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macswitcha2

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 18, 2008
1,255
8
Ok, I finally got a .AVI file of a video I have been looking made back in the late 90s. However, tje video quality is choppy, but the audio is great.

Is there a way to improve the quality of the video so that the pixels are not looking blocky and moves according to the audio?
 
Am I in the wrong forum?

Maybe... the Digital Video forum might be more useful. But I suspect that unless you still have the original video media and can re-import and re-convert, you may be SOL if all you have to work with is this AVI file.
 
Maybe... the Digital Video forum might be more useful. But I suspect that unless you still have the original video media and can re-import and re-convert, you may be SOL if all you have to work with is this AVI file.

ok....thanks
 
Well, in a decent video editor (Final Cut or Adobe Premiere or some other tool), the audio can be resync'd with the video. But if all you have is the AVI video quality to begin with... if it's really blocky, sounds like it's been extremely compressed.

Or put it differently, if all you have is the finished product (AVI file), it's a lot like having a burnt hamburger, sometimes. If you burn it, you can always make another hamburger if you still have some raw meat left (i.e. the original video source). But trying to rescue a badly burnt hamburger can be a difficult proposition even in best of circumstances.

A finished video file using a lossy compressed format can't really easily be 'reversed' or edited at the original quality -- because a lot of the original video data was lost when doing the inital compression and conversion into AVI format. Honestly, your best bet is to have someone re-edit the original footage (if still available in its original form) with a modern video/audio editing tool and then once edited, convert into whatever format you like.

(This, BTW, is the same reason why movie and TV studios carefully store their original stock footage for years -- so they can later recopy, reedit, and reconvert into whatever modern-day format is needed with a minimum of any loss in quality.)

Wish I had better news. Sorry. :(
 
Or put it differently, if all you have is the finished product (AVI file), it's a lot like having a burnt hamburger, sometimes. If you burn it, you can always make another hamburger if you still have some raw meat left (i.e. the original video source). But trying to rescue a badly burnt hamburger can be a difficult proposition even in best of circumstances.

I love that analogy.

I think the best you can hope for is to shift the audio so it’s synced.
 
no i'm afraid not. Once you compress a file, you cannot uncompress it because the data has already been taken out.
 
you could also run a blur and sharpen filter through the video. as has been said, you can't get back quality and it's likely this would make things even less clear, but at least it won't be 'blocky' - it may even be able to feign that the production was filmed with a little vaseline on the lens ;)
 
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