#more DetailTilted rambling

[detailtilted]

Next Enhanced Video In Process - CHICON 2008

WARNING: Heavy camera flashes below.

I thought I'd post an update in case anyone's curious. After finishing Comic-Con 2008, I moved on to CHICON 2008. The videos for the main panels are decent and they're upscaling nicely, but you'll all hate the quality of the Breakfast video. I'm doing that one first.

I made some improvements to the originals which are explained and shown below, but I couldn't upscale them. Jared came out ok, probably because he was closer to the camera, but even the most light-handed approach distorted Jensen's features too much.

However, one thing I improved were the flashes. The original videos are nuts. Flashes have been bad on other videos too, but I think the lighting in the room made them stand out worse here. I was afraid they'd give someone a seizure or something so I found a way to reduce them. I probably won't do this again on other videos because I used a free trial that expired and I've already put way too much money into software for this pet project. I don't think it'd work as reliably on the less dramatically flashy videos anyway, but I may reconsider the purchase if I encounter more videos like this down the road.

I also tried to do some color corrections, but it's erratic. Suppressing the flashes doesn't change the real life effect they had on the lighting in the room. Maybe that's why the color correction settings I applied didn't have consistent results throughout the video. I separated out some longer segments of drastically different colors and fixed them independently, but there was just too much fluctuation. Individually analyzing and correcting all 37,440 frames is way beyond the scope of this project (and my patience) and would probably require more lifetimes than I have.

Anyway, I wanted to post a short comparison video so people can see the difference. I think when people just see the enhanced video by itself they'll be like, "this sucks!" I was hoping people might not hate it as much if they've seen how it originally looked. I think the "enhanced" version, once I publish it, will be the best version that's been posted to date, even if it's still crappy.

This video has three 30-second samples:

Original version of Breakfast video.

My modified version.

Sample of upscaled main J2 panel to prove it will get better again after the Breakfast video. (No flashes removed. You can see them, but I think they're less painful.)

I've also made other adjustments that aren't seen in that sample:

The best-quality video has interruptions because the video taker also took pictures. This caused the frame to freeze and the sound to cut out. When possible, I edited in an alternate lower-quality video at those moments. I also edited in the alternate video to cover brief segments missing in the main videos.

The only other video that has the 1st two minutes is one where the video taker was scared to be too obvious about what they were doing and so recorded their legs and random non-J2 objects instead. 😂 But it was still helpful, because I substituted that video's audio in for the sections that cut out on the primary video due to the picture taking. We'll still have a few freeze frames in the first two minutes, but at least we can hear what was going on.

Speaking of hearing, there were some truly ear-shattering screams when Jared and Jensen first came out. I lowered the volume a little in those moments to save your ears some trauma.

This breakfast video will be the next one I release, but my video releases will be increasingly slow. I have something going on in real life that's eating up most of my spare time and will probably continue to do so off and on for most of this year. Nothing bad, just very time-consuming. This is a shorter video though, and I'm already well into the work on it, so hopefully it won't take too long.