Sure, you can capture video on a whole slew of handheld devices today, including your cell phone and tiny pocket digital camera. But have you seen the quality of those videos? Not only are they low-resolution, but they can be fuzzy, pixelated, dull, and generally unappealing. Enter vReveal, a push-button easy program that can sharpen, heighten and generally clean up those poor quality videos. On startup, vReveal scans the Your Pictures and Your Videos (and any other folders you define) and loads the videos it finds. Any time you add videos to those folders, they will be automatically imported into vReveal. Or, you can manually import individual videos. Unfortunately, vReveal does not yet support networks, so your videos must be saved on the local computer.
The core of vReveal are "one click fixes": Clean, Sharpen, Auto Contrast, Stabilize, Fill Light and, for very low resolution files, 2X Resolution. You can choose each one individually, or apply all at once. In the Fine Tuning section, vReveal has sliders for user control over the amount of each fix, plus adds a Color option to adjust saturation or white balance. You can save the file to Windows Media (WMV) or uncompressed AVI on your computer, or directly to YouTube.
VReveal's focus is on videos produced by low-resolution handheld devices, such as your cell phone. So, it works only on videos with a vertical resolution of 576 pixels or smaller. That also means that you shouldn't expect miracles from vReveal. When you start out with such low-quality footage, you won't end up with HDTV-quality videos, no matter what software you have. However, it does a decent job of heightening most pictures, and it's easy as pie to use.
--Sally Wiener Grotta & Daniel Grotta
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