Video Enhancement Software
Generic Company Place Holder STOIK Video Enhancer
Almost everyone has a mobile phone with a camera that can recordboth still images and video nowadays. The only problem is thatmobile video codecs don't exactly produce video of the highestquality. In fact, phone video is typically blocky, out of focus,and shaky. I had high hopes for this nifty-sounding tool from StoikImaging, makers of the very well-received Imagicand PanoramaMaker image editing and management applications. Their work ontechniques that improve the quality of marginal still images isreally out on the cutting edge. Could their free demo do the samefor mobile video?
Unfortunately, in this first version of Video Enhancer, theanswer is a resounding no. I wasn't expecting the kind of fantasy,super-resolution enhancement that's possible only in television andmovies, but almost anything would be an improvement. The softwaresupports a wide range of mobile video codecs, which is good becausemost desktop PC media players or organizers offer spotty coverageto replay video from phones. That's about where the good newsends.
Stoik Video Enhancer requires the latest version of WindowsMedia Player and DirectX, so factor in the storage andtime-to-download and -install these products into yourconsideration. If you're already up to date, great. If not, itcould add another 15 minutes, a reboot, and about 75MB of harddrive space to the installation requirements.
I started out by picking some short clips of standard-definitionvideo from my Android mobile phone (352 by 288 resolution, encodedin h.263). The largest was about 1.6MB in size and 33 seconds inlength. The program, by default, has some modificationschecked--these are the real powerhouses of the program, and thereason you might pay $49 for Video Enhancer instead of justtranscoding your mobile video into a more compatible format usingsomething free, like FFMPEG.
By default, Stoik Video Enhancer opts to perform noise reductionand deblurring, and to make adjustments to the color balance andexposure levels, which should drastically improve most of thethings that are wrong with your average mobile phone video. It doesnot, by default, perform image stabilization or deinterlace videos,but you can check boxes to add those tasks to the video'senhancement to-do list, as well.
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I clicked the Start button, but I'm not really sure whathappened next. The program informed me that it would take about 30minutes to complete the tasks I selected, so I walked away. Aboutan hour later, I came back to the PC to find that the program hadcrashed. I tried again and again on different test systems running32-bit XP, disabling one of the enhancement features at a time, buteach time something prevented the file from completing. The vendorwas unable to replicate or explain this issue.
Eventually a different error message began to appear and, aftera little closer analysis, I realized that the program hadcompletely filled every last byte of storage space on my hard drivewith its attempts, and those files were massively too large: Evenwhen I simply tried to transcode video with no enhancement optionswhatsoever, Video Enhancer generated about 1GB of output for aboutevery three seconds of video. That made my 33-second video into an11GB opus that could make James Cameron's IT director cry. Evenwith a terabyte of storage free, I found that the program chewedthrough the hard drive with reckless abandon.
Sadly, this version of Video Enhancer doesn't really make thecut, but perhaps your mileage may vary. Maybe the next release willbe better, but for now, Stoik Video Enhancer is a great hard drivestress-test tool that, if you're luckier than me, may be able toconvert and enhance your mobile phone videos as well.
--Andrew Brandt
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Video Enhancement Software Online
Generic Company Place Holder STOIK Video Enhancer
Video Enhancer offers a wide range of options designed to clean up most of the problems with mobile phone videos.
Cons
- Buggy; Generates files that consume gargantuan amounts of hard drive space