Best Akujo, Iana Magnolia:




This is a medium effort filtering and encoding for Tensei Akujo no Kuro Rekishi.
slow.pics compare: https://slow.pics/c/RJqmL8SY

The source is actually quite nice for this anime: a heavy layer of static grain or texture, next to no banding. Lineart is good as well, apart from some light halo.
For filtering, we first lehmer merge all available CR sources for each episode together using [code]vsdenoise.frequency_merge[/code]. For OP, we lehmer merge all episodes together.
After merging, we apply a protective denoise to remove the thin layer of dynamic noise on top using [code]vsdenoise.DFTTest[/code] and [code]vsdenoise.mc_degrain[/code], protected by [code]dctf.DCTFilter[/code] and a character mask via [code]vs-mlrt[/code]'s [code]anime-segmentation[/code] model.
At last we perform a light dehalo using [code]vsdehalo.dehalo_alpha[/code], protected by the character mask, [code]vsdehalo.fine_dehalo.mask[/code], and a [code]vsrgtools.bilateral[/code] based protection from sgt.

For encoding, we use lastest version of 5fish/SVT-AV1-PSY. We use [code]--tune 0[/code] and we use a mixture of [code]--preset 0[/code] and [code]--preset 2[/code] for this encode.
For bitrate allocation, we use Progression Boost's Preset-Basic-Character-Boost for boosting. On the encoder side, we use [code]--balancing-q-bias 1 --variance-boost-strength 1 --variance-octile 6[/code], and especially [code]--noise-level-thr 16000 --noise-level-q-bias 0.06[/code] to control filesize.
For the best texture retention, we use [code]--noise-norm-strength 0 --ac-bias 1.0 --complex-hvs 1 --texture-preserving-qmc-bias 1[/code], in addition to basic parameters [code]--qm-min 8 --chroma-qm-min 12 --variance-md-bias 1 --variance-md-bias-thr 6.0 --chroma-qmc-bias 2[/code].
We generate a layer of photon noise via [code]noise.Add[/code] and [code]grav1synth diff[/code], and apply to the encode via [code]--fgs-table[/code].

Thanks to all the people creating the tools, plugins and vsfunc's that make this possible, and thanks to everyone in the community for teaching me, pointing out issues, and giving me advice.

If you're interested in AV1 encoding for anime, you are welcome to join AV1 weeb edition at https://discord.gg/83dRFDFDp7.

You are welcome to do anything with this encode, including remuxing and republishing it. However, we would ask you to leave a credit to Kekkan if you can.

We recommend using MPV to playback our releases. Thank you for seeding after download.