RealESRGAN versus RealCUGAN
 

My main video restoration project is 8mm camcorder tapes with a few VHS tapes. I also have MiniDV tapes that could use some love. I have experimented with Vapoursyth filters inside the Selur Hybrid software. A few months ago, I started using a dev version of Hybrid, which includes a lot of AI(?) upscalers. I found that most made my videos too cartoony looking. The only one that was good was RealESRGAN in the mode RealESR-general. I recently installed the newest version of Hybrid on another computer and discovered that it includes another AI(?) upscaler called RealCUGAN, which I used in the mode SE and with TTA enabled.

I haven't found very many discussions about RealESRGAN or RealCUGAN, and whether these upscalers make a lot of the rest of the filters unnecessary, such as the denoise filters. For instance, I found that when I used RealESRGAN, using the denoise filters in QTGMC didn't change the final video.

I have attached some images from a MiniDV tape that was upscaled with the default settings in Selur Hybrid Vapoursyth, RealCUGAN, and RealESRGAN. In my opinion, the RealESRGAN looks the best.

You are aware, that RealCUGAN is meant for anime image super resolution, right?
source: https://github.com/bilibili/ailab/bl...N/README_EN.md