By Staff, May 20, 2008
Sounds, the movie produced with Super-Resolution
Technology, came home with multiple awards in several categories at the
recently completed WorldFest International Film Festival, including the highest
score in the New Technology category.
Competing against more than 500 other full-length feature independent films
submitted to the 41st annual WorldFest, Sounds won a total of three of the prestigious Remi Awards
in the “Best Picture” categories including:
Science-Fiction: Gold
New Technology: Gold
Low Budget: Silver
In addition to the awards, Sounds also made history at WorldFest (www.worldfest.org) by premiering the first use
of Super-Resolution Technology in a feature-length film. Sounds creator Ryan Humphries of Grass Valley, California,
partnered with Dallas-based Topaz Labs LLC (www.topazlabs.com)
to demonstrate its Super-Resolution Technology (SRT) previously unheard of in
the film industry.
“Winning the Remi Awards is an awesome thrill for me and all of those who
helped make this film a reality,” said Humphries. “I also am honored to working
with Topaz Labs to let the world -- especially other filmmakers -- know about
this exciting new enhancement technology.”
Until now, SRT has primarily been used by spy satellites, the military, the
CIA, a few high-tech forensic labs and U.S. law enforcement agencies. Topaz
Labs is the first to develop and introduce Super-Resolution Technology (SRT) to
the film industry.
Topaz Labs is a technology and software company founded by Dr. Feng Yang, holder
of five U.S. patents in video and audio enhancement technology. Topaz designs
unique ways to improve video quality resulting in a series of proprietary video
enhancement algorithms based on “super-resolution” technology. Radically more effective than typical scaling-based editing
programs using so-called video enhancement features, this revolutionary
technology carefully extracts image information from multiple adjacent video
frames and combines them to re-synthesize video signals at much higher
resolutions
.
With the sci-fi comedy Sounds,
Topaz has developed sophisticated SRT software that gives producers of
independent films the ability to enhance the resolution of any finished movie.
The SRT software from Topaz empowers producers to bump-up their standard
definition shot film to hi-def, or even hi-def to digital film of 4,000 pixels.
SRT similarly parallels the difference in quality Blu-ray has achieved over
standard DVD and compliments Blu-ray in a number of ways, providing greater
marketing and revenue possibilities for film producers worldwide.
“If you shot a movie in standard definition, which is generally 720x480, you
can process it with our SRT software, and the finished product is a
high-definition quality 1920x1080 version of the movie,” Yang said.
“The discovery of true SRT from Topaz is exactly what I and other filmmakers
need,” Humphries said. “The term Super-Resolution Technology has been used
before to describe the process of interpolating and smoothing pixels during
image enlargement, which isn’t super-resolution at all to me. The Topaz
technology uses a whole new approach to achieve super-resolution enhancement.
It synthesizes missing data to achieve a high-resolution image from a smaller
source, pulling information from multiple channels and frames all at once. You
get a much better result than the other so-called SRT methods.”
Sounds was also featured at the
recent National Association of Broadcasters conference where Topaz Labs
promoted the technology by showing “Before” and “After” clips from the movie.
Several detailed movie frames can be viewed on the SRT demo Web page at http://www.soundsthemovie.com/srtdemo.htm.
Sounds is a sci-fi
thriller/comedy that pokes fun at cinematic drama in this spoof about FBI
agents on their biggest case ever. www.soundsthemovie.com
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