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MotionDSP vReveal

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:00:30 -0500

Look out CPU, the GPU finally gets a killer app

What do a surveillance camera and the average home videographer have in common? Surprisingly, a hell of a lot—it’s just the subject matter that’s different.

One takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a gas station clerk getting a pistol jammed in his face, and the other takes really poorly exposed, fuzzy, low-res videos of a kid kicking a soccer ball or blowing out birthday candles.

Apparently, that’s the logic MotionDSP used when it decided that its $10,000-per-license, super-fancy video algorithms could not only be used to help the police catch carjackers, but also clean up the video of little Timmy’s birthday, too.

We’re not kidding. MotionDSP’s algorithms were developed to help resolve license plate numbers from video by analyzing multiple frames before and after a frame. By using the additional data to reassemble one sharp frame, MotionDSP’s algorithms are able to pull out far more detail than you would think possible.

vReveal cleans up messy video in a snap.

MotionDSP’s consumer app, vReveal, features a cleaning algorithm to remove pixilation, grain, and compression artifacts, along with a sharpening filter, auto contrast, and lighting and stabilization enhancements. The app also offers a resolution doubler, but alas, it’s only available for very low-resolution video (a forthcoming pro version will likely support higher resolutions.)

The results are fairly impressive. The vReveal app is able to clean up bad video far better than what you can do with consumer video editing packages and it does it very quickly, too, thanks to its GPU support. The app uses Nvidia’s CUDA platform to tap the GPU’s wealth of parallel processors to process video far faster than you could with any current CPU. We tested vReveal on this month’s monster rig from Maingear and a single GeForce GTX 285 gave us a 2x to 4x performance boost over the overclocked 4GHz Core i7-975. SLI support is not currently available because of a limitation with CUDA, the company says, but MotionDSP expects to have a work-around to fix that problem and will make it available in an update.

The app leverages Nvidia's CUDA as well as multicore CPUs.

The bad news is that vReveal will not support ATI’s Radeon HD series until OpenCL arrives. It’s also a bit of a letdown that vReveal is limited to standard-def material. The company says it’s optimizing performance for HD video and will have a free update for that as soon as possible.

One final problem: Output from the app is either in WMV or uncompressed AVI only. We can see WMV, but uncompressed AVI is too much for the average home user and would swamp his or her hard drive in no time.

Overall, we’re very impressed with vReveal, and while it’s a bit pricey for the video dilettantes, it’s a very handy tool for anyone who’s hot and heavy into video editing.

Need a Quick Photo Fix? Photoshop Express to the Rescue!

Mark Soper — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:56:50 -0500

Photoshop Express Brings Photo Editing as Close as Your Browser

If you need quick fixes for some photos and don't have a photo editor installed on the system du jour, what can you do? Adobe has the solution: Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a free web-based photo editing, uploading, and sharing solution. Get started here.

Register or Test Drive - Your Choice!

You don't need to register to give Photoshop Express a try. After you enter the site, click the Test Drive button to work with a wide variety of existing photos already on the site. You can't save your changes, but you can see for yourself what it can do. When you register, you can upload your own photos (you get 2GB of space), browse galleries, and use Photoshop Express's wide variety of photo repair tools to fix common problems.

Picture Tools

To rotate, e-mail, link, embed, download, or use a picture in other ways, just click it and select the option desired.

Basic Picture Editing

To edit a photo with problems (or just to change it for fun), select Edit Photo. Basic changes include:

- Crop & Rotate supports traditional photo sizes, and features an adjustable grid for straightening crooked photos.
- Other adjustments, such as Auto Correct, Exposure, and Saturation, offer a variety of previews of different adjustment levels. As you move your mouse across the previews, the main photo changes accordingly.
- Touchup offers a low-end version of Adobe's healing brush.
- Red-Eye Removal provides one-click removal of you-know-what.

Beyond the Basics

The Tuning menu provides a variety of preset adjustments for:

- White balance
- Highlights
- Fill light
- Sharpening
- Soft focus.

The Effects menu adjusts:

- Color
- Hue
- Tint
- Sketch effects
- Distortions
- Black and white conversions

Sharing Your Photos

You can specify which of your albums to share using the My Gallery menu. You can also use Photoshop Express to edit photos you have displayed on other popular sites including Facebook, Photobucket, or Picasa.

Photoshop Express, a Photoshop Elements Killer?

That's like asking if apple eaters never try oranges.

Photoshop Express puts a nice combination of features and ease of use at your fingertips - but if you need to really fix up a bad photo, you'll miss familiar tools like Levels, white balance by skin tone, and others.

Photoshop Express can't use TIFF or RAW files, either: it's only for JPEG photos. You can't upload anything larger than 10MP or 4000 pixels in height and width: anything larger than 2880x2880 is resized, and don't try to feed it more than 100 photos at a time.

It's designed for Windows XP, Vista, MacOS 10.4 or later, 1024x768 or larger screen, IE 6 or 7, Firefox 2 or later, or Safari 3.0.4 on Macs (if you're trying Safari 3.1 for Windows, tell us - and Adobe - if Photoshop Express works for you).

It's no application killer, but it's a handy extension to whatever you're using now that can bail you out of a tight spot, give you another place to stash some photos, and provides a generally responsive way to have some fun with your pictures. It's a beta, so it can only get better. And best of all, it's web-based, so it's always ready.

Windows Media Center + Adobe Photoshop Elements = More Photo Fun

Mark Soper — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 17:42:41 -0500

Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions include Windows Media Center (WMC), an updated version of the Windows XP Media Center Edition "10 foot UI" designed to help you enjoy your media from across the room on a big-screen TV. Unfortunately, WMC doesn't include support for Photoshop (PSD) files. But, if you've installed Photoshop Elements 5 (PE5) since you installed Windows Vista, you already have the solution to your problem.

Launching PE5 from Within WMC

Photoshop Elements 5 is one of an increasing number of third-party apps that can hook into WMC. To launch PE5's WMC features, open the Pictures + Videos menu in WMC and scroll horizontally to locate the Adode Photoshop icon. Click it to start PE5's WMC interface.

How PE5 Supercharges WMC

From within WMC, PE5 disp[ays photos in full-screen with more playback options and transitions than WMC provides and - most importantly - enables WMC to display photos saved in formats normally not recognized by WMC, especially Adobe's own PSD format, which supports layers of various kinds, including object and adjustment layers.

Better Photo Selection

You can view all photos included in a Photoshop Elements catalog or select photos by date, by tag, or by collection. The Select Photos by Date feature displays a calendar; dates with pictures feature a thumbnail image of one of the photos taken on that date (see figure). You can also view photos by a specified date range. These features beat out WMC's Picture Library (which groups photos by the month) for convenience.

Better Photo Playback

Use the Slide Show menu to choose playback duration, transitions, and speed when you view your photos in WMC with PE5 (don't confuse this with the option to play back slide shows created with PE5). The default Fade transition provides a very smooth transition between images, very useful if you're wanting to view several versions of the same photo with different effects (full color, black-and-white, exposure adjustments, and so on).

Create Catalogs and Collections to Help PE5 Find All of Your Photos

To enable PE5's WMC support to find all of your photos, be sure to create a catalog of your photos when you use PE5 from the Windows Vista desktop. Otherwise, it displays only images you created or edited with PE5. To make it even easier to view your photos, create collections of related photos in PE5 and browse them within PE5's WMC interface.

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Discover how Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions bring your photos, videos and music to life with Windows Media Center. Get Mark's new book Maximum PC Microsoft Windows Vista Exposed: an Insider's Guide to Supercharging Windows Vista. It's now available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, BooksaMillion, and other fine bookstores.

MemoriesOnTV Pro 3.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 06:05:24 -0600

Garage developers have coded some of the most amazing software available today—including MemoriesOnTV Pro. Version 3.0 of Codejam’s powerful slide show maker packs in a ton of new features and improvements yet maintains the friendly design that we’ve long loved about the app.

The niftiest new feature is the ability to combine multiple images into a single frame of your slide show. But as much as we like the output, we’re not thrilled with the implementation—Codejam cheats when rendering the multi-image effect. While all the other effects in the program run in real time, the multi-slide effect comes about after first being rendered to a video file, and then inserted into the timeline. Fortunately, the render only takes 10-20 seconds, and making changes is fairly easy as well, but it feels like a hack.

The strength of MemoriesOnTV has always been its ability to emulate Ken Burns’ trademark zoom, pan, and fade style. MemoriesOnTV remains the best tool for Burns wannabes, and it’s damned easy to use.

The biggest improvement over previous versions of the software is MOTV 3.0’s stronger audio-editing chops. The program will now automatically trim out the silence at the end or beginning of your soundtrack. And long overdue is the ability to add sounds to individual slides. That’s handy for narrating your slide show. MemoriesOnTV gives you the ability to fade out the music while the narration plays, as well as the ability to set the narration volume. We appreciate the additions, but we still wish you could view and edit footage in a more traditional timeline—something you see in most video applications.

And that’s the rub. MemoriesOnTV is really nothing more than a tool to create slide shows; it’s not a replacement for a nonlinear video editor. With cheap video editors and DVD burning bundles offering similar functionality today, albeit not nearly as polished or easy to use, you have to be really serious about picture DVDs to opt for MemoriesOnTV. We obviously are, and for slide shows, MemoriesOnTV is the first icon we click.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
Verdict: 9
URL: www.codejam.com

Adobe Photoshop Elements with Premiere Elements

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:45:53 -0600

The newest update to Photoshop Elements 4.0 is just a bunny hop forward from the previous iteration. Adobe really sweetens the deal, however, by bundling the home-user edition of Photoshop with the home-user version of Premiere—Premiere Elements 2.0.

Don’t take that to mean that Photoshop Elements doesn’t get any worthwhile new features; there are quite a few, including some that had even our designers’ mouths watering. But the more noteworthy update is to Premiere Elements. While Premiere Elements 1.0 was a decent 1.0 version, it was a rough product.

The most noticeable change to version 2.0 of Premiere Elements is the removal of the surfeit of palettes that Adobe normally buries you under. With Premiere Elements 2.0, as you grow or shrink particular palettes, the other palettes adjust accordingly. It’s a nice touch that we’d like to see in other Adobe products.

Premiere Elements 2.0 also now lets you create your own DVD menu templates. You can set your background video or image and customize text but, sadly, button editing is verboten, as are edits to the graphical overlays used for the templates. The templates themselves, however, are quite polished and exhibit none of the general cheesiness you find in competing products. The titling capability of the program is also enhanced and the stock of included Adobe fonts is pretty spectacular.

The real gem of Premiere Elements 2.0 is its performance. Because it’s based on Adobe’s pro-level Premiere Pro 1.5 engine, Premiere Elements sings—just sings—with today’s hardware. If you’re running a dual-processor or dual-core machine, Premiere Elements’ multithreaded engine chews through video in a way that will make any hardware-head giggle with joy. Several of the video transactions are rendered on the GPU as well, for additional speed.

Rev 2 also allows you to import video using High Speed USB with cameras that support the interface (FireWire is also supported), and the app can encode audio to the space-saving Dolby Digital 2.0 codec instead of using uncompressed PCM audio. Adobe also catches up to the competition by letting you import VOB files for editing. The VOBs must be unencrypted, though—so you won’t be able to edit Sophia Copola out of The Godfather III, but you can re-import your movies once you’ve burned them to DVD.

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe mostly polishes the award-winning image-editing app. You still get a good taste of Photoshop without any of the pro-oriented pre-press stuff. The most notable changes are the skin-tone tool that lets you easily tweak skin tone in images, and the Magic Extractor. Every old Photoshop-hand knows what a daunting task it can be to clip images from photos; with the Magic Extractor, you easily separate your cat, kid, or car from the background. A similar tool called Magic Selection Brush lets you easily select objects. Both tools are far from perfect, but even if you think the Magic Lasso should be used exclusively by Wonder Woman, you’ll be able to clip and edit like a Photoshop pro.

Where Photoshop Elements 4.0 is lacking is in performance. Next to its multithreaded sibling, we found ourselves waiting an inordinate amount of time for Magic Extractor to complete. Admittedly our test clip is complex, but we were testing on a machine with four CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Uninspiring performance doesn’t outweigh the positives of the program, but after coming off a hardware high from Premiere Elements 2.0, the lack of any real multithreading was a bummer.

Purchased separately, the apps would total $200, but as a bundle you get both for $150. That might still seem like a lot, but between the pair, you’ll be able to handle 95 percent of the image and movie chores you’ll ever be tasked with.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

+ 8MM: Dual-core and GPU support in Premiere Elements.

- VHS: Adobe Photo Downloader can be quite annoying.

VERDICT: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.adobe.com