If you’ve ever worked in video restoration, you’ve likely noticed that most of the mainstream post production software fall short of providing a collection of tools which address all of the weird and wonderfully novel problems that exist. Does Resolve provide a tool to reduce ringing? Does Nuke offer a solution for dialing in macroblocking reduction down with a delicate finesse? The answer is no. Most people slap a Neat Video OFX plugin onto a node and call it a day. However, for those of us restoration folks who are obsessed with the integrity of the original image, nuance is critical. Enter Vapoursynth.
I was frustrated that there aren’t Resolve plugins available on the market for my specific needs in restoration so I decided to develop my own. I had a bit of software development experience from my consulting days at Quantifly so I called up an attorney who has experience in intellectual property within the software dev community to explore the idea. I sold some crypto and hired Vapoursynth’s creator, Frederik Mellbin, to adapt the software into a package compatible with Davinci Resolve’s OFX standard. I was then able to call up the Vapoursynth plugin within a node inside Fusion. This allows me to simply drop my custom Vapoursynth scripts into my pipeline thus bypassing the need to roundtrip out of and back into Resolve for my restoration work.
I am currently working on launching the plugin as open source to give back to my restoration community. Feel free to message me to learn how you can add Vapoursynth into your own image processing pipeline.