Originally posted by: Laserman
I'm interested in what the plugins you have developed do?
(I have been using Eddie for roto and satabilising the footage, but am interested in what you are up to on the PC)
Are you going to try and stabilise all the footage, or just the horribly wobbly bits?

We've developed a few plug-ins for this project. One is a de-noiser, as the laserdisc has surprisingly visible, ever-present video noise. Our de-noiser has successfully removed the video noise without softening the image.

We also developed a saturation plug-in. Simply boosting a saturation control doesn't work because it immediately introduces artifacts into the image as it tries to recruit colors from a palette that's already been truncated. Our saturation plug-in allows us to dial the color back in without this limitation. It also allows us to easily apply the color palette from one image to another, though there are a lot of ways to do that.

There's also a sharpening plug-in we wrote that works a billion times better than standard sharpening tools like unsharp mask, which usually adds edge artifacts and other anomalies.

Another plug-in was developed for things like lightsabers and lasers (I used it to restore the lasers in the opening scene), whereby there is nearly limitless control over the shape, softness, color gradients, etc.

For rotowork, we usually use Commotion 2.x (still the best), which we also use for paint work/clean up.

I'm cool with stabilizing footage where necessary, and for that I'll usually use boujou, or Commotion, or AE, whatever works, really.

_Mike