MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: 2020's Almost Here: What Do You Guys Hope For in Mame/Mess?

> I dont need to understand how Laserdiscs work at an RF level and to say at all, is a
> little bit bitchy, dont you think?

Actually, I just re-read your post. When I originally read it last night, it sounded like you were asking how ld-decode would handle movies or videos that have single-pixel white or black spots that are part of the original signal, and that you thought it might detect those things as dropouts rather than the original signal.

I've read your post for a third time and I now realize that I completely misinterpreted what you were asking, and you're 100% right, it was a pretty bitchy response, and I apologize.

> Post-production effects should only be applied if nothing else does it better and
> after all work is done. On a finished dump so to say and i dont see why they should
> not work.

In general, it's better to apply these sorts of 'healing' filters in the RF domain, rather than after it has been decoded as an image. To that end, ld-decode already has a robust DOD (Drop-Out Detector) and DOC (Drop-Out Corrector).

ld-decode, at present, has the ability to do "3D" drop-out correction which is almost every bit as good as the sort of post-production effects that you would find in professional software.

When I say "3D", I mean it can look at the line above, the line below, to the left, to the right, one field ahead, and one field behind to determine what the best potential fill is for the dropout.

I don't know if you've seen this video yet, I might have linked it before, but this particular timestamp gives a really good impression of how advanced the dropout correction was in rev4 of ld-decode. rev6 is coming up later this month, and will have even more features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNAwMmWLFTs&t=1m17s

While there's still an incredibly small number of sparkles left in the corrected frames, the majority of the remaining specks that you see are due to film grain that was part of the original disc master itself - exactly the kinds of things that post-production effects would also cover up.

So to that end, an imperfect but still-impressive dropout correction is far preferable to applying any kind of post-processing to the resulting image frame, which carries with it the risk of destroying or at least altering things that were present on the original disc master, too.

I should also point out that in that demo of ld-decode rev4, the Drop-Out Corrector results were from a single read of a single disc. It wasn't even by combining multiple reads.