Restoring the Lost Interview with Steve Jobs
How CSI technology restored Steve Job's lost interview
An example of the jagged lines that were eliminated with the Ikena software
You can't call yourself an Apple and Steve Jobs fan without knowing of Robert X. Cringely's famous interview, which was part of Triumph of the Nerds, a documentary released in 1996. But this was only a tiny portion of the meeting Cringely had with Jobs and sadly, the original footage somehow disappeared--until, by some odd coincidence, a VHS copy of the entire interview was discovered in the director's garage the week of Jobs's passing. Trying to improve its quality for a theatrical release was no easy task.
When we interviewed Cringely about the process, he confirmed that increasing the resolution and detail of a video clip was definitely not as easy as when the actors on CSI do it: "We've tried some existing products, both hardware and software, and they simply didn't get rid of some artifacts," he said.
Robert X. Cringely needed tgo restore his lost Steve Jobs Interview.
Fortunately, a lucky search online revealed MotionDSP, which does, among other video reconstructions, real-time video processing for Predator drones in Afghanistan. "They were able to apply their Ikena software to good purpose," adds Cringely. He bought the company's $49 Windows-only software vReveal, but found the results unsatisfactory. He then saw that the company also had a product available that cost more than $25,000.
Figuring that the price differential must be there for a reason, Cringely made contact with the company. "That software didn't work, either," he says despairingly. "It turns out that there's a huge difference between terrain and an enormous Steve Jobs face."
To understand why the military-grade software wouldn't work, we contacted Sean Varah, CEO of MotionDSP. It turns out that the necessary filter was still being designed by their engineers and so wasn't ready for prime-time, but they used a prerelease version on the Steve Jobs interview and it worked flawlessly. This filter is now included with MotionDSP's high-end Ikena range of products.
Sean Varah, CEO of MotionDSP, had the right solution to restore Job's interview.
So how did MotionDSP manage to vastly improve a video's quality? The "secret sauce" as Varah calls it, is its patented super-resolution-based image reconstruction. That's quite a mouthful, but simply put, in order to rebuild one frame, the software analyzes up to 15 frames around it and in doing so, gathers additional information not present in the current frame. Further, by analyzing the camera's motion as well as the subject's throughout all these frames, it gains a lot of data, and the result of both these actions is a better image, with cleaner detail and less noise.
MotionDSP gets requests from all around the world, for all kinds of videos, but cleaning up old VHS tapes isn't really one of them. Its clients usually are in the field of law enforcement or the military. However, Varah agreed to work with Cringely because, "We're big Steve Jobs fans, and Bob was persistent, so we gave it a shot. Luckily, it worked, and we were really pleased to restore this historical footage."
MotionDSP gets requests for all kinds of videos, but cleaning up old VHS tapes isn't really one of them
Turning VHS-quality footage into something fit for a theatrical release
It did help that the interview's quality was better than most of the ones MotionDSP usually has to deal with; a video forensic expert typically gets the very worst footage. The Steve Jobs interview suffered from video noise, interlacing artifacts, and poor color and lighting. As Varah reveals, "to deal with the video noise, our super-resolution algorithm reconstructs each frame of video with the most statistically valid information, reconstructing and restoring the video without noise. De-interlacing is problematic where you have fine details such as Steve Jobs's glasses in the foreground, and other objects in the background. Our special de-interlacing avoids 'the jaggies' in all parts of the image--both foreground and background. And as for poor color/lighting, we adjusted the lighting with our auto-white balance and contrast filters, and adjusted the unnatural red tint."
Since it has done this work for Cringely, MotionDSP has had more requests from other filmmakers, but for now it has no plans to release a professional video version of Ikena, and even less thought toward making one compatible with the Mac. "It's certainly technically possible for us to port to Mac, but the real challenge is the whole professional video software market," says Varah. "It is small, fragmented, and shrinking each year in dollar terms."
Its existing products do work with Boot Camp on a Mac if you're keen to give them a try, but the technology that made this reconstruction possible is out of reach for most of us (that new filter which was instrumental in restoring the interview isn't part of vReveal, MotionDSP's cheapest product), but at least we can enjoy a rare insight into a man who changed the world so many times; Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview is now available for rent through iTunes.
Original Page: http://www.maclife.com/article/columns/restoring_lost_interview_steve_jobs
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