Depth Upscale plugin for The Foundry Nuke

Technical requirements

• The Foundry Nuke version: 6.2 or above
• Memory requirements: 2 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended
• Works with: all depth tools
• Main use cases: increase of the down sampled depth map resolution to the initial size

Depth Upscale

Video content processing is often carried out on low-resolution versions of the source shot. The benefits of using of such downscaled input are less-time-consuming rendering and the ability to use special software to automatically process the video. These special plugins can work properly with a smaller image, but occasionally, they produce artifacts when working with full-HD content. Performing manual processing is also easier when working with low-resolution video sequences. For all these reasons, the downscaled variants of a video are convenient for pre-processing and are widely used. The processed results, however, must be converted to the original resolution, and all the benefits of the above process can be lost if the upscaling is done poorly. Application of ordinary methods often leads to loss of gradient areas and lower accuracy of object boundaries relative to the source image. The YUVsoft Depth Upscale plugin was specially designed to avoid these problems and to achieve high-quality results when working with downscaled video. Depth Upscale is a component of YUVsoft 2D-to-3D Suite for The Foundry Nuke, a complete toolset for stereo video generation.

Key features of YUVsoft Depth Upscale are

• Arbitrary upscale factors—the resulting depth map is upscaled to the resolution of the original 2D video
• Exact binding of boundaries in the upscaled depth map to boundaries in the original 2D frame
• Accurate processing of gradient areas to eliminate the staircase effect

YUVsoft Depth Upscale in use:

 

 

The algorithm uses information about the original frame object boundaries, binding them to the boundaries in the upscaled depth map. The adjustable Spatial Strength parameter enables users to regulate the degree of binding: the greater the Spatial Strength value, the greater the adherence of boundaries in the depth map to those in the source image. Regardless of the selected Spatial Strength value, the boundaries of upscaled objects will be in strict accordance with those in the source video frames; high values are not recommended in cases of noisy video sequences, however.

 

 

The required input for Depth Upscale is the source video and the corresponding sequence of low-resolution depth maps. The high-resolution depth map output can be further processed by other plugins or used directly for stereo generation.

 

See also:

• Depth Upscale technology – a general description.
• Depth Upscale plugin for Adobe After Efects.
• Depth Propagation technology – propagates the frame’s depth information through the whole video sequence.
• Depth Propagation plugin for The Foundry Nuke.
• Depth Effects plugin for The Foundry Nuke – allows to obtain detailed depth for static scenes and background areas.
• Depth from Motion plugin for The Foundry Nuke – a good solution for obtaining key frames from scenes with camera motion.
• Depth from Focus plugin for The Foundry Nuke, works well for scenes where foreground objects are blurred and where manual rotoscoping is an undesirably complex and expensive option.