Ground Breaking Video Editing Technology
Posted on August 25, 2008 in Digital Effects | 8 Comments
The University of Washington who’s computer technology team recently developed Photosynth now has a group of graduate students showing the potential of technology to enhance digital video in amazing ways.
Video and Descriptions From: Pravin Bhat
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.
The work presents a system for automatically producing a wide variety of video enhancements and visual effects. Unlike traditional visual effects software (e.g., After Effects, Shake, Boujou, etc), the system is completely automatic and no manual labor is required from the user. The major limitation of the work is that it can currently handle only videos of static scenes (i.e., videos shot with a moving camera but containing no moving objects in the scene). Efforts are being made to lift this restriction in future work.
Applications of the system include:
High resolution/definition video,
High dynamic range video,
Removing objects from a video,
Creating painterly (NPR) videos,
Video stabilization,
Easy video editing
Project website:
grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/videoenhancement/videoEnhancement.htm
Interactive Video Cutout from pro on Vimeo.
The work presents an interactive system for quickly creating alpha mattes for objects in a video. Unlike previous techniques commonly employed in the visual-fx industry (e.g., rotoscoping) our system can help novice users create professional quality mattes with very little manual effort.
These alpha mattes can then be used to cut out objects from one video and composite them into another video. Alpha mattes can also be used to apply image filters selectively to objects in a video.
Project website:
juew.org/projects/VideoCutout/VideoCutout.htm
GradientShop: A novel approach to image and video processing from pro on Vimeo.
Painterly rendering using GradientShop from pro on Vimeo.
The results shown in the video were created automatically by our painterly rendering filter. This filter was written using just 200 lines of C++ code by leveraging the GradientShop API.
To demonstrate the utility of our framework we have developed, or improved, several image processing applications, which include:
# Saliency sharpening
# Painterly rendering
# Deblocking
# Video deflickering
# Image relighting
# And sparse data interpolation (e.g., colorization)
You can see higher resolution results and get more information regarding GradientShop on the project website: GradientShop.com
8 Comments
Incredible stuff.
John I totally agree, I am sure it takes a lot of processing power and time to make it work, but if it can remove objects, It will become a godsend for many productions. I wonder if they have plans to commercialize this.
Hopefully they will follow in the footsteps of Photosynth:
Microsoft Photosynth Buckles Under Demand
http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/hosted_apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210200469
I’m sure Adobe and others are looking at this.
It will be just a matter of time before we get our grubby mitts on this stuff.
I almost want to sign up for their master’s program up at the University of Washington just so I can be part of this break through – but a las, I don’t want to have to break out my old math books…
It still takes me a while to understand exactly what a logarhythm is… isn’t that a percussionist that uses a fallen tree?
Personally, I think it will have infinitely more advantages to the programmer, rather than the end user… The results I saw were no different than existing programs can achieve, but it uses a different interface… How the software arrives at that result is of little concern to me, there’s only so many things you can learn in life… But if it makes it better, fantastic. The edges of a few of the alpha mattes were kind of terrible, and would likely need some additional garbage matting, unless the process is improved. I see Adobe/Autodesk buying them and incorporating various algorithms or whatever into their software. One of the advantages of the new CS4 suite coming online is the programming of the software to take full advantage of the GFX card, i.e. Cuda by Nvidia… a HUGE potential time saver. Something like this would absolutely have to be reprogrammed to follow suit…
CS4 already???
I see that only SoundBooth and Photoshop are on the list of programs to be reworked… I haven’t even come close to exhausting my possibilities with Photoshop and I could give a rat’s patutti about SoundBooth (give me Audition please)…
The entire lineup will be reworked, Photoshop most extensively, and Premiere most likely least so… The advantage though, is 64 bit processing in a Windows environment… This allows programs like After Effects to use unheard of amounts of RAM… I don’t think people realize just how useful this tiny advance really is. Programs like the Autodesk lineup have major advantages because they’re running in a 64 bit environment. Technically, the Mac OS is 64 bit, but the programs I use aren’t, and for the time being the Adobe lineup will continue to be 32 bit, until the lineup gets reworked due to some last minute OS changes by Apple…
All that means I have to update my editing computer to 64 bit to utilize that feature… that’s a lot of things for me to upgrade. I say that now, but in a year or two, after Adobe’s marketing people get to my brain – I’ll probably upgrade.