Operation of the software went off without a hitch, although I did have a few issues exporting video to YouTube. It would render the video fine, and seemed to be uploading just fine, but then would throw an error and abort the upload. On another computer it successfully finished the upload, but then the video was nowhere to be found in my YouTube account. Regardless, the YouTube-formatted video works fine when uploaded manually via the web interface, and looks great once processed.
As I said, vReveal does allow you to custom-tailor your enhancement settings quite a bit. I was actually impressed that there were three separate layers of customization, from the simple “one click” button all the way down to manually changing the parameters of each function. The one-click seemed to do a pretty good job but often left out the stabilize feature, perhaps since using that feature does decrease the resolution. I preferred to use the mid-level settings most often, selecting or deselecting the six different icons which enable a default setting for each type of enhancement.
However, there were also quite a few features that seem to have been overlooked or left out of vReveal, perhaps so it doesn’t compete with its bigger brother, Ikena. First of all, the program can’t process HD video. I had a bunch of footage from a little MinoHD Flip camcorder that I wanted to stabilize, but vReveal wouldn’t let me do anything with the footage. Seeing that a lot of consumer level video devices can now capture HD video, this seems to be an oversight that MotionDSP should correct quickly. The strangest thing is that vReveal will export HD video! To their credit, in their FAQ section, MotionDSP does acknowledge this shortcoming and says that they “are currently optimizing our algorithms to support enhancement of HD video”.
Another half-offered option is the ability to double the resolution of your video. Unfortunately this feature only works on clips smaller than 352x288. To be honest, I had to work pretty hard to find a device that would capture video at this low of a resolution! My cell phone, video camera, and still camera all capture at 640X480 or higher. I was eventually able to get some small video out of my Blackberry Curve to test this function, but this is another area where MotionDSP needs to keep up with current trends in technology. I would be thrilled if it could double the resolution of my 640x480 footage for up-res’ing to HD, but this feature is simply disabled on normal-sized video. Bummer.
I’d also like to see a feature that could interpolate frames from video with low frame rates. For example, my Blackberry records at 15fps and looks pretty choppy as a result. It would be nice if vReveal could convert the footage to 24fps or 30fps by interpolating the missing frames, much like RE:Vision’s awesome but difficult to use Twixtor.
One last option I missed was the ability to export to DV-AVI or DV-QT, which are the standard consumer formats for most editing programs. I’d like this feature to be available so I can edit footage corrected by vReveal on any editing platform and not have to worry about whether I have the proper codec. You can export to an uncompressed AVI, but the resulting files sizes are much too large for most practical uses.
Finally, the program only works on Windows. Sorry Mac people!
While this sounds like a lot of criticism, I only mention these flaws because vReveal is an otherwise super-cool program which could be perfect if these minor oversights are corrected.
