Would this be possible with avisynth?

[themichael]

There is a plug in for After Effects that will convert NTSC video to look like film. It changes the frame rate to 24 fps, deinterlaces, remove color artifacting, and restores lost color information. The reason I am asking is they claim to be the only affordable to do this conversion. $1000US isn't affordable! (story pasted below)

I really like avisynth. I am working on several functions (the limit of my programming skills) to do some fancy dissolves/wipes for a photo slide show. Still can't get the "burn thru" to work right, maybe I'll post what's working later....

Mike

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How Magic Bullet works

In the simplest terms, Magic Bullet lets you take digital video's faster frame rate and interlaced capture and convert it to the film frame rate of 24 fps.

Television has two fields in every frame, also known as interlacing. Magic Bullet combines these fields using a proprietary, adaptive process to convert the video into a full-frame image, also known as deinterlacing. There are a number of tools for deinterlacing, but only Magic Bullet removes the artifacts from the digital video format.

Magic Bullet lets you produce high-quality professional-grade movies and commercials at the cost of video and with the look of film. Currently, there's no other solution on the market that's as affordably priced to accomplish these tasks.

The process behind 'deartifacting'

Deartifacting simply means cleaning up your video image. In almost all cases, color information is lost as it's compressed and saved to videotape. This applies to both consumer mini-DV and professional high-definition cameras. The Magic Bullet deartifacting feature smoothes out and re-creates this lost color information, giving the image a sharper and less blocky appearance. This is the first step in the Magic Bullet process. It brings the original video closer to film.

Look Suite creates dramatic images

The Magic Bullet Look Suite addresses the style by applying dramatic or subtle color changes. We've included a number of preset "looks" that you can apply to your footage. The preset looks are designed to mimic popular shooting styles, filters, and postproduction processes. You can create a dreamy warm feel or a sharp dramatic look with the click of a button. Magic Bullet Suite ships with 15 different professional preset looks.

You can use the preset looks as a launching pad to create your own unique film styles. Look Suite lets you apply them across your entire movie, save them for use on different scenes, and even share looks with other Magic Bullet users.

Availability

Magic Bullet is aimed at video professionals. There are two versions of Magic Bullet: the Standard Definition version is $995 and the High Definition version is $1,995. Visit The Orphanage for details on where to buy the software.


http://www.theorphanage.com/

[Xenoproctologist]

Deinterlacing/inverse telecine:

Decomb
IVTC
IT
GreedyHMA


Artifact removal & cleaning:

2DCleaner
Temporal Cleaner
Convolution3d
etcetera, etcetera...


As for the Look Suite or whatever, it's hard to tell what it really does without a spec list. Most of it could probably be done with suitable application of Tweak and General Convolution.

[theReal]

Magic Bullet lets you produce high-quality professional-grade movies and commercials at the cost of video and with the look of film.I think this software doesn't do the same as an ivtc filter. I think it means you can convert real 100% 29.97fps interlaced DV material into 24fps progressive video. IVTC filters "only" restore the original 24fps video from telecined material

[themichael]

I've got a script somewhere that converts NTSC to PAL. I guess if I changed the framerate to 24 (instead of 25) after deinterlacing and then one of the cleaners.....

The sample they showed was of a red traffic cone in the corner of a 720x480 picture. They had already deinterlaced the picture. The cone had "ghostly" jagged edges. The after picture had smoothed out and didn't look like a vid cap. The author had said that the red channel suffered the most from compression. Needless to say he was very light on technical specs....

Deartifacting simply means cleaning up your video image. In almost all cases, color information is lost as it's compressed and saved to videotape. This applies to both consumer mini-DV and professional high-definition cameras. The Magic Bullet deartifacting feature smoothes out and re-creates this lost color information, giving the image a sharper and less blocky appearance. This is the first step in the Magic Bullet process. It brings the original video closer to film.

[theReal]

Magic Bullet is set apart from rivals in the way it works. It deinterlaces video by examining it for the type of interlacing artefacts that are easy to spot by eye, but hard to isolate for a computer algorithm. To do this it uses a fuzzy-logic approach to account for pixels, which may move a whole frame or a half frame, potentially skipping fields as they go. Magic Bullet then examines those areas of motion and creates new pixels where the secondary field has to be discarded. New pixels are created based on pattern-matching, so that instead of a simple interpolation, you get smooth contours and clean diagonals.

I found this in a review on http://www.pcpro.co.uk/front_index.php?ip=1&domain=macuser&page=reviews%2Freviews_story.php%3Fid%3D32489

I'm not sure, but I think other deinterlace filters are not as dumb as the author here wants to put it. Maybe one of the deinterlacing experts (Donald Graft or Tom Barry come to mind) can comment on this?

[theReal]

Found another description (one that differs a little from the usual few statements that every site has copied from some other site...)

The Magic Bullet is the result of collaborations with Adobe Systems, Pinnacle Systems and Apple Computer. Developed as a set of After Effects plug-ins the process is essentially twofold, a 24p mastering system and an opticals and 'looks' suite. The main component of the software is capable of using any number of digital video formats (PAL or NTSC) and converts them to a more desirable 24fps. The process can also convert interlaced fields into complete frames. This frame rate conversion is a crucial part of transferring video to film and while most transfer houses are quite capable of performing this task, each has it's own proprietary methods which can create mixed results.

What makes Magic Bullet a real breakthrough in this process is that it doesn't average, throw away or blend fields to do the rate conversion. "What Magic Bullet does is selectively discard video fields to recreate image data from those fields," says Stu Maschwitz, one of The Orphanage founders and the driving force behind Magic Bullet. "It then replaces deleted pixels with interpolated data generated using pattern-recognition algorithms." In addition to this it is capable of handling elaborate film emulation tasks that re-conform the linear contrast curves of video formats so that they emulate the logarithmic characteristics of film. The package (a version of which is now commercially available) also contains video artefact extraction tools and precise film graining utilities. These capabilities basically allow the film-maker or post facility to do the de-interlace themselves meaning that the footage can be visually altered in any way imaginable, safe in the knowledge that they have controlled all of the processes, which is useful for adding visual effects later since you'd be working in 24p.

The 'look' suite is the creative element to Magic Bullet and involves a collection of preset looks which can be applied to film footage, although the software also allows for the user to design their own. Maschwitz comments, "By listening to cinematographers and directors we built a suite of tools that are very, very specific for creating looks. They're not merely about colour correction, but designing an entire look. For example there will be a setting to emulate the look of a movie like, for example Saving Private Ryan," Laughing he adds: "Of course the look will be given a more proper name for the process like 'Skip bleach by-pass." Further presets will regularly be added to by The Orphanage. The package also allows for film-like fades to black and burns to white and has a 'letterbox' facility providing simple and effective cropping of footage to output ratios. (from http://www.cgimag.com/technology/orphan_may02.shtml# )

Seems like the price is so high because it's aimed at film producers who'd have to spend a lot more on real video to film conversion...

[Marc FD]

that makes me mad.

claiming to have the best deinterlacing method, and saying it's perfect. nonsense.

first, no deinterlacing method is perfect. each as pros and cons.

second, what they describe seems very close from a very smart smartbob, with a very selective decimation. nothing revolutionnar. They have of course added some good and smart ideas. (it's their job after all)

third, for denoising, as xeno said, avisynth has nothing to learn. of course you can do that in the smartbob process. maybe that's why the call it de-artifacting.

fourth, the "professionnal" NTSC->PAL convertions i see everyday are crap. and PAL/NTSC->FILM convertion is even harder, because you need to deinterlace.

fifth, i think if you want a real improvement in deinterlacing, you'll need lots of cpu power. i wonder how fast this filter works. simply speaking, if it's really fast, it's crap ^^

simply speaking, the best converters aren't software filters and don't cost 2000$, that's pocket money for big producers. they use hardware monsters, about 1'000'000 $ the box. this's another world.

[Xenoproctologist]

Yep. If you want the good stuff, you want something more along the lines of morphological interpolation, in which case you're talking about big bucks and render times measured in minutes-per-frame (at best).