Requested by a friend. Let's talk denoising. Denoising is an incredibly useful, yet deadly tool in an encoder's arsenal. Sometimes you're going to have sources with starved noise overlays, or heavy dynamic grain over the entire frame. Sometimes you've got basically no movement, but some noise left on the BDs make the scene look slightly worse, or you want to make the end filesize even smaller, and so you remove a lot of minor noise that would bloat the filesize. These are the times where denoisers can truly shine. However, with such great power comes a great flaw: it's incredibly easy to wipe away detailed textures, particles, and fx by denoising. However, I would go so far as to say that is not always as bad as it sounds. Let's take this OP for example. [Here](https://slow.pics/c/BrbAgc9r) you can see a shot from the BDMV and from the filtered preview in VapourSynth. Note how, due to the denoising, it seems some particles were lost to the void. That's bad, right? Not necessarily. If you look at the OP, you'll note that these particles move very fast and only show up in bursts of two-three seconds at a time. Deleting the less-easy-to-spot ones as they're already fading out means we have to spend less precious bits preserving those (which would sound far more convincing when it's something that didn't end up being 250MB, but I digress). The filesize will overall decrease, and perceptually nothing noticeable will be lost. My main point is to denoise as you see fit, and not be too afraid to lose detail. Obviously apply some common sense and don't go wiping away every last texture you see, because that's dumb. However for stuff that is barely noticeable in the final encode? Knock yourself out. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk. Filterchain consists of upscaled_sraa to fix the awful lineart, and fairly strong denoising (stronger on brighter areas) to try and stabilize the noise a bit and preserve filesize, or else we might as well have been remuxing BDMV files. Debanding was applied afterwards, but it didn't help much because of all the noise, so some rather awful banding caused by the fx is still present. New grain was added as well for the scenes that had a bit too much removed. [Maelstrom](https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1201046#com-3) (uploading m2ts files) - no. They're either available on private trackers (u2, AB), uploaded to Nyaa, or shared privately. Obtaining them isn't hard enough to warrant me uploading them myself, especially not random m2ts files of NCOPs.