isovideo Award-Winning Viarte Conversion Technology Again
Applied to the Big Screen

(Beaverton, Oregon - March 16, 2015) isovideo announces the powerful and intimate documentary "Chinese Couplets" by Emmy Award-winning independent director/producer Felicia Lowe used their award-winning Viarte digital conversion technology/services for its footage conversion. The film will be world premiered at the CAAM Fest on March 14th and March 21st, 2015. The film will also be released on a major broadcast station later this year.

The documentary follows her passion and long-time quest to trace her family history in order to understand her roots and connect with her mother. As a first generation Chinese-America immigrant, she felt distant and alien to both Chinese and American culture. The film touches upon a controversial part of US history - the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Act resulted in painful barriers for many Chinese families.

Although direct questions to her mother had always remained unanswered, through interesting twist and turns, and heart searching journeys to Cuba and China to see her mother's village, she eventually deepened her understanding of her family roots. This culminated in her revelation that she and her mother, although so different, are really like a “Chinese Couplet”. The film spans almost two decades, with footage starting from the 1990s, as well as historical footage. The intimate narration by Felicia Lowe herself adds a personal touch.

isovideo was honored to be contracted by the multi-award-winning film post-production company InCA productions. The contract was to convert 40-minutes (over 200 clips) of a variety of mixed content (SD and HD) to a uniform 1920x1080 29.97p. The mixed footage included i) SD/HD interlaced and/or telecined with different aspect ratios, and ii) a variety of progressive footage, such as 23.976p, 25p, 50p, and frame-duplicated 29.97p. In addition, the clips had wildly different levels of noise and film grain. Another factor that made this project even more challenging was the very tight schedule.

Using isovideo award-winning Viarte motion-compensated processing technology, featuring

1. cinema quality, 100% vertical resolution deinterlacing with imperceptible flicker. Viarte deinterlacing averages a 21% AVC/HEVC bit rate reduction.
2. sophisticated, robust inverse telecine, that deals with varying noise levels and mixed, broken and random cadences.
3. cinema quality any-to-any (23.976p - HFR 120p) frame rate conversion (including both integer and fractional rates as well as cinema 48p) that also includes:
   
   
   • sophisticated, accurate simulated motion-blur capability to reduce judder on playback, when downconverting from 50p, 60p, 100p or 120p to lower rates such as 23.976p, 24p, 25p, 30p or 48p;
   • highest quality (film/Blu-ray applications) low frame-rate conversions between 23.976p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p and 30p with pristine sources;
4. breakthough quality temporal detail-preserving noise reduction,
5. edge-sharpening up/down-scaling from SD to 4K/8K, when combined with Viarte noise reduction allows SD/HD content to look better than ever before; and
6. aspect ratio conversion, as well as
7. encoding;

all footages were successfully converted to specification in time and on budget without any redos.

High quality conforming of a variety of footage spanning almost 100 years into a common HD or UHD format in a very short time and at an affordable price has hitherto been impossible. “isovideo's award winning Viarte-based digital conversion technology and services offers content owners peace of mind - no matter what format they are shooting in, they can always achieve that superior film look as they envisioned it, and in a timely and cost effective manner,” said Keith Slavin, CTO of isovideo.

To found out more about our Viarte conversion services, please visit isovideo, and follow us on Twitter and Youtube.

About isovideo:

isovideo is an innovative start-up company in the digital media technology and servicing industry. We specialize in file-based, GPU accelerated, video processing (including frame-rate conversion, deinterlacing, inverse-telecine, scaling, noise-reduction, transcoding, etc.) services and server systems for the TV and entertainment industry. isovideo offers the best quality and fastest turn-around multi-format content transformation, including breakthrough quality SD/HD to HD/UHD services for remastering, cinema quality low frame-rate conversion, and retiming.