improving video quality

[loulou]

Didn't really know which forum was the right one for this. So I guessed the newbie field was appropriate.

I've searched the board and the web to find a tool to improve video quality, whether it is avi, wmv or vob. I'm expecially looking for a sotware that can make the video size bigger with no quality loss. Nothing that really requires too many knowledges, something pretty much user friendly.

Is there any that some of you experienced successfully, even a non free one? I'm willing to pay if find what I'm interested in.

Thanks for any help, I highly appreciate.

[unskinnyboy]

Video size bigger means? Frame size? Then what you need is a Resizer. But you cannot prevent quality loss, because you will have to re-encode the video to resize it and re-encoding always results in quality loss. If you want to resize by re-encoding nonetheless, then you can resize in AviSynth or VirtualDub. I won't get into the details till you confirm we are on the same page here.

[loulou]

Let's make an example (numbers are just to give you an idea).

I have an avi video 320x240 and I wanna have the same video 800x600.
I understand that if I use a tool like virtual dub or even agk I can do the resizing. But I will have a loss of quality.
Starting fron this very point: do you know a tool that is able to improve the quality of my 800x600 video? - ie: fix the blur images, make them sharp, brighter and so on.

I guess that there are people who actually do this as a job. Like picking old clips and restore them, meaning: when the oldies were taped, the technology was poor. Now they improve the images.

I don't need anything spectacular, but I'd like to have some of my clips improved. I would like to watch them bigger and sharp at the same time.

I hope I've been able to explain myself.

Thanks for replying, I appreciate.

[CWR03]

There are some resize filters that can smooth the image to make it appear less blocky, since simply increasing the size of a 320 x 240 video to 800 x 600 will simply enlarge the pixels to fill the screen, but only some of the highest-end softwares (such as Adobe Premiere, an $850 USD program) can make modest improvements in video quality from a poor source.

[Awatef]

loulou, older movies are restored by re-scanning the film source with high resolution scanners. That's why they look much sharper.

But in your case, you don't have the original source, so all you can do is post-processing. You can use FFDShow for playback. It has a lot of resizing and sharpening options, try it out.
But you'll never achieve a professional result (no matter which software you may use)

[Daodan]

What you want to do can be achieved with pretty good results in avisynth (a free frameserver), using different filters (denoisers, deblockers, sharpeners,etc) which will somehow make it look better even if no detail is created. Still, this requires a lot of work on your part, tuning these filters to your needs, etc, and the encoding process will be slow. After a few weeks of using avisynth you probably will be able to achieve good results, or read around the avisynth forum for ideas on what other people use for upconverting.