14 DAY TRIAL // Google, or rather YouTube, has just announced an interesting acquisition. The subsidiary bought Green Parrot Pictures, an Irish company that focuses on video restoration and enhancement. Google says it was impressed with the technology which it plans to apply to the millions of shaky, poor quality videos on YouTube.
"We’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired Green Parrot Pictures, a digital video technology company founded by Associate Professor Anil Kokaram at the Engineering School of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland," Jeremy Doig, Director, Google Video Technology, wrote.
"In the last six years, their small team of engineers has built cutting-edge video quality improvement technology that has been used in major studio productions from Lord of the Rings to X-Men to Spider-Man," he said.
"Their technology helps make videos look better while at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed," he explained.
GPP has several tools for restoration and a couple for enhancement. While the latter may be of more use to movie studios, Google is more interested in the former.
35-hours' worth of video is uploaded to YouTube each minute. Much of that video comes from poor quality sources, mobile phones, webcams and so on. But even the worst videos can be improved in several ways to make them more watchable.
For example, GPP's stabilizer technology would make any shaky video from a phone or any handheld device a lot better and easier to follow. It can't do wonders, but it can restore some pretty messy video to a state where there shouldn't really be any more complaints.
GPP also has some technologies suitable more for old videos, such as the flicker and blotch remover. The noise remover also comes in handy for plenty if not most videos on YouTube.
While it may be a while before GPP technology is available in YouTube, having some restoration and enhancement features built into the uploader would make the site a lot more useful for a large number of people.