Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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The opening animation from the classic game, Lunar Silver Star Story Complete! (Or more accurately, the higher quality Chinese PC version's video and its music, vocals replaced with the Working Designs English lyrics.) Lunar's intro has been uploaded hundreds of times on youtube. So I had to work extra hard to make this one worthwhile! I'm pretty satisfied with the results.

Lunar Silver Star Story Complete was a favorite growing up. I still have the Playstation collector's edition with the Ghaleon figure xD Always wished it had an anime adaption... Alas...

Anyway, what did I do to the video? Let's see... Three weeks worth of tinkering and rendering on my PC using various technologies. I could have done it all in 30 minutes with one click with Topaz Video AI, but... I'd hope the extra effort distinguishes it!

HEre's what I did: First I got a request from StyLec0 for some Lunar content :D. And it's been a while since I uploaded anything so... It's an excuse to try the latest tech.

First, I started with the Chinese Lunar SSS PC release for 640x480 24 fps video. Pretty decent compared to the PSX versions.

Next, I went on github and started searching for interpolation. I know some people really dislike 60 fps slapped on anime, but I wanted to see what various tech could do. I ended up spending a few days downloading various research projects and other python based interpolation solutions, along with the ones I already had. Some notable mentions include Eisai, which required me to figure out Docker and WSL2 on Windows. It also didn't have an easy way to handle more than two frames at a time, so I wrote my first python script to create a .sh file containing all the commands for whatever range of frames I wished for, fps, etc. Also getting the latest DAIN vulkan version working required compiling it with changes. A lot of holding my breath moments lol, but ultimately worked. Most of the others only required minimal effort with a basic Conda environment. I guess I can list the ones I used...
SVP, CAIN, Topaz Video AI's Aion Apollo Chronos, sepconv, InterpAny, FILM, gmfss fortuna, IFRNet, m2m, RIFE, EMA, amt, eisai-anime.

I rendered the entire video at 640x480 in all of the above, and compared them, choosing my favorite per scene. That took a while to do...
Unfortunately the newly released anime AI making its rounds on youtube on high end PCs came out after I had already done this work. Plus I have the feeling without having 24 - 27 GB of VRAM for the best results would bother me xD And running each frame would probably take a decade... Still I will definitely check it out, or another like it in a future video.

Anyway after interpolation was complete, I moved onto audio. I had the original song ripped from the Working Designs PSX release, but actually the PSX video and audio are different from the Chinese PC higher quality video in places... So, I decided to use demucs and RVC's AI audio tools to extract the Japanese audio from the PC version and English audio from the PSX song. And swap it in. It took a little extra audio repair, but overall the results are nearly perfect imo.

Next up was upscaling. I broke the interpolated results up by scene, and went through them using various techniques I already had. At this point it's been over a week... and I question my life decisions :P

I ended up using an old version of Gigapixel AI (didn't want to spend to renew subscription right now...), Topaz Denoise AI, Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve for some manual fixes; and most of it through Stable Diffusion's extra section. This includes using the following:
Swin2SR CompressedSR x4 48
LDSR
4x UltraMix Balanced
4x RealisticRescaler 100000 G
4x Sourcetex v2 Smooth 120000 G
4x NMKD Superscale Artisoftject 210000 g
8x NMKD Typescale 175k
Swin2SR CompressedSR x4 48
4x NMKD DigArt 10k
4x Realistic Rescaler 100000 g
4x Sourcetex v2 Smoother 120000 g
4x DigitalFrames 2.1 Final
1x NMKD Jaywreck2 Soft 200k
1x SSAntiAliasNT Alt
4x UltraMix Smooth
SwinIR 4x
4x ultrasharp
4x fatalpixels 340000 g
LADDIER1 282500 g
4x escale 100000 g
4x valar v1
4x NMKD-superscale v2 46k
4x RealESRGAN-2banime
NoiseToner-Poisson-Detailed 108000 g
1x noisetuner poisson 108000
WaifuGAN v3 30000
4x Toon FArtDIV3 Blend
4x PackCraft v4
and StableSR for the logo section.

I'd paste my notes, but it'll go over the limit...

Basically I tried bunches of these various models on the scenes trying to find the best look for each scene. It was a slow process since I wasn't feeling good for a while D: Lots of sitting and slow rendering various choices and picking the best choices... then finding a problem and having to resolve it... Ergh! Again, one click solutions or just a single type for the entire video would have made this a breeze lol. But... I hope the end result was satisfactory!

The project folder is currently 189 GBs, and I've deleted probably 50 GBs of data already. Worked with lossless.

TLDR; PLEASE ENJOY! xD