Redirect to Home Entertainment Center

 There is much information on the movie aspect of media at my Home Entertainment Center blog.

Most of my interest, currently, is in video rather than stills.

Microscopes, almost

   Since the last major post, I have acquired 3 USB microscopes. These are not full-fledged microscopes, but devices that have zoom factors and light sources. One comes with screenshot/video recording software. I used this to examine a phonograph needle on my turntable. I had enough detail to determine the source of a playback problem.
   As a result, I purchased a new stylus and now enjoy my LP collection.

August 14, 2019 update

A lot has happened since the last post.
I have acquired a Konica Minolta MAxxum 5D, replete with strap, charger and rechargable batteries.
Everything works...exfept the CCD. All the pictures taken are blacked out. There's no visible physical damage to the unit. I'm considering opening up the unit and perhaps looking for a loose connection caused by a drop of the camera. I located and downloaded  a service manual with diagrams and service data.

I want to continue some exploration of HDR imaging. To this end, I combined my interest in my cell phone's cameras with my HDR interest and found a few programs that seem to do a good job at HDR or providing the needed lo-res images for assembling an HDR image.

I prefer the assembly method. The tonemap compressor from Radiance, programmed by Eric Reinhard, is the best general purpose compressor I've run across in the years of working, albeit intermittently, with HDR.

The apps for the phone are from the Apple AppStore and do cost money. For those interested, they are:

ProCam 6
Camera+ 2
NightCap, for low light and night shots

Im going through a learning curve with my new LG oled SmartTV. There are screen 'modes' such as Cinema, Hoe Cinema, HDR Effect, Game, Sports, Vivid, Technicolor, and more. Add to this Dolby Vision and its variants, and many possible settings become possible.
I usually flip through the SmartTV screen modes if the movie I'm watching seems, somehow, off.
Each of the built-in modes is adjustable and has numerous settings itself. I don't suppose the thought occurred to anyone the average consumer does not like having so many tech-based decisions to make.

Does your SmartTV peak out at 1000 nits???

Classical Gas: 3000 Years of Art - a reconstruction

This project dissembles a copy of the original Classical Gas, 3000 Years of Art video and identifies all the artworks used.

Copies in better condition, and in larger formats, are found on the web and saved to the project.

Help would be very valuable in this project. Therer are over 2,000 images in the video that need to be identified. Many are smaller subsections of an artwork rather than the entire work. If a large enough copy cannot be found, I will attempt enlargement using one of the current deep-learning super resolution techniques.

To date, I have identified and downloaded over 100 artworks.

The Google search engine for images,  helps a lot. That service can upload an image of a work of art, or a subsection of a work of art, and attempt to find the same or similar images on the web. Sometimes the search is quick and exact, other times, way off. One image was used as a cover for a recent book. The engine could not get away from the book reference, subsequently, art images were not searched as thoroughly as was possible. Sometimes, the greenish color of the originals is correctable and results in a success. Other times color correction combined with sharpening will yield a success. Once, I simply found the publishing company of a book and sent an email asking if anyone knew who had painted the picture on the book cover. I got a working response.
There will be no single approach to get all the images identified.

I am still looking for help with this project. Without help, the project can easily take three months of full time work.
If I download 100 artworks each day, twenty days will have passed before I complete the identification process. Then, the rebuilding can take place.

Is the goal worth the time and effort?
I don't know. I may keep my mind open for something more fundamental and longlasting to do.
Maybe, I'll go on vacation.
Who knows.

Super Resolution

   I ran across a university site in Israel a decade or so ago. Technion was ahead of its time, at least the computer science department. Among subjects, explored there, was super resolution.
 
   Take a low resolution image and apply processing to get a larger image with the same level of detail.,

   My first instinct was that the task was impossible. You would hasve to manufacture information. The detail in a larger image does not exist, in reality.

   Technion scientists had studied  the problem and developed an approach. This was in March of 2003. I recently ran across some work being done in the area of neural networks that expands the field.
   A paper on SRGAN, images/videos and super resolution attracted my attention. SRGAN is:Super Resolution with Genrative Adversarial Networks.

   This approach is very effective, though some failings in color occur. Structure and form are well done and the manufactured detail is developed from trained associate networks. The failings have to do with some aspects of color.

   The HSV (Hue-Saturation-Value) model is useful for this explanation. The saturation drops in areas. The saturation is not uniform with respect to duplication. The overall Value drops some. The experimental model may benefit from inclusion of the HSV color model in the training set.

   Still, the examples of SR imagery are impressive. One of the uses for SR is a substitute for compression, thus a new way to save disk memory space. A catalog of images could be saved in low resolution format along with the trained model, and recalled when needed. This would be limited to general images where accuracy of detail is not important such as advertising and electronic publications.

Digital movies and editors -- do it yourself?

   Occasionally, I need to correct a delay in the audio in a video. I have become acquainted with all kinds of software for modifying and playing media such as movies, images, and music.
   Sometimes a video will have an audio track that is not loud enough. I have a software to correct that problem.

   I have installed and used video editors to convert from one file format or codec tro another. My preference, currently, is for Matroska containers using HEVC-x265 compression and AC3 or FLAC audio encoding. The Matroska file trype can contain separable subtitles and audio in several languages. Separable means one or more of any can be removed from the file. All excess language audio tracks and subtitles can be removed for local use. This saves some on disk space.

   I have several Apple iPhones. Sometimes, I use these phones as movie cameras. I used one to make a movie of shadows on my solar panel array. I needed to study the play of shadows to determine the best place, or places, for the array. I also have two iPhone apps. One lets me create a sped up version by deleting sections of the movie. I have another aqpp that places a timestamp on the movie screen to let me know when that particular frame (moment)  took occurred.

   I'm developing a technique and lab to modify one film using another copy of the film. The difference may be in screen dimensions. If a film has a color scheme/palette that differs from one I find more desirable, I want to be able to modify the colors in one film by using the colors in a copy of the same title that is smaller or has foreign audio dub, or some other undesirable feature. The idea is to get the 'best of both worlds' by editing the movies or creating a new movie with the desirable characteristiccs of both.

   In another instance, a movie may have hard coded subtitles. These subtitles, text form of the audio track that appears on the screen top or bottom. Eliminating or reducing the effect of hard coded subtitles would preserve the desirable characteristics of both. This would recquire the ability to slectively, overlay the two movies. A small section of a smaller screenversion can be enlarged and replace the corresponding area in the larger screen version. This would remove the hard coded subtitles. Most instances of hard coded subtitles can be resolved by simply locating the same file without hard coded subtitles. However, in a few instances, perhaps a rare file, only one or two copies different exist. In that case the technique would prove very useful.

   A word on scale. Movies can be watched on many devices. cell phones, digital tablets, laptop and desktop computer screens, and ordinary television. In each case, the requirements of the film screen resolution ( size/dimensions) varys. Larger devices can display more detail. a cell phone cannot display the amount of detail a television screen can. The excess detail can be removed for a phone. this makes the file size much, much smaller. A file that is formatted for a 50" television screen can be between 2Gb and 50Gb in size. After the file is reduced, the size is closer to 100Mb. A reduction of 500 to 1 can occur. This works out well for people who want to watch a film on their phone. That is 10 movies per gigabyte of phone space where a single movie for larger devices typical runs 2 gigabytes.

   Players: Video player software makes thge viewing experience better or worse, depending on the software design. A search of available players will bring up lists of popular software.
   Money: To pay or not to pay. All of the software tools I've mentioned, and more, come in free versions. Some of the free software is better than paid verson. Sometimes, if not more frequently, this is not so. Usually, if one is selective, an equivalent can be found in the freeware/open source community. I donated to one, paid for another, and the software I have settled on, is free.
   Most of the time, I have found free software that equals or excells paid software. I always find something(s) that get(s) the job done.

For those unfamiliar with the details of computing, here is a list of free software that is well done.

Office software
  Open Office
  Libre Office
Audio player
  WinAmp
Image viewers/editors
  Lilyview (no longer available, but one of the most advanced made.)
  Gimp
  Irfanview
  XNView
Video players
  GOM
  POT
  VLC
Audio CD ripper
   EAC
Audio editor
   Audacity
   Nero Video Editor
Video editors
   Microsoft Expressions 4

  AVIDemux/AVISynth

  VirtualDub (.AVI files)

   Windows Movie Maker

Video rippers

   MakeMKV

   Handbrake

   MKVToolnix/MKVExtract
   WinDVD
Notepad programs
   Notepad++
   Scintilla WSCITE (may be legacy by now)

There are others. This is where search skills become handy.

Digital movies and database software

I've been spending a lot of time and energy on digital movies lately. I've acquired a collection and installed database software specialized for movies and or media in general.
   There are many such programs available and I decided to find the better ones and put them to the test.
   You would be surprised at the problems that can arise when the user context does not overlap the software use plan exactly. Anbother way of saying personal habits can result in problems if the program designer thinks differently than you, and narrowly. 

   Human factors engineering is important in software. Easy to learn and use software becomes popular if the program does what's expected well. People will pick an easy to use software over a difficult, obtuse, piece of software given all other thing are equal.
   I used a DBM (Database Manager) that is popular and free. My problem was, the programmer wrote the program from the botom up, and not top down. This means that when I stepped outside the programmers experienc, I had problems with the softwate. In one instance, I lost seven hundred entries in the database. I could have avoided the event, but a little thoughfulness on the part of the programmer owuld have made the loss difficult or impossible. There could have been a warning that the software was ablout to delete a large amount of data. Most professional software for a professional environment will issue such warnings. This is referred to as software that is 'forgiving', meaning that users can make mistakes without doing too much damage that is not recoverable. Not so this particular software. I think the software is not scalable. The software is suitable for small collections of films, but not for large, or even massive collections, spanning several hard drives.
   I completed my rebuild and exported the database in proprietary and more general formats. The software did allow the user to create a CSV data file containing all the data. Unfortunatle, the movie poster images are not included. That can be a major problem in and of itself. I migrated the data to a new software. I ended up having to 'update' each poster in the database. That's a lot of updates for a thousand plus movie database.
   Another software had a feature I had expected in the previous programs, but did not get. Unfortunatley, that program deposits the accessory files, including poster images, in the same folder as the movie. That was unacceptable. The program was written for a popular accessory program (PLEX) for an even more popular home entertainment management program (Kodi, derived from XBMC). I posted a question in the forum for that product and was informed by a team member, there were no plans to alter the program, in fact, the software had been relegated to the archive section of the PLEX website.
   I 've settled on one unassuming little program (human metaphors and computer science, a match made in hell) that includes the expected feature and more. I may test others, but I have found the software I'll use until I know of a better one.