#restoring

[dutchs-blog]

Restoring The Smallest Clockwork

[lost-fool-wandering]

...

-L.F.

[vielmouse]

Sentinel Upscale Test

Tumblr will probably compress this horribly, but here is my first actually good looking attempt to upscale a show I love.

How do you think it looks? Uncanny or decent? See the comparison and upscaled clip in full quality by downloading here. (The previews there are also compressed- gotta download to see actual quality)

I was hoping my fancy RTX 4070 laptop could do whole episodes, but just 3-4 seconds takes 15 minutes😅 Turns out I'm bottle-necked by VRAM. There's always something :( But at least short clips are feasible.

Technical stuff:

I tried some simpler free tools before this, but they were more optimized for anime, and made live action plastic-looking. For this, I used free/open source ComfyUI and SeedVR2. But first! I ordered the first season CBS DVDs, because they're slightly higher quality than the VEI series set, ripped them to MKV, then used StaxRip to format a short clip for upscaling/restoring. Since SeedVR2 doesn't seem to take Prores (like Topaz would?), I instead converted it to a high quality h264 mp4, which involved: using TIVTC to remove 3:2 pulldown interlacing, and to restore 23.976 FPS progressive frame rate, resizing from 720x480 to 720x540 so that the pixels are square (PAR 1:1), and encoding with CRF 16 with film grain. Then, I brought that into the SeedVR2 video enhancing template, and mostly used default settings.

Every step had technical walls I had to keep bashing my head against. Especially downloading ComfyUI, finding out you had to install Git (whatever tf that is) too and do it a certain way, then reinstall the portable version of CUI because an additional required "Manager" feature requires it, then getting errors with SeedVR2 and running command lines to get that to work! Then testing a bunch of settings only to find the defaults looked better anyways. Man, I hope someone enjoys this!😅

[l03y25dp]

Resorting MH dolls

I recently received a restoration order for the dolls. they came in this state:

they were yellow and grubby🥺 I took the glue out of their hair first. Clawdeen had a lot of it, it was a whole grind.

I started restoring the face screening

I got a result like this, it came out pretty good, i guess.

i also restored the tattoos on frankie's body.

The deyellowing left well from the body. then i tried to fix the operetta's neck... it's gone wrong, I tried a lot materials, but it didn't work lol. so i had to leave her with a broken neck.

the final result🙌 I did factory hair stylings for all the dolls. tried to lighten the frankie's hair a little, howleen struggled to style the cut hair strands.

yhe customer was satisfied with the result, I'm glad🥳

[zemtsovska]

Before After

[creaturecollectors]

Restoring an old Metagross figure. Got to the point where my brain gets mad and I gotta wait for 12 hours till cleaning and sanding. It was a launcher bit I've got some other ideas for it 👀

[tzialillina]

I got an original Sans plush from 2016 for roughly 12$ and restored him :) just a few stitches, trimming and a lot of cleaning but I'm happy w the results!