Hello from Judson’s Garage: Fiddling around with upscaling and enhancing low-res, low-quality video

  • August 16, 2022
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HerpDerp Mucking About With Things Personal Firsts
Concluding frames of the commercial for MEGO's 'Forbidden Zone Trap' Planet of the Apes playset.
Concluding frames of the commercial for MEGO’s ‘Forbidden Zone Trap’ Planet of the Apes playset.

Vault of Vintage Toys recently posted an image of the box for a 1970s-era MEGO Planet of the Apes (check out All PLANET OF THE APES Original Franchise Trailers (1968 – 1973) if you’re only familiar with the remakes) playset: Forbidden Zone Trap. It was one of four playsets mentioned on the MEGO page of an unofficial Planet of the Apes wiki.

Detail of part of a photo of the product's box, showing that the playset is intended to be the ruin of part of a human-era city block, centered on what used to be a auto repair shop (Judson's Garage). Whole-box image inset.
Detail of part of a photo of the product’s box, showing that the playset is intended to be the ruin of part of a human-era city block, centered on what used to be a auto repair shop (Judson’s Garage). Whole-box image inset.

A bit of searching turned up a low-res, poor-quality upload of the original television commercial for the product. The resolution seems to be 320 pixels by 240 pixels (QVGA).

The sinister global adtech cabal has been showing me adverts for image enhancement apps and services lately, so I wondered what was freely available nowadays in terms of “smart” beep-boop-beep “A.I.” video upscaling tools. In the end, I was able to get 2 tools to run: esrgan-upscale-video (hereafter to be referred to as ESRGANUV) and Waifu2x-Extension-GUI. In my subjective opinion, on this one video (which itself is likely not the sort of target intended for video upscaling and enhacement), and using the settings that I chose for the latter, the former yielded better results.

OTOH, I was able to get video out of Waifu2x-Extension-GUI and my ESRGANUV runs ended in errors without yielding videos. I commented out the line in ESRGANUV‘s main.py that deletes the upscaled frame image files (1280 by 960 pixels) and their containing folder and fed some sequences of those PNG files to gifski (e.g. gifski -o output.anim.gif -W 1000 --quality 100 input-frames/*.png) to produce the animated GIFs in this post.

Clip from another scene from the commercial, featuring one of MEGO's human Planet of the Apes action figures, with the order of frames reversed.
Clip from another scene from the commercial, featuring one of MEGO’s human Planet of the Apes action figures, with the order of frames reversed.

It was a fun exercise.