to Deemon: Why isn't Video Enhancer more popular?

[plethora]

First of all, I just want to say that your software is absolutely incredible; actually- nothing short of miraculous.

I'm wondering why it isn't more popular or well known? I've done extensive research and testing of upscaling options (Instant HD, Instant HD Advanced, Boris Uprez, Topaz "Enhance"(what a joke!), DA ReSizer, and other algorithms such as lanczos3, mitchell and catmull rom). Most of the software I've audited produces mediocre results. The rest are either good or horrible: nothing amazing except for Video Enhancer/SuperResolution Plugin.(ok actually, in my tests Instant HD (not Advanced!) on best with a quality setting of 25, slowly produces results that appear identical to your's. Props to redgiant/magic bullet, though Instant HD Advanced on best is aliased and cartooned...)
(I actually have DPX frames from testing, and if anyone is doubtful PM me and I'll try to find time to share)

I realize that most big budget Hollywood production studios rarely have any reason to upscale, so there isn't a huge demand from professionals for upscaling software.
In my case, I have professional footage shot at 720p (960x720) that needs to be full 1080p(1920x1080) HD. This can't be all that an uncommon scenario, can it?

I have a few suggestions:
-pick a better name, video enhancer is too generic. how about theDeemon's Phoenix! (should also apply to the After Effects plugin: bundle them)
-charge more money- pros take expensive software more seriously. (match whatever Topaz is charging. For two reasons: they are the only one's mentioned when googling
  "hollywood super resolution", and because their software is so shockingly bad!)
-provide more technical details about your software- it's impressive to see whitepapers and incomprehensible technical details about a product (i want to
  know how/if you incorporate motion tracking into the super resolution algorithm)
-compare your software to EXPENSIVE programs, include comparisons to all of the standard algorithms too
-get some magazines/sites (creativecow!) to review and compare your software. The results will speak for themselves! (and you'll be easier to find on google)
-keep development active. I don't know how, but I'm sure there's room for improvement. (I'd guess that whatever motion tracking you're using can be improved. Also I saw some pretty impressive results from smartedge 2 for still photos. vReveal might be nice but there's the resolution restriction)
-no insult intended but 'theDeemon' might throw people. how 'bout: "REsolv" like REsolv's Phoenix!!

Also, to establish some credibility to my praise: here's a list, off the top of my head, of some of the video software we're currently using along side Video Enhancer/SuperResolution Plugin:
Adobe After Effects & Premiere (and the rest of CS4)
Boris Continuum Complete
The Foundry's Tinderboxes (all four)
Redcine
Cineform Prospect 4k
Imagineer Monet
2d3's Boujou
Autodesk Toxik (now being incorporated into Maya)
The Foundry's Furnace
Genart's Sapphire
Autodesk Maya
e-on's Vue
Autodesk Lustre
Sonic Cinevision
etc. etc.

If I were the CEO of Adobe or Autodesk, I'd be all over Video Enhancer/SR Plugin!
Thanks for such a useful tool.

[Dee Mon]

Thank you very much for kind words and informative details!
You're right, our marketing efforts now are close to zero and we're far from being well known. We'll be working more on this.
Quality comparisons with most competitors you mentioned is available for a long time though not so known to the public:
http://www.thedeemon.com/articles/video_upsize_methods_comparison.html

It's a nice idea to charge more money. Although many people still find VE too expensive (we see this in uninstall feedbacks all the time). I guess a good solution will be to have two versions: one very easy to use and working fast for most home users and one with maximum quality and settings for professionals, the second being more expensive.

Some gross algorithm details are present in this article:
http://www.thedeemon.com/articles/what_is_super_resolution.html
Yes, motion tracking is used extensively. We're not sure about releasing too much details - don't want cloners. There is a more serious paper for 2008 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4711763
where I am one of the authors. The paper describes further development of the method which provides even better quality but much slower. VE uses a simpler method.

You're right about names "Dee Mon" and thedeemon sounding bad. Historically, "Dee Mon" is just creatively spelled form of name Dmitry in Russian language and has nothing to do with deamons. Domain thedeemon.com appeared way before it started to be used for selling software. Last year I opened a company and it got a better name: Infognition. www.infognition.com is currently an alias for thedeemon.com and later will become the main domain (after it's one year old, around this October or November).

Although it's been a while since last version of VE, its development continues. With funding from one big Korean company we developed a realtime super resolution implementation working in YV12 colorspace. It's going to be used in next version of VE as a third mode of SR. It also has some deblocking and scene change detection, the latter increasing quality on cuts. We also plan a big redesign of user interface, making it more interactive and WYSIWYG (that's in version 2.0). The main problem of VE now is its dependency on system codecs which often work not so good and crash a lot (infamous ffdshow!). Probably we'll use a more self-contained approach to make VE more stable.

As for SR plugin, it's waiting to be adapted for newer versions of Adobe software. Making such a plugin for other host applications is also planned. Here we're just limited with our manpower because the company is still quite small (at least I'm not alone now, as it was a year ago).

So, thanks again for bright ideas and information. I hope we'll be moving more in this direction in near months.