If you're a gamer like me, you know that nothing beats the feel of having a smooth sixty frames per second while you're playing. Sadly however, film and other broadcast media haven't been so quick to adopt this golden standard. Part of this is to reduce necessary storage space: Whereas video games are rendered on the spot, an entire episode of Archer rendered at sixty FPS would take half a disk just to store. To say nothing about the costs of animating each frame; which are kept at a bare minimum in Japanese animation.
Most people don't care, but us discerning individuals would crave that extra little bit of smoothness. Fortunately, for those of us with a beefy enough processor, a team of Russian developers has created something that's right up our collective alley: Enter, the Smooth Video Project.
[size=large]What's the Smooth Video Project (SVP)?[/size]
The Smooth Video Project is a software tool that makes all videos play at 60 Frames Per Second. The version I'm using is compatible with MPC-HC (32-bit), which also allows you to run the Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP) to enhance your videos.
[size=large]How does it work?[/size]
It does this by running each frame of a normal video through a gamut of image-processing algorithms, and inserting extra frames between those already featured in the native media.
[size=large]That sounds complicated...[/size]
It is. Thankfully however, setup is easy-peasy.
[size=large]What's the catch? How much does it cost?[/size]
There's a paid version if you really want the extra features, but the free version supports MPC-HC, which is essentially the last word in desktop media players.
[size=large]Does it work with live-action films?[/size]
SVP was made specifically to work with animation, but it does an okay job with action movies.
[size=large]Alright, I'm interested. Let's see what it can do.[/size]
I mean, don't take my word for it; check out the official video released by the team!
In case you're still not spotting it, pay close attention during panning shots and rapid camera movements.
[video=youtube][/video]
[size=large]Sweet deal! Now how do I install it?[/size]
Just head over to the Downloads page on the SVP-Team site, and get the version that's right for you. For the smoothest procedure, you'll want to remove all installations of Media Player Classic from your system; it's already bundled with SVP.
Once you've done that, this guy has an excellent video tutorial on how to install it on Windows. (Don't worry about the streaming video portion. IMO, KissAnime blows Crunchyroll outta the water anyways.) Sadly I can't speak for Linux/Mac users, but the SVP team does have resources for those operating systems on their Downloads page.
One easy mistake I made while starting up for the first time was not running both the SVP Manager and MPC-HC as an Administrator. If you do that, you should be good as gold.
Anyhoo, that's pretty much it. I've gotta say though: It really does bring the medium to life; especially in action series with rapid camera movements and liberal use of CGI. Everything seems much more natural and fluid, which is quite a feat considering that most anime move at anywhere from 24 to 12 frames per second. Hope you guys like! 😃