Indie Film Turns to Topaz Labs to Improve Image Quality

Time (and technology) waits for no one. Three years ago director Ryan Humphries shot his feature film Sounds on the Panasonic DVX100, “which was still a state-of-the-art camera at the time,” he notes. But during the long post process he saw all the high-def cameras coming out and regretted having shot in standard-def. He started researching image enhancement technologies and came across Topaz Labs. In two days Topaz processed the SD footage with its super resolution technology software to produce footage that looked like it was shot in 1080p.
“I’d say it is close to HD,” Humphries says of the result. “You have to remember that you can’t actually pull data that doesn’t exist out of thin air. What you are actually doing is you are simulating HD. When you have a limited amount of data with SD and you blow that up on a screen the data separates, you get artifacts and it’s grainy. So what you are doing with this software is deleting all those artifacts, smoothing it out and regenerating the main details, ’cause you can’t add detail that wasn’t there. On top of that, you are adding in a slight amount of film grain. The film grain has been added in at the highest definition level, so on the screen it looks good because you don’t have any of the resolution artifacting.”

Though Topaz had existing image enhancement software on the market, it had been developing the new generation of software for the past year; it was still in beta when Humphries came with his film.

“The problem was that there was some artifacting in one of the color channels of the original DV footage, just from it being color corrected because it was standard definition,” says Humphries. “I had to pull out one of the color channels and create a new color channel to kill some of the artifacting. This was a problem with my video and had nothing to do with the Topaz software, although the super resolution software made the artifacts more apparent so the artifacts had to be deleted. At the time the software was still being developed and I believe, at this point, the software has more functionality to automatically do those corrections; I was manually doing it at the time.”

So would Humphries use this software again on his next project?

“The higher resolution you start out with, the better it works. If you shot on 720p and blow it up to 1080p it will look really good. If you shot it at 1080p and bump it up to 2K or 4K, it’s going to look much better than just doing a film transfer. If I shot in HD, I would use the super resolution technology if I was going to film. If I was using the RED camera, I’m already getting 4K so it doesn’t make much sense. Where I would use it, if I was intertwining SD footage with HD, would be to bump up the SD footage.”

Sounds won multiple awards at the WorldFest International Film Festival and will be shown at the West Hollywood International Film Festival July 29-Aug. 1.

Topaz Labs’ Topaz Enhance software, a plug-in for After Effects, extracts data from multiple adjacent frames and then re-synthesizes that data to the video signal to produce a higher resolution. To date, this has been mostly used by television stations to enhance the look of SD footage and then broadcast out HD. The company expects to release the next version of Enhance, targeted to the indie filmmaker, in late July. It also plans to release plug-ins of the software for Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro and Eyeon Fusion.

“We’ve had the Enhance technology for a while but about a year ago we made a breakthrough in our development,” explains Dr Feng (Albert) Yang. “That allowed us to solve many of the issues we had before with some of the artifacting.”

To see a demo of the the SRT technology in action on Sounds, click here.

www.topazlabs.com