Texture remapping of standard definition video?
 

Hi,

Are there any good ways of adding detail to an SD video to give the impression of higher quality, even if completely fabricated? For instance, I thought that I could add textures to a video for each element that would be similar to that element in life. So for a blazer, I would add a cloth texture, for a curtain a curtain/silk texture, and so on.

The easiest way to do this would be with a color-based masking, but I don't think Premiere Pro has this. Avisynth does allow color-based masking by making the mask based off color, but it never worked very well. In addition, it does not have a tool which I used in Premiere--Change to Color--to change the texture to the same color as that of the video element.

Single images would be much easier to deal with, as tracking the mask in Premiere by location is difficult. Also, the texture has to be at the same size in the video as it would look from that distance away.

I only changed the background and the blazer:

Attachment 17041
Before

Attachment 17042
After

Hmm. Really reminds me of the "sharpness" slider that the AG1980 has (which you'd have to do at the time of capture) - You can see a big difference in sharpness if you increase it, but it adds it's own type of noise/artifacts to the image.

There's mixed reviews on if things like Topaz AI can improve quality of VHS captures, some are pretty convincing, though it seems to do a lot better with content that is already HD and making it "more HD" (like 720p to 4k, or just making the 720p file stay 720p, but making it look quite a bit sharper).

Also gotta ask, did you mask out the bottom few lines, and if so, how many lines did you mask?

Thanks for the info. I have read the same thing about Topaz AI only being effective for rescaling HD footage. That's why I was looking for an alternative.

I can see doing this for photos, but it might be too much for video. For one, I just applied one texture to each material, when in reality the texture would look differently in each part. So the texture of the blazer's lapels would be off from the rest of the jacket. Also, the texture used needs to be at the same size as if being seen by the viewer from the camera, which will depend on how close the subject is. This is likely to change over time and from shot to shot.

If by mask you mean crop, then yes, the bottom is cropped maybe a 2 to 4 lines. I forgot if it was done in Premiere or Avisynth. The sides are from the original video and were not cropped and thus uneven.