Mpeg2 Macroblocking

[PDB]

I have a few recordings that break up into blocking in fast motion. Anyone have a good technique to fight this?

[spoRv]

It depends how bad the problem is... in avisynth, the deblock filter helps, but not so much; adding to that a grain plate helps a lot IMHO!

[PDB]

Is the deblock filter basically a softening filter? Does the grain plate itself help or is that with the deblock filter?

[spoRv]

Deblock is not a softening filter; it basically "round" evident square blocks; grain plate is just a capture of film grain, so it's the real deal, it's"organic", and better than a classic grain filter which is fake.

Right now I'm finishing to work to The Arrival, and I decided to use deblock then apply a grain plate; deblock alone doesn't help a lot, because there is almost no grain in the BD, so the grain plate is the real winner here...

[guiser]

I would guess also that deblock should be used lightly to avoid removing non-block film details as well? I've only used that filter in Handbrake which has a simple slider for tuning, not sure what "more" or "less" actually means in terms of the filter though.

[PDB]

Thanks guys. I was capturing some stuff from my DVR and since it is MPEG2 there is a lot of blocking. For example this is from the open matte True Lies:

[Image: vlcsnap_2015_02_04_23h01m39s162.png]

I'd like to preserve it but you can see the problem. Its baked into the HD master.

Andrea, what setting do you like to use for deblock?

[spoRv]

Usually I use the default ones, as the "harder" work is made by the grain plate!


Sure this is a problematic image, but should be not so noticeable when in motion...
well, here you are two processed image

with only deblock:
[Image: test_deblock.png]
link to the image: http://s27.postimg.cc/lqbpamb77/test_deblock.png

with deblock and faint grain plate:
[Image: test_deblock_grainplate.png]
link to the image: http://s27.postimg.cc/gsy4pi983/test_deb...nplate.png

(strangely today screenshotcomparison has problems...)

[PDB]

Thanks for the example Andrea. I'm going to give that a try. Frankly, I'm not much of an AVIsynth guy but there are too many useful tools for me to ignore it. I need to start getting more comfortable with it.

[spoRv]

At the beginning, I was very afraid to use avisynth... but, thanks to my old BASIC and HTML programming knowledge, it was not that hard, after a LONG period of trials and errors... what I love most is the fact you have a simple script that you could also comment - I reccomend to do it every time - and, for example, if you back to work on a project after several months (or years) you only have to take a brief look at it, eventually make a small change, and you have a sort of "video program" that do everything on its own... I love this software, even if it's really old, it continues to amaze me!

[PDB]

Has anyone tried 2D Cleaner or Smart Smoother for cleaning up mpeg blocking? I tried 2D Cleaner and it looked pretty good on bad blocking but I didn't know if it had errors I didn't know about.