Stoik Video Enhancer: Good Idea, Poor Implementation

Just about everyone has a ambulatory phone with a television camera that bottom record both still images and video nowadays. The only problem is that mobile video codecs don't exactly produce picture of the highest quality. In fact, headphone video is typically three-dimensional, out of focus, shaky, and, well, pretty so much useless for anything differently showing grandma your fashionable kid-spit-up-strained-peas masterpiece. Thus I had really high hopes for this great-sounding tool from Stoik Imaging, makers of the very well-standard Imagic and Panorama Maker image editing and management applications. Their work on techniques that improve the quality of marginal still images is genuinely out on the knifelike edge. Could their free demo do the same for mobile video? Unfortunately, in this first version of Stoik Video Enhancer ($49, free demo with watermarks), the answer is a resounding no.

I for certain wasn't expecting the sort of fantasy, CSI Miami-esque super resolution enhancement that's only possible in the domain of television and movies, but almost anything would comprise an improvement. The software supports a wide roll of roving video codecs, which is good because most screen background PC media players or organizers offer spotty coverage to action replay video from phones. That's about where the good news ends.

Stoik Video Enhancer requires the latest version of Windows Media Musician and DirectX, then factor in the storage and time-to-download and -install these products into your condition. If you're already up to see, great. If not, it could add another 15 minutes, a bring up, and about 75MB of hard drive space to the installation requirements.

I started out by pick some short (under one second) clips of regular-definition video recording from my Android changeable phone (352 by 288 resolution, encoded in h.263). The largest was about 1.6MB in size and 33 seconds in length. The platform, by default, has some modifications checked — these are the real powerhouses of the computer programme, and the reason you might pay $49 for Video Enhancer instead of right transcoding your mobile video into a much compatible format using something free, like FFMPEG.

By default, Stoik Video Foil opts to execute noise diminution and deblurring, and to cause adjustments to the color balance and exposure levels, which (again, in theory) should drastically improve most of the things that are unsuitable with your norm mechanized phone video. IT does not, by default, perform image stabilization or deinterlace videos, but you can mark off boxes that will add those tasks to the video's sweetening to-perform list, as well.

I clicked the Start button but I'm not really reliable what happened next. The program informed me that it would take about 30 minutes to complete the tasks I selected, so I walked away. About an hour later, I came back to the PC to find that the program had crashed. I tried again and again on different test systems spurting 32-bit XP, disabling one of the sweetening features at once, only each time something prevented the file from completing. The vendor was unable to replicate or explain this issue.

Eventually a disparate error message began to appear and, after a immature closer analysis, I realized that the program had completely filled all byte of storage quad on my hard drive with its attempts, and those files were massively too large: Even when I simply tried to transcode video with no sweetening options whatsoever, Telecasting Enhancer generated about 1GB of turnout for about every tierce seconds of video. That would make my 33 endorse video into an 11GB opus that could make James Cameron's IT director cry. Straight with a terabyte of storage free, I found that the program chewed through the unyielding labour with reckless vacate.

Sadly, this version of Video Enhancer doesn't really create the cut, but perchance your mileage may deviate. Maybe the next release will be better, simply for now, Stoik Video Enhancer is a corking disk drive stress-test tool that, if you're luckier than me, may be able to convert and raise your cellular telephone videos likewise.