Topaz Enhance Suite of plug-in filters for Final Cut Pro 6 or later, After Effects CS4, and Premiere Pro C54 on Intel Windows or Macintosh www.topazlabs.com $349.00 MSRP
In a nutshell. Enhance was built to revive old films on video and upscale good standard definition video to near-HD quality. It's not out of the scope of this product to deliver from well-lit and shot NTSC-DV material a very adequate near-HD video Image, and as we see here, it's great in reviving old film·to-video transfers from which you just wish you could wipe away grain and analog artifacts.
Topaz Enhance: a filter suite for Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere Pro, shown here in FCP's Effects menu.
That's a mouthful, and with it comes a bucket of time. Even on fast multicore machines. Topaz wants to take its time chewing on noisy. grainy motion images, because certain Enhance filters can sample neighboring frames for additional data to reconstitute Into each frame. I call that cool. This is what computers like to do!
The range of filters in the suite includes DeInterlace. DeNoise & Enhance, Clean (RGB) and Clean (YC), Remove Compression Artifacts, Wavelet, and several others for tackling compression "blockies" and other image issues. It's affordable, but no toy.
The test clip original was a 2-minute opening sequence to a prizewinning film I cut years ago. THE POWER TO CHANGE, produced by the ubiquitous Jamil Simon, whose Third Eye Films in Cambridge was the starting point for my professional career. Jamil now runs Spectrum Media, still producing global-scope films revealing social programs to help repair the world.
THE POWER TO CHANGE, narrated by Joanne Woodward, told us about energy-saving appropriate technology. First released on 16mm film, eventually transferred to video. captured to digital, it was finally burned to DVD. Whew! That's a lot of image pounding, colorspace shifting, and artifacture (a word I just invented) and it showed.
I extracted the DVD to DV-NTSC using Cinematize Pro 2, (see separate review), at highest quality. It was good, but when I re-extracted to ProRes422 I got a richer look, so the remainder of my workflow was in ProRes422 (LT).
I then loaded it into Final Cut Pro and first deinterlaced it, because the most powerful of the Enhance filters requires the clip be deinterlaced of its video fields and made into a progressive clip at exactly the same frame rate. I found the easiest way to do it was to next the clip within a sequence with Field Order set to None.
Two passes of Topaz filters: DeNoise & Enhance, then Sharpen(Line Accent) which isn't recommended for organic forms-- note posterized effect on face.
This is all explained in the easy-to-read Topaz Labs user guide, which lacked only a few details on using Enhance specifically in FCP, some of which is covered in their website tutorials. There's also a growing online community there. l first applied the DeNoise & Enhance filter. While the test clip was 2 minutes long, it required close to two hours to render on an older, 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro laptop. The results using out-of-the-box filter settings were pretty good, There was far less noise and some enhancement to detail after first pass. You can set multiple passes for some of the multiframe filters if you desire.
I exported the enhanced clip in its native settings and reimported it into a new sequence and applied another filter, Clean(RGB).This is a recommended workflow since you want to treat dips with multi-frame filters one at a time. This pass took 2 hours as well, But now the results looked like a thin film had been peeled off. practically no grain noise, only smooth surfaces.
At default settings, three passes of Topaz filters: DeNoise & Enhance, Clean(RGB), and finally, Sharpen(Line Accent) which improves well-defined object edges.
Finally. I added Sharpen (LineAccent). One of three specialized Sharpen filters offered, which only took 20 minutes on the laptop. The results were mixed, depending upon the image. Faces became mildly posterized. Objects with hard edges became nearly perfect. With careful filter selection, this show would be ready for FCP color correction, paint-out of film cement blemishes, minor dust and scratch removal: video touchup now supported in Photoshop Extended CS3 and 4.
For the budget conscious among us who can't afford a $3000 Teranex box. but who did spend $3000 on a new multi-core tower and wondered why, the $350.00 Topaz Enhance suite is the first line of attack to revive a project like this. It might take only a couple normal workdays, perhaps a long weekend. Of course this can only improve as faster hardware appears.
Not a bad solution for a process which, done well. usually requires thousands of dollars in hardware or time in a costly vision engineering suite. or both.
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Loren Miller, a professional longform editor, operates the boutique post house NeoTron Design out of Boston. He is a participating member of Los Angeles and Boston Final Cut Pro User Groups and occasionally reports for both, along with Imagine News in print, where this review in another form first appeared. Reach him anytime at
. ©2009 Loren S. Miller All rights reserved.
