I have some live action video I am scaling up 200% and then uploading to youtube.
Trying to reserve as much quality as possible.
Can anyone suggest some good starting settings to use with hqdn3d?
Is there a better option than hqdn3d for live action?
Is it normally a good idea to apply some unsharp masking after you denoise a video?
2 Answers
Upscaling is rather unlikely to help quality, so I suggest you should first consider not upscaling.
hqdn3d will only harm fidelity, but that's more of a theoretical concern if you happen to prefer the way the video looks after being filtered. I usually prefer sort of conservative options like "hqdn3d=4:4:3:3" or similar. If you at all like what that does to your video, you may consider that the first two parameters could be set higher for higher-def videos but should not be raised a whole lot on low-res videos. The last two parameters are temporal filtering, and as you may have already seen, you get an annoying motion-blur like effect if you overdo it.
But ultimately you have to accept that this is all subjective, and each video will be affected to different degrees and in different ways by this filtering.
Upscaling in fact increases the ammount of detail a lot! Youtube always compresses Video. 1080p looks very bad. Scaling it up to 1440p already looks quite good. To 4k it looks almost perfect. Of course it is only 1080p detail level, but this is a very great trick, to get better quality video on youtube. I realy hate it a lot, that NO ONE seems to do this. Youtube 1080p's bitrate looks horrible.
Just to back up the question starter.
About hqdn3d: You realy need to individually test this out. This takes some time. Use the parameter: -frames:v 300, to only render the first 300 frames. Usually this is plenty for a test comparision. It would take to long, to render the whole video for testing purpouse! However the parameters required for hqdn3d are very source specific. Test out what works best. If you have multiple sources, save each parameter, that works best for each source. That is what I do usually.
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