The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) recently adopted Thomson's Film Grain Technology as a registered disclosure document. Thomson, which developed the technology as a collaboration between its Division of Technology and its Technicolor business, said that Toshiba, RCA, Broadcom, Sigma Designs, Horizon Semiconductors, Nvidia, Microsoft and Sonic Solutions are set to deploy the new technology into some of their respective products.
Two Toshiba HD DVD player models, one RCA HD DVD unit, and a Broadcom IC decoder are coming to market with Film Grain Technology software. Thomson said as soon as the negative impact that advanced compression was having on film grain became obvious, the firm's Princeton Corporate Research Center began looking for a remedy.
The technology allows compressed motion pictures to be delivered more efficiently and improves video quality by enabling film grain that is extracted before content is compressed to be faithfully recreated during playback.
