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Toward a Better Computing Experience | Software Review by Steve Miller, VP Vendor Relations, Brookdale Computer User Group, NJ BCUG Bytes, September 2009 www.bcug.org stevemiller1 (at) comcast.net |
“Do you shoot video with your cell phone, digital camera, or other handheld device?” is the question found on the website for vReveal. “Then the chances are good that you have shaky, dark, noisy, pixilated, or blurry videos. Less-than-ideal videos that obscure your life’s best, captured moments.”
“But those moments don’t have to be lost to common video problems anymore,” the site promises. “vReveal has the advanced enhancement technology and “one click” touch-up tools that make it easy to dramatically improve the quality of flawed videos.”
I was impressed by vReveal’s enhancements of my video. I was equally impressed by the dramatic speed increase resulting from off-loading computing from my motherboard CPU to my system video card. As advertised, vReveal improves snowy/jerky/low quality video. It also exports a high quality photo, derived from lower quality source video.
Installation I own a compatible late-model NVIDIA graphics card (8800GT). I downloaded the latest NVIDIA graphics driver, which enabled vReveal software to use parallel processing by ~100 processors in my video card. During the simple vReveal installation, I specified a video folder to be “watched” by the new program.
Evaluation Figure 1 shows the primary user screen. My video was displayed split-screen, in order to contrast before and after application of the video enhancements. I discovered an important, but unadvertised use for this amazing software. vReveal improves the quality of Standard Definition (SD) video, so the contrast becomes less noticeable when SD videos are used in the same movie with High Definition (HD) video.
My Standard Definition video sources include traditional SD camcorders as well as my digital still camera (in “video capture” mode). My HD sources include a HD camcorder, and digital photos, which I “pan” and “zoom” to create motion.
I used the following vReveal settings to enhance my Standard Definition video:
• “One Click Fix” (this automatically “Cleaned”, “Sharpened”, and
AutoContrast”).
• “De-interlace”. (“de-interlace” is an important feature which prevented
unacceptable artifacts during video with fast motion).
To view the result of video enhancement, I used my favorite video editor to create one timeline that contained three types of content.
• Standard definition video, no enhancement
• Standard Definition video, enhanced with vReveal
• High Definition video
I then “burned” a standard DVD, and also “burned” a High Definition BluRay DVD (encoded with the optional HDV MPEG2 format). I used Cyberlink “Power DVD” software with a 24 inch Samsung LCD (1680X1050) to “play” the DVDs, and compare SD video (with and without enhancements) to the HD video.
I then “burned” a standard DVD, and also “burned” a High Definition BluRay DVD (encoded with the optional HDV MPEG2 format). I used Cyberlink “Power DVD” software with a 24 inch Samsung LCD (1680X1050) to “play” the DVDs, and compare SD video (with and without enhancements) to the HD video.
Visible results The original (un-enhanced) SD content was clearly deficient to HD video content. After enhancement, my SD content exhibited remarkable video improvement (although not quite up to the high definition sources): Snow (especially resulting from low light) totally disappeared on my SD content after enhancement. Colors were brighter, blacks were blacker, and contrast was enhanced.
vReveal, owned by NVIDIA, includes a performance and control dashboard to showcase the speed increase resulting from leveraging NVIDIA video card GPU (graphics processors). My jobs ran twice as fast when I shifted the processing from my high performance quad core to my lower-end video card!
(Enhancement of my 40 minute SD video took about 90 minutes when off-loaded to the video card, and took about 180 minutes when confined to my high performance quad processor.)
System Requirements Hardware: Intel or AMD 1.6GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 50MB hard drive space; NVIDIA video card with “CUDA” enabled (GeForce 8-series, and higher); 100GB free disk per hour of enhanced video (uncompressed AVI) Software: Microsoft® Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista™ Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (certified for 32-bit editions). Output flee types supported: WMV and uncompressed AVIs Price: $49, download from www.nzone.com 30-day trial software is available (watermark is applied to output video files.) For more information: http://www.vreveal.com/
This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).