MotionDSP launches vReveal tool to clear up blurry home movies

Everybody has blurry, unfocused, and motion-sickness inspiring home videos. But Silicon Valley company MotionDSP is launching a video restoration software program today that could help fix that.

The company’s vReveal software can automatically fix movies so they look more professional. It uses graphics computation to smooth out movies with shaky motion, lighten dark videos and otherwise reduce noise. And you can run the process with a single click.

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The video enhancement technology taps a computer’s graphics chip. Graphics chips are normally used for graphics processing, but they can also be used for non-graphics computational tasks, thanks to Nvidia‘s CUDA software programming environment. The graphics chip enables vReveal to run five times faster than it otherwise would on the microprocessor.

vReveal can fix videos captured by cell phones, digital cameras, and other handheld devices. MotionDSP, based in San Mateo, Calif., was founded in 2005. Back in September, Nvidia invested in the company, and before that, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel investment firm invested in it. The company developed a high-end forensic video technology for the CIA known as Ikena, which can do things like sharpen the image of a license plate seen from far away.

The patented technology is clever. In a second of video, there are 60 snapshots, or frames, that form the individual slices of the video. The software analyzes a scene by looking at all of the previous frames that have played and the frames that are about to play. It then finds the sharpest features of each frame and uses those in the enhanced video. The result of this “multi-frame analysis” is improved resolution for the whole video.

The company first announced the technology at last year’s DEMO conference. Now it’s shipping the software for $49.99. You can buy it on such web sites as vReveal.com and nZone.com. For now, it works with Windows computers. It competes with software such as Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas, CyberLink PowerDirector and Apple’s iMovie.