YouTube Aims to Eliminate Shaky Cellphone Video

YouTube has acquired a small Irish start-up that it hopes will improve the quality of video being uploaded to the video sharing site.

Google’s YouTube team today announced that it had acquired Green Parrot Pictures, a digital video technology company founded six years ago by Anil Kokaram, Associate Professor at the Engineering School of Trinity College in Dublin. In the few years it has been around, Green Parrot’s technology has been used in major motion pictures like Lord of the Rings and X-Men. Now, YouTube is ready to get the Green Parrot treatment.

“Take, for example, videos of recent protests in Libya,” said Jeremy Doig, Director of Google Video Technology. “Although emotionally captivating, they can be jerky, blurry or unsteady. What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos -- sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video -- all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site?”

Doig says the folks at Green Parrot will act as a source of new ideas and further innovation at YouTube and Google, which means we’ll probably be waiting a little longer for that rescue from shaky cellphone cam videos. In the mean time, check out a few examples of what Green Parrot’s technology is capable of:

Stabilizer

Slo-mo

Blotch Remover

You need to be logged to post a comment

There are 17 Comments.

Other Comments

7

kcorp2003 , March 17, 2011 10:58 AM

This will go great with shaky videos of alien footage.
4

caeden , March 17, 2011 11:07 AM

...wow. The deblotcher can be done better with shaders, and other video cleaning features, especially when in black and white. But the other 2 are fairly breathtaking. Most of the people who see this will have no appreciation of just how hard it is to get true clean slomo, and the dejitter tech isn't particularly brain surgery, but it wasn't that long ago that you would have to fix it frame by frame, doing it automatically would save so much time and effort.
9

Kelavarus , March 17, 2011 11:14 AM

kcorp2003This will go great with shaky videos of alien footage.

Haha, so I take it we'll see Cloverfield re-uploaded on Youtube with a stabilized version soon?
3

joytech22 , March 17, 2011 11:57 AM

All of these are incredibly useful but I can see this getting annoying if each of these filters is applied to your video's automatically during each upload, Especially since I make gameplay recordings which can get shaky with gameplay (screen recording).
2

asdfghjkl , March 17, 2011 2:17 PM

It's less the bad video quality, but the awful audio quality of cell phones. See/hear videos of amateur concert recordings: broooooooooooochrchrchrchrchrchrchrchrchrbroooooooo.

Youtube should create a function that limits the volume on such videos automatically, before we destroy our ears.
2

alidan , March 17, 2011 4:41 PM

caeden...wow. The deblotcher can be done better with shaders, and other video cleaning features, especially when in black and white. But the other 2 are fairly breathtaking. Most of the people who see this will have no appreciation of just how hard it is to get true clean slomo, and the dejitter tech isn't particularly brain surgery, but it wasn't that long ago that you would have to fix it frame by frame, doing it automatically would save so much time and effort.

i despise the de blotcher, personally. but thats just me because of alot of anime i watch went from anolouge to bluray, but the studios decided to do a deblotch like filter to remove grain and ruined a fair number of great animes.
1

addictxd , March 17, 2011 6:05 PM

is there a software out that can do this?

It would come in handy when shakily recording HD video from my SLR
1

nebun , March 17, 2011 6:14 PM

addictxdis there a software out that can do this? It would come in handy when shakily recording HD video from my SLR

vreveral...very good in fact
2

addictxd , March 17, 2011 6:44 PM

nebunvreveral...very good in fact

Thanks, I take it you meant vreveal, looks great and it's designed to work with cuda, great!
1

anonymous@guest , March 17, 2011 7:21 PM

The appeal of old movies is the media it was filmed on, why remove the grain and blotches, thats how it was filmed, looks unreal cleaned up!
Slo mo is very very good though!
2

mayankleoboy1 , March 17, 2011 8:16 PM

excellent dejitter. but will it reduce the overall quality of the video?
1

scott_madison1 , March 17, 2011 8:18 PM

I'd prefer it if they would just get it figured out so video's wouldn't buffer when you put them in full screen....
1

Cyex , March 17, 2011 8:33 PM

asdfghjklYoutube should create a function that limits the volume on such videos automatically, before we destroy our ears.

Yeah they should make some kind of volume control, so that the viewer can decide what volume to view each video with, and they should put it right near the play/pause button.
-1

Sabiancym , March 18, 2011 1:00 AM

alidani despise the de blotcher, personally. but thats just me because of alot of anime i watch went from anolouge to bluray, but the studios decided to do a deblotch like filter to remove grain and ruined a fair number of great animes.

Great and anime do not belong in the same sentence.
1

lightbulbsocket , March 18, 2011 2:00 AM

CyexYeah they should make some kind of volume control, so that the viewer can decide what volume to view each video with, and they should put it right near the play/pause button.

I believe what the previous poster was referring to was the fact that regardless of the volume level you chose in youtube's video player, the videos themselves can have wildly differing output levels. Maybe this isn't a problem for you if you're listening through some crappy laptop speakers or you only turn things up about as loud as my grandmother. However, for myself and many others who do our listening through decent pairs of headphones or speakers, an output level normalization feature built into the youtube player or perhaps at the time the videos are uploaded would be great.
0

wild9 , March 18, 2011 6:39 AM

moriconThe appeal of old movies is the media it was filmed on, why remove the grain and blotches, thats how it was filmed, looks unreal cleaned up!Slo mo is very very good though!

I agree. I personally prefer films that retain that aged feel, despite the audio and visual artifacts. I'm not a massive fan of digital media in general to be honest, including especially broadcast media. Digital seems very dark, flat and generally fatiguing. On my hardware I have access to both analogue and digital transmissions and when watching an old film..I'll take analogue any day.

As for this processing feature. I wonder what impact it will have on the service as a whole. Lately I find that all the adverts and constant features place an increasing load on my system and what makes it worse is that darn buffering. I'd be interested to know just what kind of hardware YT uses to store, process and stream all this media. Does this technique for instance, rely on CPU-based algorithms or does it utilise GPU resources? The slow-mo filter..I can see that being popular on certain video's alright lol. Most of them being x-rated.
0

Aionism , March 18, 2011 12:07 PM

Remember when they did some horrible volume leveling around the middle of 2008 where the quiet parts were made loud and the loud parts were made quieter? They didn't give you a choice. Your sound was ruined whether you liked it or not. I hope they don't make the same mistake with this.

YouTube Aims to Eliminate Shaky Cellphone Video

Tom’s guide in the world