The source of "Takopi's Original Sin" generally has few artifacts, but the fine dynamic noise remains quite tricky to process. Its visual intensity is moderate, and it suffers from some insufficient bitrate. If left unchanged, HEVC encoding struggles to reproduce it fully; if denoising is applied directly, it affects the original art style.
Driven by our passion, we boldly switch to the AV1 format in this project. We utilize its Film Grain Synthesis (FGS) feature to solve the noise retention issue. By analyzing the design and characteristics of the AV1 encoder, we discover a more suitable combination of parameters and corresponding PP logic. This helps us best overcome the AV1 format's flaw of having a "low floor, and an even lower ceiling" in detail retention.
For FGS, we do not use the encoder's built-in --film-grain feature. Instead, we build a new toolchain to extract the noise characteristics of the source and accurately reproduce noise that matches the original art style.
The final visual result proves that our invested time and effort are worthwhile. Moreover, since the noise is preserved through synthesis rather than direct encoding, the final file size is even optimized to some extent.
Using this project as an opportunity, we hope that more grainy anime adopt AV1 + FGS to overcome technical difficulties and present a better look to the audience.