How to sharpen a video for optimal quality (With AI and non-AI Tools )
Summary: When playing the video you’ve shot with your smartphone or DV, you found sometimes the video was blurry, or lost its focus? This is why you need a video sharpening software which can sharpen videos to remove the motion blurs and out-of-focus blurs to deliver you a crystal clear video that you can share on your social networks. Read on to find more details.
- • Upscale low-res videos into 720p/1080p/4k content
- • Enhance video clarity to a more realistic and vivid visual effect
- • Support video editing to meet your personalized demands
- • Get 50x faster speed with GPU acceleration
There are several reasons why your videos may come out blurry. The most common factor causing a video to be blurry is the vibration, which could be caused by your trembling hands when shooting videos with your phone, DV or DSLR camera. Usually, this kind of vibration can be fixed or compensated if your shooting device comes with an optical image stabilization (OIS) or digital image stabilization (DIS) feature. However, there is another big reason that can cause a video blurry — the subject being captured was moving fast; and the 3rd major reason is that you simply lost the focus when the shooting took place…for the latter two cases, even the best image stabilization technology today on a camera finds it hard to prevent the video being blurred.
Hence, this problem can only be fixed during the post production stage, with a video sharpener software. Here is this article, we’ll show you how to sharpen videos with some popular video editing software, such as iMovie, Premiere and the AI-powered UniFab Video Enhancer AI on computers.
Content Quick Sneak:
Section 1. How to sharpen videos with video editing software
Most of the video editing software products today claim to be able to sharpen videos, but only a few of them are really good at this. In this section, we are going to show you the best video sharpeners with or without AI capability to help you sharpen blurry videos to better visual quality.
1.1 How to sharpen a video with the best AI-powered video enhancer software
- Restore your low-res videos into 720p/1080p/4k content
- Enhance video clarity to a more realistic and vivid visual effect
- Support video editing to meet your personalized demand
- Get 50x faster speed with GPU acceleration
During the processing of upscaling your videos from low resolution to higher level, it also sharpens your videos by removing all the visible motion blurs and out-of-focus blurs automatically using its embedded AI sharpening algorithms. And aside from several clicks to proceed the process, nothing else is required from your manual interference. In other words, you don’t have to be a video editing geek to sharpen videos with this software.
Refer to the steps blow to see how UniFab Video Enlarger AI can sharpen videos while upscaling its resolution level:
Launch UniFab and choose the 'Enlarger' module.
Install the software on your device and open the interface
Load the source and edit the output video
Choose the 'Enlarger' module. Click the Add Video button to select the video you want to sharpen.
Customize the restoring video file
Click the start button to edit your video file. UniFab will complete the video task at lightning speed.
1.2 How to sharpen video with UniFab Toolkit
The UniFab Video Enlarger AI mentioned above is not the only video sharpening software from UniFab family, there is also a dedicated video sharpening module packed in its Toolkit multimedia editing package. With 28 (this number is still growing) independently working modules packed in one suite, UniFab Toolkit gives the users the power to edit videos, audios and images with versatile features. Among these 28 modules, the Sharpen/Unsharpen module is dedicated to video sharpening and de-sharpening. That is to say, you can use this module to sharpen blurry video for better quality, or fix the videos that are sharpened too much.
See the steps below to check out how UniFab Toolkit can sharpen video quality with its Sharpen/Unsharpen module:
Step 1 — After launching UniFab Toolkit, click the Sharpen/Unsharpen module from the Video Tools section;
Step 2 — Drag & Drop your blurry video to the next window, or use the big + icon;
Step 3 — From the Effects dropdown selector, choose the Sharp option;
As a sidenote: unless you’re a professional who knows exactly what the jargons below mean, it is strongly advised that you avoid the Customize option, because sharpening and too much sharpening is always just a blink away. So leave that to the program itself is a viable solution to go with;
Step 4 — Hit the Start button and let the program do the rest for you.
- Available on: Windows as of now
- Pricing: $26.99/month, $44.99/year, or $79.99 for a perpetual license available at its online store
1.3 How to sharpen video in Premiere
As a user of Adobe Premiere, how to perform the video sharpen process without having to turn to another product? Interestingly, inside Adobe Premiere, there is an effect called Unsharp Mask and that is exactly the one you should use to sharpen video quality. See the guides below to see how Adobe Premiere can sharpen blurry video with its Unsharp Mask.
Step 1 — Create a Premiere project, import your blurry video clip and drag it to the timeline;
Step 2 — Click the file icon right next the dust bin and select the Adjustment Layer option, and drag the newly created adjustment layer to the timeline right above your video footage;
Step 3 — Search sharp in Effects and drag Unsharp Mask into the adjustment layer. Now click on the adjustment layer to bring up the Unsharp Mask, and then click to expand its relevant settings, namely Amount, Radius and Threshold;
Step 4 — Use each slider to adjust the value until you’re satisfied with the result;
Step 5 — Render the sharpened video footages and export the final product.
As a sidenote: Sharpening a video is a CPU & GPU intensive task that requires a lot of your computer’s horsepower, especially when your video is very long. So it’s better not to run other computing intensive programs when the video sharpening task is in progress to avoid any possible unpleasant result.
- Available on: both Windows and macOS
- Pricing: $19.99/month
- Can I sharpen a video online?
Well, sharpening videos is quite different from sharpening an image. Video sharpening is a computing-intensive and time-consuming task that is very demanding on hardware capacity. Given the fact the even sharpening a small video clip on a computer with top class CPU and GPU costs a considerable long time, and during that process, your computer will be significantly slowed down that you cannot run any other GPU-intensive programs, it is not possible nor practical to sharpen video online directly from a browser. So, the answer is no.
- Is there any sharpen video apps that I can use to sharpen blurry videos on my smartphone?
Unfortunately, we cannot say for 100% sure that there isn’t, however, it is really hard to find one that really does the job right for you, no matter on iOS or on Android. Even there is, it’ better to take it with a grain of salt. The reason is obvious, like mentioned above, even the strongest computer takes a long time to sharpen a small video clip. So there is no guarantee to count on a smartphone for the job.
- How to sharpen video in iMovie?
Well, it feel sad to say that iMovie does not feature such a function. But it is the truth. So you have to turn to other 3rd party video sharpeners to do the job for you.
When shooting videos with whatever device you have, always try your best to minimize the side effect of vibration to maximally avoid blurry videos. To do that, a better camera with optical image stabilization or digital image stabilization feature may help a lot, as well as a tripod to steady the camera instead of holding it with your bare hands. That said, even with the best camera, it’s hardly to completely prevent your videos from becoming blurred, especially when you are shooting a moving object.
Thus, when your videos do come out blurry, there is no need to panic either. You can sharpen blurry videos with 3rd party video sharpening software at the post production stage, like the tools we’ve mentioned in this article. No matter you are a professional video geek or a novice who just jumped into the video editing thing, our advice is that it’s better to opt for the AI-powered video sharpening software UniFab Video Enlarger AI, because it not only saves your precious time by supporting GPU hardware acceleration and batch processing, it also does not need you to be knowledgeable on video editing itself.