[Released] [AviSynth] The Amazing Digital Circus - Enhanced Edition

[narth]

The Amazing Digital Circus - Enhanced Edition

[b]Purpose:[/b]

I went and saw The Last Act (Episode 8 & 9) in theaters and was blown away by how cleaner of a source Episode 8 was on the DCP and how nice Episode 9 looked compared to what I saw on YouTube once it was released. I wasn't surprised of course due to how the rest of the show looked online, so that planted a seed in the back of my mind that grew into the end result of this project. This project originally started as a simple reconstruction of The Last Act using an AI upscale of the fish intro and 2 shots of the series recap I couldn't source from the rest of the episodes at the beginning of the movie and the cleaner Netflix source to reconstruct the recap of the series, and I was reminded of the compression issues after the first render and I wanted to see what I could do to improve it. After being mostly impressed with what I was able to accomplish with AviSynth over AI tools to fix compression issues (Banding, blocking, aliasing), I switched to a AviSynth workflow and decided to expand the project to cover all of the episodes.

Process:

I did a few visual comparisons and found that the Netflix WEB-DL's of the episodes were the better source detail and bitrate so I went with those and used a script that Debands, deblocks, performs some anti-aliasing and does a light warp-sharpen to further hide any aliasing issues and make the image slightly less soft. A light layer of grain was added over the image to help make the filter come together cohesively. I felt an authentic 35mm grain overlay wouldn't suit the 3D animation so I opted to use an AviSynth script to add a light layer onto the image. I also tweaked the saturation slightly to reduce some of the harsh colors the show had and brightness/contrast to address the Netflix version having lower contrast than the YouTube version.

I also discovered that the Netflix source had more detail in the mix than the YouTube so I also opted to use that mix.

Around this time I decided I wanted to do a Blu-Ray release eventually for myself so I tested out converting to Dolby Digital AC3 and it compressed the detail similar to how the YouTube mixed looked. I ended up encoding in DTS-HD MA for compatibility with the higher quality preserved. YouTube subtitles were synced up and cleaned up and converted to SUP files for Blu-Ray compatibility as well. This project should be 100% Blu-Ray compatible but I haven't tested it myself yet.

Comparisons (Full Gallery):

Feel free to reach me in a PM for how to get this project! Hope everyone enjoys!