MotionDSP has taken the same multi-frame video technology that powers FixMyMovie.com and ported it to NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture, with stunning results, (as demonstrated at last month’s NVISION ’08 show). Now, MotionDSP is creating a version that will run on your home PC — out in early Q1 ’09 and tastily running in real-time on NVIDIA graphic cards, as well as standard CPUs (albeit much slower).
MotionDSP’s new software product, codenamed ‘Carmel’, is one of the first mass-market consumer applications to use NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture, which makes this all possible in real-time. Virtually all the other announced CUDA apps are scientific or very vertical in focus. MotionDSP is an important element in the software ecosystem around CUDA: NVIDIA needs to expand its market away from games, and video is the #1 non-gaming application that all consumers use.
With Carmel, your PC will use the same super-resolution algorithms that power MotionDSP’s video high-end forensic tools (which are in use at the Secret Service, CNN, and intelligence agencies) to make all the video on your PC look better. Starting with user-created content and moving on to video conferencing and fixing YouTube videos. All this running a LOT faster, and indeed real-time, thanks to NVIDIA.
In a grossly oversimplified nutshell – we track every pixel through dozens of frames of video, and by tracking its motion trajectory and combining the information from multiple frames, we are able to re-construct a video that is dramatically enhanced from the video. Much less noise, higher resolution, corrected lighting, and smoothed motion.
As you can imagine, this consumes ludicrous numbers of CPU cycles – 10X more than H.264 encoding, which is itself extraordinarily math-intensive. We are talking about requiring close to 1/2 a Terraflop in compute power to enhance a YouTube-sized video in realtime. Right now, without GPU acceleration, it would take more than 8 Intel cores to make our algorithm work in real-time on a PC.
We are obviously very excited about this, and I would be happy to put you in touch with NVIDIA or MotionDSP to bring clarity to any queries you may have. Please feel free to contact me (or NVIDIA) if either party can be of any help. If you are on deadline, please do contact me on my mobile at US +1 408 393 4900.
Should you like to embed an example of how well we can enhance video, here are two embed codes for your readership’s online pleasure:
Making jerky videos smooth with frame-rate interpolation
Restoring dark videos with powerful lighting controls and super-resolution noise suppression
