Creating this since I get asked a lot what my process is for video cleaning.
The funny history behind this is - I joined this forum having no idea what to expect and no intention to participate. So when I picked my username I just mashed on my keyboard. First 5 characters happened to be g90ak.
Fast forward a few months and I picked up a Handy and was really starting to appreciate the community that was built here and wanted to begin giving back in some way - I didn’t have enough time then to script myself unfortunately, but did have electricity and good GPUs. Asked the mods to shorten my name, whipped up a quick avatar, and got to work.
The term “g90ak’ed” was literally a personal tag for me to keep track of what I processed so I wouldn’t get confused on my hard drive between original and processed versions. I started sharing with the community and things have just kinda gone from here.
My goal with video enhancement is centered around preserving as much of the original content and correcting and improving it as much as possible.
Correction - in this “phase” of my process I address specific issues with the original content across a few areas:
- Frame duplication correction - In a lot of DVD content, there is 3:2 pulldown, which repeats frames on a regular basis. This is a leftover artifact from conversion of film (24fps) to TV/DVD (30fps). It can lead to judder which is most apparent during pans and looks like very subtle jerkiness.
- Deinterlacing - DVD content was originally stored as odd and even lines per frame. This helped save bandwidth and still produce a full frame on TVs and relied on our eyeballs to merge the lines together. Once we moved to LCDs and beyond, this looks like jagged lines that needs to be corrected.
- Variable frame rate - Many streaming sites will use encoding settings to create as small files as possible (to save server costs), one of the techniques that is used is variable frame rate which can also lead to poor frame pacing and jerkiness
- Black/White Levels - Some content is improperly mastered, resulting in the blacks not being black (looking grey), or whites not being white (looking tan/dirty). Correction of levels gives the video depth and impact and can correct very “flat” looking content.
- Hue - Some content can be overly red/blue/green/yellow, etc. Adjusting hue makes colors appear more natural, skin tones more “healthy”, etc.
- Gamma - This is a big one - LOTS of content has gamma pushed a bit high. Perhaps it’s because it’s designed to be viewed in brighter rooms, but most of my gooning is done in the dark. Making adjustments to gamma can make the video “pop” a lot more and have more impact.
Improvement - In this phase, I’m doing more adjustments that depart further away from the original source and are done with the interest of making the videos look “better” vs. the previous step of correction, which focuses on making videos look “right.”
- Saturation - Careful adjustment of saturation, especially on older content will make colors more vivid and lifelike. It boosts color intensity of the entire video.
- Vibrance - This is similar to saturation, but only targets portions of the content that have low color intensity. It’s a good way to provide further color “pop” of background items, clothing features, etc. without making everything oversaturated
- AI Upscaling - with monitors and VR benefiting from higher resolutions, allowing AI models to intelligently upscale can have huge benefits in terms of sharpness, reducing color banding, and edge fidelity.
- AI Frame Interpolation - again, with most playback devices allowing for higher refresh rates than the typical 24 or 30 fps of source content, intelligently increasing the frame rate can result in more smooth and lifelike playback. This process generates “in between” frames for the video, making motion much more smooth. This is hugely beneficial in porn as there is often a lot of fast action. I am NOT supportive of this being done to TV or Movie content, but find it great for porn as it adds a level of realism and immersion.
- 3D Conversion - VR! I really am a huge fan of viewing all adult content via VR. Being “locked in” is a much better experience for me than looking at a monitor. Conversion of 2D content via AI 3D further adds to the sense of immersion. This process takes the input content and “warps” a left and right eye image for each frame. It tries to determine what content is in the fore/mid/background and warps slightly different images to give perceived depth when viewing in 3D.
Tool List - these are the tools I typically will use for each of these steps. I often do venture to other tools for very specific use cases such as VHS content, Anime, etc.:
- Frame duplication correction - Avisynth + Decimate
- Deinterlacing - Avisynth + QTGMC
- Variable frame rate correction - FFmpeg + FPS command
- Black/White Levels - Avisynth + Smoothlevels
- Hue - Avisynth + Smoothtweak
- Gamma - Avisynth + Smoothlevels
- Saturation - Avisynth + Smoothtweak
- Vibrance - Avisynth + Satmask
- AI Upscaling - Topaz Video
- AI Frame Interpolation - SVFI or Flowframes
- 3D Conversion - Owl3D
- Final encode - Command line FFMPEG
For final encoding, I use a single pass of CRF 19-22 with h.265 to encode. Do not use h.264 with VR videos - most hardware acceleration won’t work, making the video very hard to play back.
That’s it. There is no strict process I follow, as each video needs its own settings based on inherent issues or lack thereof.
This is a very CPU and GPU intensive process. My rig will consume between 350-550 watts continuously while processing a video. A half hour video can take between 5-8 hours depending on complexity (15th gen i9 @ 5ghz + 5080RTX) . I would not recommend getting into this without at least an 6th gen i7 CPU and a 1080ti unless you’re only doing clips of 5 min or shorter.
Learning how to use Avisynth is the hardest part. There’s a good wiki and some tutorials out there. I won’t be able to recreate it here though. You can skip it and get results that are pretty good. However, that’s really the big difference between my versions and most of the others.
Living the dream. Working on some new scripts too. Hopefully good stuff for the community.
