Posted 08/31/09 at 06:00:30 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

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.

 

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 01/22/09 at 05:15:09 PM by Andy Salisbury

Nvidia recently announced that they’ll be releasing a new “professional video editing accelerator bundle” based on their Quadro CX platform. The bundle consists of a Quadro CX video card and Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and they claim that it will be able to encode H.264 video four times faster than a dual-core CPU.

Nvidia reports that rendering times for a one-hour movie requires 10 hours on a dual-core CPU, whereas with their Quadro CX it would only take two hours and 35 minutes.

So if you’re looking to get yourself into the video editing game with a powerful bundle like this one, be sure to act fast. The bundle will be going for $1,999 until March 31, 2009. After that, the bundle will jump up to $2,299.

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Posted 09/19/08 at 04:06:05 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Windows Live has come a long way since it was first introduced as a Microsoft brand in 2006. The first wave bolted Hotmail, Messenger, and Spaces into a single download. In last year's second wave, tools like SkyDrive,  Events, Photo Gallery, LiveWriter, Calendar, and Family Safety joined the family, along with support for mobile devices. This week, Microsoft rolled out its third wave, adding a new member to the Windows Live family (Movie Maker) and new features to several existing programs (Messenger, Photo Gallery, Writer, Toolbar, and more). We've already told you about the new features in Hotmail, so join us after the jump to find out what's new and improved.

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Posted 08/13/08 at 10:00:10 PM by Mark Edward Soper

Microsoft demonstrated its newly-unveiled Unwrap Mosaic video editing research project this week at SIGGRAPH. Unwrap Mosaic enables users to add shapes ("artifacts") to home video. As Gizmodo describes it, you can use it to put "a handlebar mustache on Grandma."

If that makes Unwrap Mosaic sound no more sophisticated than a spray-paint can in the hands of a tagger, consider Geek.com's summary:

[Unwrap Mosaic] is best described as the Photoshop of video editing tools. With UM you can literally take a video and change the appearance of the objects it contains. The demonstration video shows this in action with the male star having a moustache, bushy eyebrows and rosy cheeks added. The result looks natural, moving realistically with the face, and the first-time viewer would think he’d had a moustache all along.

Don't go banging down the doors at your local "Software-R-US" store or start surfing for your own copy of Unwrap Mosaic just yet, though. It's still a research project, but you can learn more at the Microsoft Research website. Unwrap Mosaic is just one of 13 different presentations that Microsoft is offering at SIGGRAPH 2008.

Are you looking forward to the chance to use photo-editing tools on your videos? Worried about a further blurring of the line between reality and "virtual reality"? Sound off after the jump!

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Posted 07/17/08 at 12:41:14 PM by Mark Edward Soper

eWeek reports that NBC will provide 2,900 hours of live TV coverage, shattering the 2,562 hours of combined US TV coverage for all previous summer Olympics games. According to NBCOlympics.com, though, the number is even higher (3,600 hours) when all NBC Universal networks and NBCOlympics.com are taken into account.

To learn how NBC's doing it, and how you can watch it on your PC or mobile device, catch us after the jump.

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Posted 01/30/08 at 01:46:39 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

Just bought a snazzy new camera that records to AVCHD but don’t have the software to edit it? No problem. Ulead’s VideoStudio 11 Plus pitches itself as the only app capable of fully editing video captured using Sony’s and Panasonic’s new H.264-based codec, which works with mini-DVDs, hard drives, and flash memory inside cameras. (Nero was technically first, but its editor is pretty threadbare.)

Click Read More for more. 

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