Enhancing the BGs and ending anime thread

[Whendaleksattack]

Alright, I've decided to create a new thread dedicated to cleaning up both the BGs of Shun, along with the ending anime as well, just to keep things more organized.

So to start things off, I don't know if anyone tried upscaling the game over BGs (they are located in one of the .BIN files and can be seen with jPSXdec as TIM files). I'll try doing them later on when I have some free time.

Also, I'm wondering about a way to fix the ending. I found this site here on Archive a while ago (it's in Japanese), don't know if anyone saw it. Anyway, I find it interesting that not only did someone found a way of "fixing" the geometry of the STR file, but that it dates back to when Shun SE came out in 2000 (see the earliest capture).

[Whendaleksattack]

So I got to upscaling the Game Over photos (stored as .TIM files, extracted to .PNG files from jPSXdec) just right now, and HOT DAMN they don't look too bad:



I'll attach the originals in here as well, I'll try upscaling the ending video as well later on.

[Alc]

Anyone got the backgrounds from the original game?

I'm going to respond here to posts from this thread, to avoid going any further off-topic over there.

Looked at the upscaled versions just now and hooooolyyy balls - VERY impressive!! Great job, Alc!!

Cheers, but I really can't take credit - it's a largely automated process, just a couple of sliders and a few clicks once the program is installed.

I think the ones on YT are possibly from that Extra disc included with some releases of the UK Soundtrack, apparently it's the highest quality version out there. I remember seeing a page from a old UK fansite talking about fixing the geometry for the anime opening, I'll see if I can dig it up.

Ah, ok - let me know if you manage to dig up that Extra disc version.

If you're ripping the adverts, especially the one with Kawase fishing in the river, is there any chance of a lossless video at original resolution? Huff YUV as a codec, or similar, uploaded to Mega.nz, or archive.org, whatever works. I have a strong suspicion that the neural net video tool will work best on uncompressed/native res, anything substantially higher res and it seems to get confused about pixel sizes (plus there's the unavoidable quality loss from lossy compression in the first place).

I did upscale your ripped image of Kawase fishing in the river, you can see it here. I'd still like to play around with the panning video, though, if it isn't too much work.

I looked at the new BGs right now, they look really good! Quick question: what program do you use to upscale these? Just curious...

Gigapixel AI, by Topaz. It uses my GPU for acceleration, and it requires a card that supports OpenGL 3.3 or later, which means you need somewhat modern graphics hardware - Geforce 760/Radeon R9 280/Intel HD 5000.

I'm actually finding the lack of options quite limiting for other images, it's definitely a one-trick pony, but for the UK:S backgrounds it just worked like that bit in Blade Runner 

Anyway, I put that game over screen through the Gigapixel AI, you can see the result here. I think your upscale worked much better, dalek. What tool did you use?

[Whendaleksattack]

For me, I just use BigJpg to upscale images. It does a good job at doing so, but you do have to pay for other features, so I'll try out Gigapixel AI when I have the chance.

If anyone is also wondering, I am uploading the original files of the ads that I captured through BizHawk on Archive right now. They are quite large because they were captured uncompressed in their native resolution, without interlacing or any of that nonsense (speaking of nonsense, I have a video here on how I deal with interlacing).  I'll also add in the .PNG versions of my sprite ripping chronicles on the ads too, just in case. I'll let you know when all of them are uploaded.

Also, I found this video while searching around Archive, which seems to be an upscale of the Extra Disc version of the Shun Ending Video. I'll try tinkering with it later though.

EDIT: They are uploaded

[nathan]

The Shun ending anime video on the DVD is cropped to hide VHS artifacts, the original uncropped video is available here. It's still very low-res though. My guess is the dev team captured the video in the 90s and figured that low quality was okay since it was getting warped and shrunk anyway, and then lost the tape or something. Just speculation, but seems pretty reasonable.

[Whendaleksattack]

Neat! I never knew the DVD was cropped. Looking at the video itself, I wonder if it was traditionally or digitally animated. Even though it was around 1997 when Shun came out (a bit too early for digital animation, at least in TV terms), it looks a bit more like digital animation than traditional to me (it could just be the low resolution of all copies of the ending video I've found though). If it turned out to be traditionally animated, that would be interesting to me, but also sad that no cels or layouts have been found (except for the storyboard in a artbook) as of lately (I'd love to have a cel of the ending anime framed on my wall).

I took a screenshot of the provided video in that link, and tried to upscale it with Bigjpg but then aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh



(sorry for over-exaggerating, but it looks really washed out -- literally.)

[Tofu]

Hey guys, first time posting.
I've been trying to upscale the ending of Shun for a few months now, and I think waifu2x gives decent results. Some scenes are pretty impressive while others are a disaster (specially those with noisier backgrounds).



I used video2x to upscale the entire ending, with a scale of 2. A higher resolution than that gives weird results since the original video is pretty darn low quality. It also gets expensive really quickly, I don't think it's worth it. Here's the video.

[Whendaleksattack]

Amazing work, Tofu! I could never get waifu2x to work at all (mostly due to inexperience with setting up packages like that), but this...wow.

A higher resolution than that gives weird results since the original video is pretty darn low quality. It also gets expensive really quickly, I don't think it's worth it. Here's the video.

For the most part it does look good (some scenes look great), while scenes like Umi jumping across the rocks on the river don't fare as well (probably due to low resolution, as you stated). Still, I think this is a pretty good restoration of the ending anime, I'll definitely download this on my PC when I have the chance.
I also never heard of video2x, it sounds neat and I will definitely check it out.

[Alc]

That looks great, Tofu! I was surprised that bigjpg made such a mess since it uses Waifu2x, which is ostensibly for upscaling anime, but that vid looks great. I had awful results from Gigapixel's WIP video conversion utility.

The Archive.org video seems broken at the start, maybe a failed upload? Could you upload the file to somewhere else? Archive.org transcode to their own formats/bitrate.

[Tofu]

I actually have some issues playing the video in Firefox, but it works fine in Chrome and mpv. Here's a mirror anyway.
https://mega.nz/#F!o6BQFKAS!OxSxKj0NLTnajhZrZwHt_g

I'm not sure what's wrong with Bigjpg, I tried with different settings and it's always a mess. It's also really slow, it takes a minute to process a single image while it took me an hour to process the whole video on my CPU.

[nathan]

Video won't play in Firefox, in Media Player Classic, or in Windows Movie Player. Maybe re-encode it?

[Tofu]

Yup, my bad. I've re-encoded it and updated the links.
I've also added a CRF 0 encode with FLAC audio from the soundtrack.