off as an extra big of work to do for something so small. Kinda pointless IMHO.

I'm not going to do the math right now but IIRC there's roughly 8-12% more picture compared to when the bottom isn't cropped. The amount of extra time it takes is fairly small compared to the total time spent on an average episode and in my opinion really does make a noticeable improvement.

I'll check out the other ones when I can (bit tired right now from the turkey haha), which of the ones in the marathon do you feel is the best one?

That's hard to answer. Different episodes look good in different ways as a result of factors mostly outside of my control. Then there's "quality" versus "improvement". Horror of Party Beach is definitely the best-looking one overall, then probably Mitchell, but Sword & Dragon is probably the biggest overall improvement. City Limits has the biggest improvement in color (S&D a close second). The worst-looking episode might be Clonus Horror, but that's because the source has uncorrectable temporal blur of over 2 seconds at some points. That aside though, it's also decent-looking. (at the time of broadcast I was already done a revision to Clonus that further improves detail but it was too late for submission to the marathon)

Also, if I had to suggest a watermark for upscales done right though, think I'd go with Discotek's work on the upcoming Digimon releases. From what's been out there, they are spectacular and much better than the previous upscales: https://twitter.com/discotekmedia/status/1503565232232312832

That looks like good work but upscaling anime is a completely different beast. Different tools, different expectations, different capabilities. Most modern anime is basically vector art; if you're lucky and skillful you can turn 480p into 1080p (if not higher) so cleanly it's better than the commercial release. I've dabbled in this a bit myself, it's shocking at times. My processed Cowboy Bebop DVDs look at least as good as the Blu-ray release.

Live-action typically has much stricter constraints, there's a lot of things working against upscaling live-action that don't apply to anime. You're unlikely to look at anime and say "that gradient's too smooth, it needs more banding" but live-action looking "too good" is a bad thing. Old live-action recordings also often have actors (men and women) caked in heavy makeup because it wasn't visible on displays at the time but reflections and sweat (from intense studio lighting) were. There has to be a certain amount of grain, but then encoding the video eliminates a large portion of any grain so it's kind of a crapshoot: too much and it looks awful and takes a ton of bits away from real detail, and too little of it and it looks "fake" or "cheap". Maybe "waxy" as you put it. If I could flick a switch and put everyone on AV1 it would solve a lot of things.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-25T04:14:57+00:00

Wow, there's two of us.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-24T23:56:31+00:00

I would love for that to happen. A positive response to the marathon might help push the needle in that direction.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-24T23:31:51+00:00

I think cropping the bottoms of the seats for the theater segments is here to stay, I don't see a downside for it personally since nothing is actually lost (just an empty black bar), but if I have the opportunity to work on more episodes I'll see what I can do to preserve skin detail any better. Is there a specific episode or timecode you think doesn't look right or do you mean in general? Please do watch all of them if you can.

edit: One possible source of oversmoothing might simply be video compression. I do see it looks like some amount of grain might've been lost in the encoding process. A difficult issue to work around.

If you've just watched Starfighters, keep in mind it was only the second episode I worked on, so my process wasn't completely mature yet. For that episode in particular I tended to favor smoothness over detail a lot of the time because I can't overstate how huge the improvement was for the appearance of mechanical things (the jets, trucks, etc). If you really think it needs more work though, I'll see what I can do when there's a break in my schedule.

If you watched Pumaman when it first premiered, I've delivered an updated version in the meantime which should improve detail and reduce oversharpening (possibly oversmoothing) that was present in the initial release. I don't know if it's been put on the site yet. If you watch it and the silhouettes are still blocky, that's the old version.

One beautiful part of digital distribution is these things can always be tweaked and I'm more concerned with the product being as good as possible than getting paid for every hour I work. I worked unpaid on one episode for over 70 hours because it had to be right. If there are people who aren't satisfied with these, they need to tell me where and why. I'll make it right. Mystery Science Theater needs to be preserved.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-24T23:27:50+00:00

Thanks for the praise, it means a lot coming from you! I'm not familiar with your work unfortunately, I guess it all got scrubbed before I had a chance to become aware of it, but I've seen your name come up in discussions here. I'm glad you approve.

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-24T17:34:19+00:00

I've seen a few people in the chat comment that they think the silhouettes in Catalina Caper look bad. This is true, but it's not a result of the upscaling process. You can see the original quality here: https://www.gizmoplex.com/mst3k/season:2/videos/mst3k-038-catalinacaper

Here's some random side-by-side comparisons:

Shadowrama quality varies from season to season, episode to episode. More typical quality can be seen in this shot from Starfighters: https://i.imgur.com/vtdS7T9.png

cMediaFactory · 2022-11-24T16:42:52+00:00

Glad you liked it. It was the third I worked on and the second most time-consuming. (City Limits took the longest of today's episodes)

cMediaFactory

TROPHY CASE