How can I further improve the quality of my home videos?

Question

So now that I have found out how to deinterlace my videos, I am wondering if there is other software out there that can further help improve the quality of my videos. Some other problems I have noticed is when you move the camera side to side very quickly you can notice tearing in the the picture. That is the top half of the frame doesn't line up with the bottom half, it appears that the bottom half is shifted to the right or left depending on which way the camera is moving. Shaky camera hand is also a problem in some videos.

I don't expect any software to be able to correct these problems 100%, especially the shaky hand. I know that using a tripod or something of the sorts is the best way to prevent the shakes, but for preexsiting videos what are the best solutions I can use?

Answer 1

Not the most user-friendly tool, but AviSynth is amazing. You create a text file with the .avs extension, and write a script, such as this one:

DirectShowSource("MyVideo.wmv")
Bob()
Lanczos4Resize(640,480)

This is a very simple script, that loads "MyVideo.wmv", deinterlaces using the "Bob" method and resizes to 640x480. There are a TON of filters for any kind of adjustment you want to make, including much better deinterlace options, color adjustment, crop, and many other.

However, the coolest thing about AviSynth is that the .avs files are recognized as videos by WMP (and pretty much any other Windows player), and if you open it you can see the results without any reencoding.

This means you can toy around with the filters as much as you want until you get good results, and after that just use the .avs as input for your favorite video encoder.

Answer 2

This might not help with your video tearing issue, but I use VirtualDub along with the popular MSU Videogroup filters to improve the quality of my videos.