New DVO Video HPA Engineering Excellence Award Entry 2012

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1 New DVO Video HPA Engineering Excellence Award Entry 2012 Phoenix Video - Unveiled at NAB 2012, Phoenix Video is a powerful restoration system incorporating Digital Vision s respected image manipulation DVO software toolset. Phoenix Video offers highly-automated restoration and enhancement of video content stored on analog tape formats, 1, U-Matic and Betacam SP, or later transferred to digital tape formats. Extremely cost effective, Phoenix Video provides restoration facilities, broadcasters and archive holders unrivaled image restoration software that presents expanded revenue opportunities. Phoenix Video is available as a standalone system or integrated with Digital Vision's flagship restoration system, Phoenix Finish; combining a powerful film and video restoration in one system for the first time ever, Introduction Digital Vision has just introduced a new restoration and enhancement tool set for video related content - DVO Video. DVO Video offers the ability for correction and removal of video noise, cross color, drop-outs, line displacements and sync errors. The addition of the video tools enables customers to expand their restoration services and bring new life to valuable content stored on tape. For the first time, users can employ state of the art tools in a single timeline, to fully correct and deliver projects that contain film and video elements and their related artifacts. DVO Video is a highly-automated and integrated toolset that brings new life to valuable content stored on video tapes. Digital Vision unveiled Phoenix Video at NAB This unique, powerful, single restoration system answers the needs of content owners who are managing millions of hours of material stored in videotape archives. Solely targeted to the video restoration market, Phoenix Video provides broadcasters and archive owners with a highly costeffective image restoration software solution that allows content stored on videotape to be fully restored and made ready for distribution across multiple platforms. An end to end solution, Phoenix Video includes Digital Vision s leading image manipulation DVO software toolset for highly-automated restoration and enhancement of video content stored on various tape formats, including 1, U-Matic and Betacam SP, or later transferred to digital tape formats. The system handles image defects such as drop-outs, severe noise, cross color artifacting, line sync problems (shifts/stretching) and more. Additional features include motion compensated frame rate conversion and high-quality upscaling, as well as full support for common broadcast codecs. These new video restoration tools have are included in Digital Vision s high-end restoration offering - Phoenix Finish. The system restores material from analogue videotape archives, up to 4K film restoration handling, and a combination of video and film related issues. With the new video restoration toolset, Phoenix Finish can provide

2 users with a unique system that fulfils all requirements regardless of acquisition format or quality of original material. With over 20 years of research and development, the company's integrated DVO image processing software tools are seen as one of the most revered toolsets in the post production industry. Known for presenting the best image manipulation tools for restoration, enhancement and format conversion, they are only available on the Nucoda and Phoenix platforms. Background Digital Vision had received many requests from the industry to develop tools for video restoration, and began a serious research project to analyze the issues, state of affairs, and potential solutions for facilities offering archiving and traditional restoration. It became rapidly clear that there was a lack of proper video tools. While some video issues can be corrected in the analogue domain while ingesting directly from the source tape, earlier migration to digital media may have passed along problems from the original analog tape sources. Whether inherited from earlier migrated tapes or not, video related issues often surfaced in archived video tape. Sophisticated algorithms to properly deal with such imperfections once in the digital domain are not easily implemented in hardware. There was also a push to move away from hardware to software-based solutions for workflow reasons. DVO Video Tools in Phoenix Some video related issues resemble film related issues and can be dealt with in a similar process, adapted to the characteristics of video. Others are totally unique to the video realm, not just the analogue domain but to specific tape formats. Identifying the most common problems that were posing problems for content providers has resulted in a number of new DVO video tools that can be used in any type of video restoration. These tools have been designed with speed, automation and minimum user intervention in mind. Some of the issues that the new DVO tools can handle are: Cross Color a.k.a Chroma Crawling is an infamous defect that results from crosstalk due to the intermodulation of the chrominance and luminance components of a composite signal (PAL/NTSC). Once a video signal has been in the composite domain this effects is not easily removed. The resulting image will have induced colored areas around sharp transitions, e.g. black to white.

3 Line sync or line jitter is a very common problem with archived analogue video tape typically caused by the lack of or disturbances of line synchronization pulses, preventing the video tape recorder from locating the actual start and end of each line. This causes random line displacement (jitter). The most visible effect is that edges, which should be vertical in the image, appear to be jagged. Whatever the source of the degradations, it is disturbing to the viewer. The jitter can range from +/-1 pixel to more than +/-5 pixels in severe cases. Digital drop-out removal can "hide" some of the jitter, but is not the answer to the problem. The new DVO Line Sync tool automatically detects and corrects these line displacements as well as any stretching thereof without losing the original information, thus keeping the vertical sharpness. Drop-outs are usually caused by imperfections in the surface of the tape stock or by dust particles attracted to the tape by static electricity. Dropout

4 Compensation in a VTR can detect the presence of a dropout, but typically tries to cover it up by replacing it with information from the preceding line, covering up the dropout, thus causing loss of vertical sharpness and/or creating jagged edges in that area. With an approach similar to dust busting, but with detection and filters optimized for line based errors, the lost information can accurately be replaced. Video noise is similar in nature to film grain, but with some differences. E.g. being Y/C based and having lower resolution of the chrominance. Also, in general, video noise is unwanted while film grain is preserved to some extent. The DVO Noise algorithm is specifically adapted to dramatically reduce electronic noise using Digital Vision's Emmy award-winning PHAME advanced motion estimation technology along with edge-preserving 3-D spatio-temporal filters to produce clean, sharp pictures. The latter involves a process of adaptively selecting the best mix of spatial and temporal (recursive) filtering for each pixel and is unique to the DVO Noise algorithm. Combining video and film tools Combining video tools with traditional film restoration tools on the same timeline provides tremendous advantages, and reduces the total investment in hardware and software. That alone is a great time-saver as the media does not have to be moved from system to system and allowing the operator, with flexibility and virtually no limitations, to manage the order of the tools for optimum results when dealing with film media transferred to analog video tapes. In its early beta stage the new DVO video tools where used in projects to save time, removing video related artifacts from film material stored on analog tape, then upscaling in high quality to HD, not needing to go back to the original film for a new transfer. About Digital Vision Digital Vision provides innovative image restoration, film scanning, image enhancement, color grading, finishing and mastering solutions that are used to create much of the world s high profile television, film and commercials media broadcast today. The company s award-winning products are standards of the media and entertainment industry and are deployed at top facilities around the world. Digital Vision is headquartered in Linköping Sweden with offices in Stockholm, Sweden and two wholly owned subsidiaries: Digital Vision (US) in Los Angeles and Digital Vision Systems Ltd in London. The company maintains its global presence through a network of qualified distributors.

5 Digital Vision is a division of the Image Systems group of companies, a public company listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. History Digital Vision, founded in 1988 in Sweden, was a pioneer of digital video in the 80s. Founded by Peter Weiss, Björn Christensson and Håkan Almér, the latter two are still with the company s R&D group today. The team brought a depth of experience from their research role at Swedish Telecom s R&D Lab. They had carefully reviewed the noise reducers on the market and decided that, on their own, they could develop a solution for real-time motion based digital video processing with various key areas such as coding/compression, restoration and enhancement of digital film and video. They created the Digital Vision Noise Reducer later known as the DVNR (hyperlink to DVNR page), which was released in 1989 and was the world s first real-time motion compensated digital video noise reducer DVNR1000. The DVNR product line was extended during the 90s to include the first HD-processing in the industry, which also incorporated several other processing options like motion compensated film dust removal, image stabilization, color correction, pan & scan, image scaling etc., further establishing the DVNR product line as the industry s productof-choice. In 2005, Digital Vision acquired Nucoda Ltd based in London, England and integrated Nucoda s technology into its own product offering. The Nucoda software application, suited for DI workflows, was an easy to use application for grading of motion images at very high resolutions using general purpose computer platforms. While the company s first 15 years in business had been built on hardware based solutions, with Nucoda the company became largely focused on software based processing with a large portfolio of products/tools for film/video processing. The famous DVNR algorithms were a starting point for what we today call the DVO toolset. The DVO toolset was developed further to include new advanced tools and is now the cornerstone for both the Phoenix and Nucoda platforms. In April 2011 Digital Vision acquired Image Systems, a Swedish company with strong background in scanner development and picture analysis software, and formed the Image Systems Group of companies. The new company is named Image Systems AB. Contact Information Alexa Maza Worldwide Marketing Manager

6 4605 Lankershim Blvd, Suite 700, North Hollywood, CA Mobile Tel Torbjörn Dyrvold Phoenix & DVO Product Manager Telefonvägen 30, Hägersten, Sweden Mobile +46 (0) Tel +46 (0)