Dr. Francois Pitie

Improving the quality of online videos is a key challenge for video streaming companies. We considered in this project the issue of banding, which is a quantisation artefact that affects most videos and does not go away by simply increasing the allowed bandwidth. We built on our experience in developing tools for the movie-postproduction industry to produce a solution that targets the whole range of videos, from low-bandwidth to high quality movies.

Producing stereoscopic 3D content for TV's and cinema turns out to be be a very expensive task. In the case of animated movies, a 3D stereo version can in theory be simply created by rendering the 3D object data from the two views for left and right eye. This however consumes a huge amount of rendering time, has a massive impact on the traditional production pipeline and thus result in an dramatically increased production cost. It was proposed in 3DSCAM to create a technology suite that allows digital artists to have full artistic control over the creation of a stereoscopic scene in its final version, while not requiring any change to the production pipeline. Technology issued from this project has been licensed to PixelPuffin (www.pixelpuffin.com).