GPU File-based Motion-compensated Frame Rate Conversion
Sharp - Smooth - Superior Image Quality

Accurate Simulated Motion-blur for Playback Judder Reduction
Temporal Conversion & Slow-mo Effects

The Legato Frame Rate Conversion Technology

The purpose of frame rate converters is to make video look smooth without duplicating or dropping frames (causing judder), and without objectionable visual artifacts. This is achieved by converting an input frame rate to match a displayed or rendered frame rate using Motion Compensated Frame Interpolation (MCFI) with dense motion fields. Legato handles frame sizes up to 4k or even 8k. It is an engineering challenge to make high quality MCFI work in real-time on 1080p60 video in a server/LAN/file-based environment.

Principal Features:

Legato is our real time motion-compensated frame rate conversion technology. It's main features are:


Accurate Simulated Motion-blur

Legato provides an additional sophisticated, accurate simulated motion-blur capability to reduce judder on playback, when downconverting from 50, 60, 120 frames/sec to lower rates such as 24, 30, 48.

The smooth video from Legato is appreciated on a computer monitor or a big-screen Internet TV. Video quality has become a key commercial issue for content providers, since home displays have grown larger, and consumers expect more. Most consumer display systems do not have anywhere near the compute power to perform real time frame rate conversion, so they are only able to drop or duplicate frames when streaming video from other regions.

Judder Reduction Examples

Note: When adding simulated motion blur for FRC from 50p to 24p, some fine lines/details may appear less sharp than in the original 50p when viewed frame-by-frame. This same motion blurring would have occured on a real 24p camera.

Cinema Application - Low Frame-Rate Conversion

Viarte (Legato) frame rate conversion was used successfully for footage conversion (converting from 1980x1080p29.97 to 1080p23.976) for independent director/producer Karina Epperlein's latest feature length documentary "Finding the Gold Within". The film will be world premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 3 and 4, 2014. To learn more about the film and the filmmaker, and to see the trailer here. The following three clips are excerpts from the film - courtesy of Karina Epperlein.

High Performance

Legato obtains its high performance using NVIDIA CUDA technology running on Graphics or GPU cards. Fast processing allows a single processor system to perform more than one conversion at a time, or perform more than one type of conversion (e.g. FRC, deinterlacing, inverse telecine, scaling and de-noise, etc.) on the same input stream, or to dramatically speed up processing file-to-file.

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