Quote:
Sorry the quote was a joke paraphasing from the original DCDi press release, it was not meant to be technically accurate. |
John -
I was well aware of that.

I briefly considered trying to put on a PR-man's hat and reply with an explanation somewhat less nerdly. But it was just against my nature.
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More seriously Tom I'm still not sure that increasing the search effort results in a better picture. Could you outline how the mocomp bit works again ... |
Well the best example is a SearchEffort=1 where we only search 1 location. At SE=1 this is just an adaptive deinterlace (+whateverBOB). If the pixel value (of 0 motion) is unchanged from the previous field to the succeeding field then we figure it is pretty credible if it wouldn't also generate obvious comb artifacts.
Now take (imaginary) SE=2. Here we could check that 1 pixel to the left in the preceding field matched the value 1 pixel to the right in the succeeding field. If so then that value has a good chance of being in the middle on the middle (current) field.
As you increase SE you have a better chance of finding the actual motion but also a better chance of false hits, mistakenly guessing you know what is going on. My current view is that most anything above about SE of 5-9 or so is diminishing returns.
This is compounded by a possible bug that I've never been able to find. Above SE=5 we start also searching vertically and that seems to cause more stray hits.
(SE=6,7,8 all really go to 9)
Note vertical searches are less dense because of interlace so we are really 2 lines away on the search.
Anyway, folks on slower machines that run only SE=3 will probably get most of the benefit, just searching 1 pixel to the left, right, and center. But on my 2.4 Mhz P4 I still like it at 11, for no particular reason.
BTW, increasing SE to the point where you get dropped frames will make it seem MUCH worse, since the fields don't match. But everybody should use a value of at least 1 or 3 unless it is a very slow machine.
- Tom