Ascent Media has become the first company to buy Digital Vision's new image processing software tool packages Enhance and Restore.

DVO (Digital Vision Optics) Enhance is made up of Alias, Brickwall, Sharpen, Aperture, Re-grain and Grain while DVO Restore consists of Dust, Fix, Steady, Print Align, Flicker and Scratch.

Each tool does a different job. For example, Alias is used for curing the side effects of out-of-band vertical frequencies that show up on-screen as line flicker or “twitter”.

The new DVO packs will be added to Ascent Media non linear file based restoration workflow. The decision to buy was made following a period of beta-testing.

The suites of products are based on Digital Vision's award winning image processing software and are being launched at NAB 2008.

Ascent Media technical manager Chris Watson said: “From a single DVO workstation we are able to do all the traditional activities such as automatic and manual dust-busting, vertical scratch removal, three cell alignment and stabilisation but also grain management, detail enhancement and alias removal.”

The four new restoration tools that are part of the DVO Restore suite include:

  • DVO Steady, available at NAB, helps eliminate film weave, enhancing unsteady pictures originating from film scanning or camera shakes during capture. It uses an automatic two-pass solution to provide better separation between the unwanted instability and the pan/tilt movements from the original capture.

  • DVO Print Align, also available at NAB, uses a fully automatic process to align RGB separation prints, even if the offset varies over time.

  • DVO Scratch, planned for availability in the third quarter of 2008, handles vertical/continuous scratches typically missed by dust and dirt removers. The process is fully automatic with an advanced detection and a fill-in result which is far superior to the normal process of hiding the defect using information from both sides of the scratch.

  • DVO Flicker removes random flicker and variations in brightness from sequences to produce a uniform exposure across an entire scene. DVO flicker is planned for availability towards the end of 2008.

Digital Vision makes image restoration, enhancement, colour correction and data conforming systems for film, TV and and post-production companies.