Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Enhance Your Mobile Video Clips Image Quality With MotionDSP FixMyMovie

Overview

"Fixmymovie.com can take any video file from a mobile phone or digital camera and make it better. FixMyMovie's suite of automatic enhancements improves overall resolution, corrects for poor lighting conditions and removes the blockiness and other artifacts that ruin most mobile phone and low-end digital camera videos."

MotionDSP's patent-pending technology studies your video and finds the unique information present in each frame of video. If it can match the scene (background) or objects (foreground) in more than 3-4 frames, it puts that information together to make a cleaner video.

MotionDSP seems also to be using technical approaches similar to what you would call "interpolation" and "sharpening", if you were optimizing a still digital image. Applied to the a low-quality recorded video they all contribute to make the video image look less pixelated and with more and better defined contours.

To avoid wasting time in trying to improve video clips to which little can be done, FixMyMovie processes the first 10 seconds of your video clip automatically so that you can check whether the image processing that FixMyMovie has applied to it does work or not. If you like the results, then you can request FixMyMovie to process the rest of the video.

FixMyMovie showcases all of its abilities by providing the user with a compare-video feature that facilitates seeing the "before" and "after" the video processing.

Videos that perform really badly with FixMyMovie are those shot while moving especially if recorded on a low-quality low-frame rate mobile phone video recorder.

FixMyMovie is also available to do custom professional jobs and the engineering team behind this powerful technology can be reached at: professionalservices @ motiondsp.com

How does it work

To use FixMyMovie the steps to follow are very simple.

1) Upload

Sign-up, log-in and upload your low-quality movie clip to FixMymovie in .3gp, .mp4 or .avi file formats. Maximum file size is 20MB.

2) Fix

Let FixMyMovie do its job by processing and improving the quality of your video.

3) View-Compare

Check and verify how your video clip will be visually enhanced before committing FixMyMovie resources to process your whole video.

4) Share-Embed

Each and every video comes with a share-embed code that you can simply paste into any web page for online viewing. To get the "embed" code to be placed on your web site, you need to click on the text box next to the "Embed" button, just to the right of your video clip. This will in turn select the code in the box, which you need to copy and paste "as is" inside your HTML code.

5) Download

Download your enhanced video in your preferred video file format among MOV, WMV and FLV.

Examples

Check the difference between original clip and the enhanced version by clicking the "Compare" button appearing at the bottom left of each clip.

Or use the swiping bar in the image here below to see the difference between "before" and "after", as the clip plays back.

Key Features

Video processing
The video processing and enhancement capabilities of FixMyMovie have not yet been available to the large public until now. With FixMyMovie anyone can easily improve low-quality video in a few simple steps.

Video and still image comparison
This is truly notable. For each clip you upload to FixMyMovie you can see how the original clip looked versus how the clip would look after MotionDSP processing. This is invaluable and it is also great marketing at work for MotionDSP.

Sharing and embedding
FixMyMovie makes it easy also to publish your enhanced video to any standard web page or blog.

H264 Codec
FixMyMovie has recently further improved its outstanding video quality by integrating the H264 video codec into its system. To take advantage of it, you'll need to install the beta Flash Player available here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html.

Still Frame capture
With FixMyMovie you can also capture high-res still frame grabs from you video clips. To do so, play your original video, hit the pause button (or drag the slider) to select the scene from which you want to grab a still picture and click the "camera" button.

Download high-quality enhanced video clips
Once you've ordered full processing of the video, FixMyMovie makes it available for download in H264 MOV format, WMV format, and also Flash FLV (which is excellent for YouTube uploading). Please note that the downloadable clips are prepared at a higher quality (higher bitrate) than the versions you see displaying on the site.

Technical issues

1) FixMyMovie uses the very latest Adobe Flash plug-in. If you do not have this latest version of Adobe Flash installed, you may not be able to see videos play inside FixMyMovie.

In this case, please follow these instructions to download and install the new beta Adobe flash player.

* Go to the Adobe website (http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html)

* If you are using Internet Explorer, select the link entitled "Download ActiveX Control for Windows Internet Explorer" or

* if you are using Firefox or other browser, select the appropriate link for Windows, Mac, or Linux

* Install the flash player

* Go back to www.fixmymovie.com, and check if you can play the videos.

Note: this Flash player is still in beta and it may cause problems with your system.

2) The maximum resolution size for video clips to be uploaded on FixMyMovie is 352x288

3) File and Codecs supported

Just got an email from Sean Varah the CEO of MotionDSP Inc. confirming the following:

File formats: AVI, MOV, FLV, ASF/WMV, MPG, MP4, 3GPP, 3GP2

Video codecs: MJPG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (DivX), WMV7, WMV8, WMV9 (VC-1), VP6,
VP7, RAW, H.263, H.264 and more

Audio codecs: MP3, AC3, AAC, WMA, ADPCM, AMR

Editor's Review

FixMyMovie is a breakthrough web-based service allowing automatic low-quality video enhancement at zero cost to the users.

The service is extremely straightforward and simple to use though more detailed information about which specific video file formats are supported for upload, and other possible limits in file size and max number of video clips that can be uploaded would be very useful.

If you are a reporter, journalist or online publisher looking for a simple way to enhance low quality video clips for web publication this is the service to use. Keep in mind that the service works essentially only with low-res videos and it will not accept higher-quality (above 320x240) resolution videos for processing.

If you are a startup or a web 2.0 company looking to learn how best to market and publicize a product, here is on of the very best examples of 2.0 marketing I have come across in some time. Kudos to MotionDSP excellent vision and outstanding marketing implementation.

Other FixMyMovie reviews online