Duration: 2:20

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10

I uploaded this earlier (12 years ago...), but this time it's upscaled! Here's the original description:
"This is the opening to the RPG, Brave Soul. A retro RPG for the PC...
It was surprisingly good! The dungeon crawling might not be your thing though. It was a bit generic and slow at first. Still, it kept me playing till the end! (played on Hard mode)

It has some 18+ scenes, but the game does not focus on them. Most of the cutscenes play out like an anime scenerio instead."

Again testing out techniques and such. This took way too long... And I'm not terribly pleased with the noisy sections. I was attempting to "remake" parts of the video in After Effects, but I couldn't find a way to isolate the parts I wanted to keep. Like the first scene with the dragon that moves around... If I could find a way to automatically isolate him, I could place him in front of a perfectly clean background; noise-free. Alas, everything I tried, color tracking; AI tracking; tracker stuff meant for non-animation; and even photoshop... couldn't do a good enough job. So, I just used a slow deflicker/noise removal instead...

Anyway, the process went like this: take the original 480x360 video, then use Topaz Gigapixel 1x, low res, auto, no gamma correction; (cleaned up the image a bit, fixed some artifacts etc.); then use 4x realESRGAN x4plus anime 6B and 8x NMKD-Typescale 175k together to create the clean anime characters you see.

... At least I think that's what I used. I have notes where I tried waifugan, a SwinIR L x4, Topaz Denoise, 4x realistic rescaler, 4x ultramix restore, and some others. Think I used the others in some select selections, trying to get a better result.

Oh and yes, 60 FPS once more. I don't think it's distracting. I picked and chose from various methods of interpolation. FILM, RIFE, maybe some of SVP's, and some parts are just untouched (double the frames). Original file was 30 fps, now it's 60.

Overall, pretty decent result for the anime characters. The background stuff needs help, and the final scene definitely could use pure stable diffusion or if I could find the original images... but I think I spent enough time on this little project. Other stuff beckons!

Enjoy!