It's been a while since last Video Enhancer version was released. It's time to break the silence and reveal some news and plans.

Part of the passed year was spent on ScreenPressor-related projects for our corporate clients. But for last several months we've been cooking our new super resolution engine. It's not on GPU yet but we've found a way to accelerate it on CPU and use significantly less memory. Actually, reducing memory usage is the key to acceletarion: nowadays memory access is quite slow compared to computations, and if you compute everything locally in small chunks that fit into cache and don't store and read whole frames in memory several times, overall process gets much faster. For us that meant a complete rewrite of our super resolution engine, and this is what we did. While remaking the algorithm we had a chance to rethink many decisions baked into it. Additional CPU cycles freed by the acceleration could be spent to perform more computations and reach for higher quality. So we spent several months in research: what motion estimation method works best for our SR? Shall we work in blocks of size 16, 8 or even 4 pixels wide (the latter meaning just 2x2 blocks of original image)? Which precision to use for each block size? What is the right way to combine new frame with accumulated information? For motion estimation we actually tried it all: using source code generation we generated 160 different implementations of motion estimation and measured how well they performed in terms of quality and speed. It turned out usual metrics for selecting best motion compensation methods in video codecs and other applications do not give the best results for super resolution: minimizing difference between compensated and current frame (which works best for compression) doesn't provide best quality in SR when compensated frame gets fused with input frame to produce the new upsized image. Then the fusion: is our old method really good or maybe it can be improved? We used machine learning techniques to find the best fusion function. And found that actually it depends a lot on source video: what works best for one video doesn't necessarily work well for another video. We chose a weighted average for a selected set of HD videos which means quality of the new SR engine should be higher on some videos and possibly a bit lower on some other videos, it won't be universally better.

Now what it all means in terms of releases. The new SR engine is in final testing stage now and it's a matter of days before it's released in Video Enhancer 1.9.9 and new version of our Super Resolution plugin for VirtualDub. Then it will also be released as AviSynth plugin, for the first time. And then finally it will come as Adobe After Effects (and Premiere Pro, probably) plugin. Some years ago we offered this Premiere Pro & After Effects plugin but it hadn't updated for too long and became obsolete, current versions of these Adobe hosts are 64-bit and cannot run our old 32-bit plugin.

Video Enhancer 1.9.9 will be a free update, and it's going to be the last 1.x version. Next release will be version 2.0 with completely different user interface, where all effects will be visible instantly. Imagine "Photoshop for video". Update to 2.0 will be free for those who purchased Video Enhancer 1.9.6 or later.

We hope everything mentioned above will see the light this year. VE 1.9.9 in September, plugins in October, VE 2.0 later. Update: oops, our scheduling sucks as usual. YUV support and thorough testing took much more time, the releases postponed until December.

tags: video_enhancer super_resolution