Smooth Video Project Profile Comparison
~Watch in 4k60 for best results~
press the , and . buttons to do a frame by frame comparison.
photo comparison: https://imgur.com/gallery/QRoS8
Animation profile resulted in a very noticeable ~wavy~ distortion which I didn't like, although it did manage to retain the source content pretty well.
The film profile resulted in heavy artifacting which I REALLY didn't like... some of the time it looks good, some of the time it looks terrible.
So, I found a compromise between the two settings; a profile that works for both live action and animated footage.
At around 6 seconds you will notice that the custom profile looks a lot more consistent when she turns her head compared to the other profiles. Film mode loses a lot of information (look at the eyes especially), animation mode results in weird looking waves.
Profile Settings:
Frame rate: locked 120fps.
Because of the reduced smoothness from the profile, I had to increase the number of interpolated frames to reach the smoothness levels that I wanted. This results in a smooth video on a 60hz display.
Frame interpolation mode - "1m"
This mode guarantees that every frame from the source footage is shown once without interpolation applied (there is still a little bit of frame blending though), with a bunch of interpolated frames in between each frame.
I tried 2m and 1.5m but the smoothness is so low to the point where it felt like I had SVP off
Uniform mode results in nearly all of the frames being interpolated, resulting in a loss of information which you do NOT want.
SVP shader: 13. Standard
This is literally the ONLY shader that doesn't result in the wavy distortion effect, instead opting to lose information in the form of artifacts, which looks better in motion but frame by frame it looks pretty bad. 13. has the best smoothness which is why I chose it as the shader. All the other shaders have an even worse wavy effect than the 2. "anime" shader, and have a combination of BOTH artifacting and waviness which looks really bad for animation. So 2. and 13. shaders seem to be the best for animation.
Artifacts masking - weak
Ideally you want this to be either disabled or on the "weak" setting. With animated footage I recommend you keep this at "weak" but with live action footage you probably don't need it activated. There was a 'triple image' or ghosting effect that may have been a result of this setting.
artifacts masking comparison: https://imgur.com/gallery/gdFH5
Motion vectors precision: two pixels.
This setting greatly impacts CPU/RAM usage. For 1080p and higher I find that 2px is best, lower than 1080p may need 1px for best quality.
Motion vectors grid: 24 px
Larger grids result in a reduction of the wavy distortion effect, albeit less smoothness. 16px for DVD (480p). 24px is ideal for 720p/1080p. For 4k you may prefer 32px.
Decrease grid step - By two
Higher is better
Search radius - Average
For the best quality you might want to set this lower, but that results in a reduction in smoothness. I couldn't tell a difference between average and small settings.
Wide Search - Strongest
higher is better
Width of top coarse level - Average
No idea what it does, it's kind of unclear whether I should set it lower or higher. Just leave this at average.
Processing of scene changes - Repeat frame
Repeat frame is nearly always better quality-wise. For hand drawn animation repeat frame is a must.
If you want better smoothness you may want to blend frames instead of repeat them.
read this for more info on the settings: https://www.svp-team.com/wiki/Manual:...
CPU usage is approximately the same as the animation profile with the slider dragged to maximum.
Anime: RWBY Volume 3, World Of Remnant: The Four Maidens
I think this scene effectively showed the advantages and disadvantages of the animation and film profiles.
In case you didn't know what SVP is:
Smooth Video Project (a.k.a SVP) is a piece of software that automagically converts video to 60fps in real time, just like your typical high end TV. This is known as the soap opera effect which uses motion smoothing or motion interpolation resulting in a smooth image. 24fps film doesn't look very smooth on a 60hz display resulting in motion juddering which looks displeasing to the eye. SVP is especially useful during camera movement where the motion stutter/judder is very noticeable.
Animation doesn't really need motion interpolation (most anime is done in 12fps for the most part anyway), but it does look pretty cool when your favourite fighting or camera shake scene is 'animated' in 60fps.
The motion smoothing results in some distortion/loss of information, that much is obvious, but one thing that kind of bothered me is that SVP never looked quite as good as my TV. Although some distortion was evident on my TV, SVP looked noticeably worse especially when a subject was moving quickly on screen. So, I tried making my own profile resulting in this video.