Ok, so you may think this is a scam. But, I landed on this link from a news story on a ABC television affiliate news site! They did a story on it and said they actually worked.

Sooo..if we contact the people who make it and get some specially fitted for DV cameras....maybe we can HD all DV?? lol

Wait, I have an idea! We can sell these sunglasses to all clients of standard definition videos. Would these make DV look HD? Poor man's HD maybe??

https://www.asseenontvnetwork.com/vcc/ideavillage/hdvision/106421/

Murph

Sounds like they just reduce glare. That's what a matte box if for, is it not?? It's not going to turn DV into HD! (But i'm working on a software solution - but you'll have to wait on that as it's blinkin hard!)

Graeme

Graeme, can't wait to see it!

Murph

You're not the only one.... I only have it working on stills at the moment, but here's an early test that shows how promising it looks:

http://www.nattress.com/scaling_test.jpg

comparing an original bitmap with Graeme's magic scaling at 400% and photoshop bicubic at 400%.

What I've also found, is that on video images that have too much "edge detail" sharpness, that it sort of removes some of it.... I don't quite know how it will look when things are moving, but it's certainly showing a lot of promise!

Graeme

Hey, I'm impressed. This will be for Final Cut, I hope!

Murph

Nope, not FCP, but a mac standalone application. It's way beyond what FCP is capable - I'm using a lot of OpenGL to accellerate the rendering.

Graeme

Hats off to you Graeme. The work you software guys do never ceases to amaze me.

Keep up the good work!!!

-Tim

Sounds great! Can't wait to see it..

Murph

Wow, great job ... I really can't believe my eyes!

Graeme: As long as we've gotten totally off-topic.... that does look nice, but are those high contrast black and white images realistic tests? I'm just wondering how well you can up-res DV footage with all its artifacts, like the VX-2000 example I posted (http://www.greenmist.com/pdx10/chart/res.jpg) and explained in this thread (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&postid=193670#post193670)? At some point doesn't it just become a case of garbage in garbage out when the source images come from our 1/3" or smaller CCD cameras? Also, would there be reason to expect that up-rezzing software would do a noticeably better job than the hardware image scalers built into HD monitors and projectors?

Don't take this the wrong way, it's not meant as a criticism of your work, it's just a topic that's interested me ever since I experimented around with "Genuine Fractals" and wasn't particularly impressed with the results.

Boyd: Thanks! It's a diagnostic image rather than a pictoral test, and really designed to help me refine the algorithm as it's a worst case for showing up aliassing and edge artifacts. I do work on it with video images, but I'm not ready to show the results yet as the code is still very early (and quite slow as it's totally un-optimised in any way).

The first step, before up-rezzing is going to be my proprietry chroma-reconstruction algorithm, and then the up-rezzer gets applied. I'm actually looking into Shake as a development platform to test the initial version of the algorithm on as it has a lot of the tools I need to make the thing work. At the moment it's a stand-alone app in C, Cocoa and OpenGL. It's a long-term R&D project for my company.

I've examined a number of the hardware converters out there and saw quite a few at NAB, along with a whole host of algorithms for uprezzing photographs. My algorithm is very different to all others, and certainly shows an awful lot of promise and good very well work out being superior to that used in projectors and Snell & Wilcox or Terranex devices, based upon what I saw at NAB. I myself have never been impressed with Genuine fractals as the "extra" information and detail seems to be not really correlated with the picture and quite noisey in nature. Again, it's really a compression algorithm that they turned into an uprezzer, so it's not fair to compare.

As you can tell, I'm still at the beginning of this research and have a way to go, but I'm very confident that I can make DV footage look the absolute best it can at HD resolutions. Now I just have to put theory into practice, tweak it, optimise it, and then commercialise it.... Wish me luck!

Graeme

Good luck Graeme!

Murph

Yeah, good luck... let us know when you're ready to share some examples!

I'm a PC user... :(

Me too...

Interesting that the PC users are frowning ;-)

I'm looking at the new quicktime stuff in Tiger to see if it will make my life easier.... If I can get the algorithm working and proved, then there's no reason why I couldn't contract another programmer to do a PC version...

But I do think I've solved (on paper, at least) on of the issues I was having, so I just have to code it up now and see if it will work as a solution in practise...

Graeme

LOL!

As a nothing-but-IBM-compatible-PC user, I have been tempted by the dark side before. ;-) j/k