YouTube video quality will get a major boost from new company
YouTube’s latest acquisition is going to make your shaky, distorted, and boring videos look a lot better when uploaded to the internet.
Thousands of YouTube videos look like they were filmed by a four year old. Either the image is unstable, the colours are dull, or the clip has noise that distracts from watching the video. These and other imperfections may soon be a thing of the past thanks to Google’s acquisition of Green Parrot Pictures.
Google-owned YouTube announced that it has acquired Green Parrot Pictures, an Irish company that specializes in improving video. Green Parrot has technology that enhances and restores video, so the blemishes from your old home videos or the shaky hand of something filmed with your mobile will be corrected when uploaded to YouTube. Can you believe the same technology used by the creators of Lord of the Rings and Spider Man will soon enable better video quality on YouTube?
Jeremy Doig, Google Video Technology director, points out that 35 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s more than 50,000 hours of video each day, which should be more than enough to never need to watch television again. However, the quality of these videos typically doesn’t match what’s seen on TV because these videos are recorded with a mobile phone or Flip Camera. In fact, much of the early footage following the earthquake and tsunami in Japan came from people filming with their camera phones. While some clips have been a clear look into a turbulent scene, many others have been shaky and unclear looks at a devastated area. Whether watching a scene as serious as natural disasters in Japan or something light-hearted like a child’s first steps, picture quality is important. The technology of Green Parrot will be imported into YouTube to ensure that quality is much better.
Of course, this may present some unique problems. Some users may want their image to be shaky or blemished to intentionally capture a certain effect. It might be frustrating for a filmmaker to purposely downgrade a clip only to see YouTube autocorrect it, so Green Picture will probably require some type of opt-in improvement setting. Considering how well the the restoration process looks in demo videos, I’m guessing most people will choose the higher quality videos. Watch a few short demo clips below and view even more at the GPP website.
source: YouTube
This is amazing. I tried to get this software but no luck. I do not know where to download it from.
This is awesome! You Tube has been a really good investment for Google. Reading this post I am surprised to learn the volume of You Tube videos being posted. We truly are living in the information age.