Accessing parameters of TemporalDegrain2 in Hybrid

[ThoM]

Thanks a lot! That has been quite a bit of information to digest – and so I have not found the time to dive into this earlier.

This whole project has been keeping me busy for decades; I have researched a lot and worked out my own solutions. It's a pity that I did not come across Hybrid and this forum a bit earlier; maybe you could have helped me saving some time and trouble ... 😉

But let’s take this one step at a time ...

1. ideally use a lossless format, when using x264 in lossy mode, you might want to use 10bit encoding.

What lossless format would you recommend? I am using x264 with a bit rate of 24,400 Kb/s, and in the original workflow step to assemble the retouched single frames to MP4 (which can be left out, as you have pointed out, see (2.) below), I was using -c:v libx264 -crf 16, which should deliver a very high quality.
Where can I specify 10-bit encoding?

2. "Using FFMPEG again to recombine the retouched PNG frames to the attached MP4." you are aware that you can load an image sequence into Hybrid right? (the ffmpeg step seem unnecessary)

Thanks for the tip – in fact, I was not aware of this, and you are right: This can streamline my workflow considerably.

I would recommend to change temp-path to something outsice of 'AppData' and direct Windows folders and add an exemption to whatever virus scanner you are using.

Actually there seems to be a real problem with my Hybrid installation or with Hybrid in general. I installed the program 3 or 4 times on different (non-C: ) drives and in different folders and specified all sorts of path names
   
but no matter what, after closing and re-starting Hybrid the result is always the same: All path settings are blank (so the user log complains that the "Default output" path is empty)
   
except for the "Default temp" path, which points to ...AppData\Local\Temp; and "Generate debug file" is unchecked. This means I can't permanently change the Temp folder.

(By the way, your instruction page about "infos needed to fix and reproduce bugs" is a little outdated (from 2017) and does not reflect that the Path settings now include a dedicated "Debug output path" in addition to the "Default output path" (for the video output?). But this does not matter so much because any path specified here will be reset after the next program start.)

Anyway – no matter what I try, specifying AviSynth reliably fails.

a. does the Avisynth Preview work?

It does.

b. does enabling 'Config->Internals->Avisynth->Prefer FFmpeg as decoder' fix the problem?

It is already enabled by default.

But all this is not a real issue because the VapourSynth version works satisfactorily.

c. If you want to lower the strength of the degrain use another filter. I would use SMDegrain or MCDegrainSharp instead of TemporalDegrain2 on such a source, for my taste the source is not grainy enough to use TemporalDegrain2.

Most of my DV footage has the rather high quality as shown, but I have some with much worse grain (coming from a different transfer service provider or from high-speed Super 8 stock); and for those, TemporalDegrain2 works best. But for my high-quality material, SMDegrain is working magic; I am now tweaking its settings to deliver the best results – so thank you very much for these recommendations!
Unfortunately, this forum software allows only uploads with a rather limited file size; is there another way to send you samples?

(personally, I would also use a deblocker and maybe denoise the darker areas a bit)

I can't see any problems with blocking, but which tools would you recommend?

I now have a lot to try out and fine-tune – so thanks again for all this input!