Re: improving video quality by computer

[josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com (Joseph Oswald)]

Interestingly enough, a company called "Restoration Software" is doing
something very like this on feature film transfers to DVD. Using a
bunch of Apple PowerMac G5's.

See

  http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/

for more info.

mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote in message news:<20031213045725.21847.00000558@mb-m19.aol.com>...

> Many people have home movies--either real 8mm movies or old VHS
> tapes--that contain treasured memories.  Most of this footage is of
> inferior quality compared to what we now expect (DVD quality).  The
> prevailing attitude is that this situation cannot be fixed--"you can
> copy it, but you can't put back lost quality".
> 
> This is incorrect.
> 
> Most elements of home movies are present in many frames, differing
> only slightly in orientation or position.  That means that computer
> processing could "track" those elements, and "stack" their representations
> from multiple frames, producing a considerable enhancement in both
> resolution and signal-to-noise (grain, in the case of film).  The stacked
> elements could then be re-composited back into frames in their original
> positions, producing a fully resolution- and SNR-enhanced sequence.
> Of course, all the standard (and much less compute-intensive) corrections
> to color, gamma, etc., can be performed at the same time.
> 
> The computation required to do this with high quality and minimal or
> no user interaction is quite significant.  It would make motion-estimation
> compression look easy.
> 
> The effect would be that, overnight, captured video of a treasured film
> or videotape could be converted to a DVD with image quality 2x-4x
> better than the original.