I've been watching variously smoothed clips very carefully and have come to the conclusion (that of course many before me have reached) that detecting motion is the key to retaining detail.
To that end I've been playing with various algorithms and have come up with one that seems to work quite well. It effectively differentiates between motion and moderate noise (between 1-3). Since posting grabs would be pointless, I've made a
2.62mb 27-second clip to demonstrate. I know it's bad quality, but it
is small
.
The detection was done at 720x480 and then it was simple-resized down to its current resolution.
Anyway, before I start attempting to make it do something useful like smoothing, I thought I'd run it by people here to see if they can spot any obvious problems with the output. The threshold for this clip might have been a little on the sensitive side, but it's pretty finely tunable.
I'd appreciate any comments
.