Infognition Super Resolution plugin for VirtualDub resizes video using
Super Resolution approach: by accumulating
information from previous frames it can provide much more details than any other resizing method.
Here are some examples of 4x upsizing with Super Resolution:
Installation
Just download the archive, unpack it and select superres.vdf file if
you're using 32-bit version of VirtualDub, or superres64.vdf file if
you're using VeeDub64. Place that .vdf file to
/Program Files/VirtualDub/plugins/ folder.
Output resolution
The plugin can resize video to any desired width and height. However the SR engine upsizes video
exactly 2 times in both dimensions. If you set output size less than original size, SR is not used
and a high quality image interpolation method resizes the frames. When output size is the same as
input size, nothing is done at all. If new width, new height or both
is bigger than original value, SR engine upsizes video two times and then if new dimensions are not
exactly twice bigger than original ones, an image interpolation method is used to resize video from
200% to
desired width and height. Two consequences: upsizing to 200% is the fastest upsize mode. If you need
to want more than 200% the best quality is obtained by making a chain of two Super Resolution filters:
the first one upsizing to 200% and the other upsizing further.
Quality
We've compared this technology with different plugins for VirtualDub, Adobe After Effects and AviSynth
as well as several stand-alone applications like vReveal and CinemaHD.
See Video Resize Shootout.
This plugin shares the Super Resolution engine with Video Enhancer,
so in the comparison see the results of Video Enhancer.
That comparison demonstrates strong advantage of our super resolution implementation over all available
video resizing tools.
Frame order
The engine is suited for sequential processing, frame by frame. The more frames are processed
sequentially the more details are accumulated. When saving result to a file video is processed
from start to end in normal order and maximum quality is obtained. When seeking to random places
in preview mode, there is no good history of processed frames and accumulated information, so
the plugin takes 5 source frames (N-4 ... N) and processes them before showing you the result.
Visual results in preview mode when jumping to random frames can be worse than when rendering to a file.
Colorspace
Version 1.0 of the plugin works in RGB32 only. It is essentially the same engine as RGB mode of
Super Resolution in Video Enhancer 1.9.6. Support for YV12 colorspace is planned for future versions
of the plugin.
Speed
Because of high computational complexity of the technology Super Resolution plugin is not very
fast, but it's highly parallelized, providing a good speed boost on multicore and multiprocessor
systems. On a Quad Core 2.33 GHz PC upsizing 640x360 to 1280x720 is done with 15-25 frames per second
depending on quality settings.
Compatibility
Super Resolution plugin works in VirtualDub 1.9.1 and later versions. Older versions didn't support
necessary functionality to get previous frames. For the same reason it doesn't work in Video Enhancer
as a VD filter, and there's no sense in loading it in VE since the super resolution engine is already
built into Video Enhancer.
Due to heavy use of SSE2 this plugin requires a CPU made after year 2000: Pentium 4 or higher.
Trial limitations
Trial version is not limited by time or resolution. Unregistered version will draw a watermark
over the output video in a shape of diagonal stripes. Registered version doesn't draw any watermarks.
