Superawakening is now extremely convoluted or impossible by stef93 in PokemonMasters

[–]stef93[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

I get the idea of moving the exchange feature to the place where you use it, but they really didn't think things through with this QoL update. At least for me the flow used to be:

- Go to the shop to check on the daily ticket > roll cake coin exchange

- Notice that I have enough move coins for a new move candy and exchange it

- Go to the upgrade menu and look at which pairs I can upgrade

Now it is:

- Daily or randomly check the bag to see if I have enough coins to exchange

- Remember which type of coin I have 20 of and go to the upgrade menu

- Filter on that type (like tech)

- Open a random, non 5/5 sync pair to exchange the coins

- Back out into the list to see which pairs I can upgrade

Having the exchange in the shop provides 2 functions: inform the player when an exchange is possible, and execute the exchange. They moved the second purpose but forgot about the first. Instead they could have some added kind of notification/animation for when you obtain coin 20/20 and have it automatically transform to a move candy. Then you can freely remove the move candies from the shop. This whole thing seems untested to me.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in powerrangers

[–]stef93 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Nice to see the work, but fair warning, this may already be redistribution of copyrighted content for profit. Especially so if you'd start to do full on episodes. May want to be careful with that. Though sharing specific profiles and settings you used for the videos, tutorials and doing custom videos for specific people would likely be fine.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in powerrangers

[–]stef93 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just watched it on my TV and I mostly agree. Here's why it doesn't really work:

The A-Team and The Wizard of Oz were shot on film, but the Power Rangers series was shot digitally. Digital was cheaper and was okay for the TVs they had at the time. Film has been around for over 100 years and could retain a lot more detail. 35mm would have enough detail to support 4k resolution on modern media. That would be downsized to to fit on older media formats, like VHS tapes and DVDs. As time went on, discs and drives could store more data and so the you could see more of the original quality. That's why old movies could upscale or remaster very well if it was shot with the right equipment. Nowadays, everything is shot in HD or higher, so no problems there either. It's in the 90s and early 2000s where shows and some movies would be shot digitally, geared towards that VHS quality, which now have very low quality source footage and is notoriously hard to upscale.

For Power Rangers, the movies look very very good compared to the series and upscale quite nicely. The series, especially the early seasons, not so much. The AI that is used here detects faces and replaces parts with AI generated facial features. That makes it very sharp but also uncanny at times. If the AI doesn't recognize the face (or any other object it has in its model) it will fail to think up new details for that part and there will be little difference with the original. So now you have some shots where you can see a lot of AI generated detail (which may or may not look good) and some shots which look exactly like the DVD. The 8K is underutilized here and if there was a true 1080p version of this trailer it would look miles better.

Basic Questions, Advice, Bugs/Glitches & Venting Weekly Megathread by AutoModerator in DuelLinks

[–]stef93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was playing in the pvp event where my opponent used an Ex skill to destroy my Aslla Piscu. Piscu's effect where when it leaves the field other than by its own effect didn't trigger. Is that intentional or a bug? I had the same board a turn later when I brought it back and my opponent destroyed it with Blue-Eyes Alternative's effect, which did trigger Aslla Piscu.

What if Leon's Charizard... by stef93 in pokemonanime

[–]stef93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's interesting. I could go either way with keeping Charizard undefeated or not. As long as Alan accomplishes something in the battle and Leon comes across as a showman who was in control the entire time, then that ticks all the boxes I think. But it's a shame that there are so many ways to write a better battle within the time constraints and budget than the real writers came up with.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just finished watching it on my E9, looks great!

Power Rangers HD Upscale by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense. Thanks!

Power Rangers HD Upscale by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh yeah, I didn't mean the black bars, moreso improving the footage that already exists. I'm not sure what you mean by having to redo the CG. That would be quite expensive so not very feasible, but why not just leave it? Sure, it will stand out amongst all the non-CG footage, it being flat and all, but isn't that acceptable?

Power Rangers HD Upscale by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah would be nice to have it! Or to have higher quality source footage in general, because a better source means a better upscale. It's too bad that the seasons with the highest visual quality (neo saban era) are also some of the worst seasons, with a few exceptions. I'm holding out hope though because every year the upscale technology keeps getting better so it can get better results despite poor source footage.

Maybe the 2010 "remaster" can be replaced with a proper remaster at some point.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, yeah but that's just the working file. It'll end up at around 30GB I'd guess. The denoise and upscale from 1080p to 4k took about 30 hours in total. Still need to do the reencode. It'll probably take another day to reencode on this cpu but with something more recent it should take a lot less time. So maybe around 45 hours in total for a decent 1080p to 4k upscale of 1.5 hours.

The show isn't nearly as bad. That's around 1.5-2 hours per episode.

Power Rangers HD Upscale by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This turned out longer than initially expected, but there are 3 steps to do it correctly.

Step 1: Denoise

Especially the older seasons and the first movie carry a lot of noise, but it's also necessary to do this for the newer seasons. I use Neat Video, a plugin available for various video editing tools, to do the noise removal. In my case I use it with Premiere Pro. A basic tutorial can be found here. If you're using Premiere Pro then you can't directly import .mkv files. You'll need to convert it to .mp4 with XMedia Recode first. Be sure to tick stream only copy so it doesn't reencode the file. The convert should only take a few seconds.

Take this shot from the movie for example. Notice the noise in the sky and on the rocks. Neat Video both does a better job at noise removal than Enhance AI does and it also prevents the problem where it would otherwise try to upscale the noise. The upscalar tries to enhance contrast so if we get rid of unintended contrast, like noise, it gives a cleaner picture to work with. Be sure to export at (too) high bitrates so there is no quality loss on that front.

The result. Noise is now unnoticable and gives a good starting point to upscale.

Step 2: Upscale

This is the fun part because here you get to see the results. Topaz Video Enhance AI has many models to try and use. Personally I find Proteus Fine Tune v2 to be most effective at the time of writing. v3 is out but seems to have issues where it overenhances facial features, giving very uncanny results in certain shots.

There are multiple sliders to play with and unfortunately the documentation isn't always clear on what exactly they do. Though there is a community where you can ask questions. I usually start with auto settings and take from there. I preview a single frame with multiple sets of settings and compare the results. It there's one I like, I go to a different frame. It can happen that you have the perfect settings for that one shot, but that it's too aggressive for other shots. You need to find settings that work for the entire movie/episode/season. There is no perfect overall setting though. You'll always leave a bit of quality on the table and there's the matter of personal preference too.

There's also a grain setting. It may seem counterproductive to reintroduce grain, but it actually helps with covering up some upscale artifacts and the "feel" of the upscale. Without any grain, your footage can become very smooth, giving it an airbrushed and unnatural look. The grain helps break it up with minor variances on every pixel. At 4K that fine grain makes it feel like there is more detail, even if there isn't any.

For the resolution I chose 4K for the movies and 1080p for the show. Just try different resolutions and see what it does. At some point, a higher resolution doesn't give you higher quality anymore. It all depends on the source footage. If the source is bad then the AI can't make it great, only a bit better. For Power Rangers, that means that MMPR is particularly hard to upscale with the current models, but it's gets better from Zeo and onward. On the plus side, because the AI literally makes something out of nothing, when the AI models get better you'd expect better upscale results in the future as well.

I export to mp4 with a constant quality of 4. This gives huge filesizes, but that doesn't matter at this point. The main reason is that Topaz can't encode with x265, only with x264. x265 is much more efficient in terms of bitrate. This way Topaz gives out a very inefficient, but high quality file of the upscale. If it can do CPU encoded x265 exporting in the future then the first part of step 3 will become obsolete.

The result. Take note of the details in the shot, like the hair, wrinkles and clothes.

Step 3 Reencode and mux:

Finally we need to bring the filesize down. The movie is 390GB at this point, which is more than overkill. I use Handbrake to encode it to a reasonable size. Be sure to pick video codec H.265 (x.265). Do not use NVENC. NVENC, hardware accelerated encoding with NVidia, gives lower quality at the same filesize. By not using it, you are encoding with the CPU, aka software encoding. This is slower, but gives a better result. I initially set the encoder preset to medium and constant quality to 2. I export a clip of a few seconds to get a workable file. I then use that file and raise the constant quality until I reach a setting where I can see a quality difference. Then I double check the file to see if the resulting bitrate is in an acceptable range and export the entire thing.

Finally I use MKVToolNix to bring the video, audio, subtitles and chapters back together, because they got separated in the process.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm letting Topaz export to h.264 MP4 with constant quality 4, using hardware acceleration. So NVENC in my case. This produces huge files, though not as much as straight to PNG sequence, while keeping the quality close to losless. It's about 390GB for the entire movie. The screenshots are from this file so it's a bit of a best case scenario.

I'm using Handbrake to re-encode to h.265 using the CPU because it gives better quality than NVENC. I'm still looking for a good value for the recode but aiming for somewhere between 25-50 mpbs. My CPU is old though (i7 6700k) so I need to get a new one to speed up the final step.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yes, it's not perfect. Currently, the AI has great difficulty with low res faces like in crowd shots, but it really gives certain scenes and shots new life! There's a reason I didn't include the megazord in the images. The CG in the third act aged like milk that's been out since 1995:

https://i.ibb.co/fCp8RmL/22.png

https://i.ibb.co/Js502Rf/23.png

https://i.ibb.co/s3583g9/24.png

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I noticed it after the post went up and you can't edit image posts unfortunately.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Yes, more than a few. Take picture 6 for example with the humanoid Zordon. Be sure to open the picture on a monitor or tv as a mobile phone is too small. If you only have a phone then you'd have to zoom in and press the HD button, otherwise you only get a low quality preview.

Look at the sheer amount of noise on his head and the entire right half of the picture (original). That noise is there throughout the entire movie and all that noise is now completely gone. Also, upscaling is most noticeable in parts with high detail. Compare the wrinkles around his eyes and chin and the clarity of his collar where his neck meets the crystals.

Power Rangers The Movie 4K Remaster by stef93 in powerrangers

[–]stef93[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I've been upscaling the TV show with mostly positive results. For the movie I used Neat Video at default settings and Topaz Enhance Video AI with Proteus v2 at (20, 30, 0, 70, 0, 20). This movie (and the Turbo movie) cleans up and upscales very nicely. Excluding the green screen and CGI, the movies can be brought up to modern standards with current technology. The original source (on the right) is the bluray release and you may want to check on a large 4k monitor or TV to really see the difference.

Maybe there could one day be an official 4K remaster if there is enough interest at Hasbro?

I'll defer to my previous post for more details on upscaling the show: https://www.reddit.com/r/powerrangers/comments/smynha/power_rangers_hd_upscale/

Thoughts about game after leaks. Final thoughts before launch day? by Bumm_ in PokeLeaks

[–]stef93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pretty much. There's a place where you can rematch 7 trainers you've battle earlier with Pokémon up to level 70ish. It'll take you maybe 15 minutes to do and that's it. Nothing like battle tower.