Software for temporal interpolation

2004-11-18 11:01:14

I've been using MotionPerfect from DynaPel / Gooder Video to "enhance"
some video clips I took under difficult circumstances using a Canon
digital still camera.

The camera produces 320x240 MJPEGs at 15fps which, as you can imagine,
look awful. They're flickery enough at 15fps, but burning them to a
PAL DVD makes movement look even more jumpy because of the non-integer
frame rate change.

MotionPerfect (slow and buggy as it is) interpolates the motion very
nicely some of the time, producing very pleasing results. However,
where ever something moves against a patterned or textured background,
the stationary background is "dragged" by whatever moves in front of
it. It's quite obvious, and very disconcerting when (say) someone
moves their hand in front of their face. Great for a horror movie, but
not what I'm looking for!

You can see the same effect on 100Hz Sony TV sets or Philips TV sets
with "digital natural motion", but it's not nearly as bad - probably because
they're starting from 24fps rather than 15fps, and the processing is better.

So, what are the alternatives for converting my footage? Are there any
affordable alternatives to MotionPerfect? What about money no object
alternatives? They're not an option, but it would be interesting to
know what's out there and what the pros would/could use.

Cheers,
David.

Software for temporal interpolation

Reply #1 – 2004-11-18 11:46:04

1. i have used this one few times for sort of a superslow-motion effect:
http://www.revisionfx.com/rstwixtor.htm
(it is rather slow and not really cheap)

edit:
2. free version would be to figure out some sort of solution with avisynth.... (no idea where to start even, maybe here http://www.avisynth.org/FPS )

Software for temporal interpolation

Reply #2 – 2004-11-22 10:47:14

Thanks smok3 - I've asked this question in several forums and this is the first reply I've received!

It's probably too expensive, and it only plugs into software that I don't have, but I'll see what I can do.

Cheers,
David.

Software for temporal interpolation

Reply #3 – 2004-11-22 13:31:30

twixtor is crap, slow and looks worse than motionperfect.

there is a solution with avisynth - it takes a fair bit of tweak-action, but delivers pretty good results.  use latest avisynth and MVtools by manao - you'll need a slightly earlier version, as he's disabled the function MVconvertfps in the latest ones, due to some heavy re-writing that's going on.

basically, it'll do motion-compensation like what xvid does - moving blocks around.  the difference is that you can move 4x4 blocks around, which will give you pretty damn good results after some tweaking.

i haven't found the "morph" problem with MVtools, but there'll be some blocking artefacts every now and then.

FWIW, i've tried twixtor and MVtools, and MVtools wins pretty convincingly.  i've only seen sample clips of motionperfect, so i can't say much about it.

check out the avisynth forums at forum.doom9.org to find out where to find this stuff.

definitely can't complain about the price  and the speed is faster than twixtor, too.