This is a high effort filtering and encoding for Majutsushi Kunon wa Mieteiru.
The artstyle of this anime is easier to encode. Despite the filesize, the quality should have been good.
slow.pics compare: https://slow.pics/c/vXk3NUZh (outdated in later episodes because of additional improvements in the encoder)

This anime has quite heavy halo, but other than that, it's quite nice.
As a start, we merge the OPs of all episodes using

vsdenoise.frequency_merge

.
And then we use

vsdenoise.mc_degrain

and

vsdenoise.wnnm

to denoise, and then we use

vsdenoise.DFTTest

guided

dctf.DCTFilter

to reduce the checkerboard dithering in the source.

We build a custom aa mask, and use

vsaa.based_aa

for a light aa.
And then we perform the main dehalo. We use

vsdehalo.dehalo_alpha

to dehalo, protected by a mask built with two layers of

vsdehalo.fine_dehalo.mask

and a character mask built with the

character-segmentation

model of

vsmlrt

, and then we apply the

vsrgtools.bilateral

based protection from sgt.
After that, we apply a light

vsdeband.placebo_deband

using

vsdeband.pfdeband

, and that concludes all of the filtering.

In encoding, we use the latest version of 5fish/SVT-AV1-PSY.
These are the full encoding parameters:

--preset 2 --crf 28.00 --tune 0 --scm 0 --noise-level-thr 23000 --chroma-qmc-bias 2 --balancing-q-bias 1 --balancing-luminance-q-bias 20.0 --enable-variance-boost 0 --qm-min 8 --chroma-qm-min 12 --noise-norm-strength 0 --ac-bias 1.0 --variance-md-bias 1 --complex-hvs -1 --dlf-bias 1 --dlf-sharpness 7 --dlf-bias 4,2

.
Specifically lineartwise, we use typical

--ac-bias 1.0 --variance-md-bias 1

, and also

--noise-norm-strength 0 --dlf-sharpness 7

which are parameters suitable for clean source.

--balancing-luminance-q-bias 20.0

sounds quite aggressive, but thanks to discovery from Itachi Uchiha, we now think it is indeed good at retaining the dark and weak linearts in character's hair.

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.