Home videos capture treasured moments -- but also many a grainy image and shaky scene, as any visit to YouTube shows. Now people who shoot impromptu videos on their cell phones and other handheld devices may find some help in stabilizing the rough spots -- or in bringing their new baby's face into focus -- before posting their clips online. And it comes from specialized algorithms more common in a forensics lab than on Facebook. MotionDSP Inc., a software maker in San Mateo, Calif., is offering a $50 download for PCs that tackles pixelated and fuzzy frames in standard definition video. It analyzes the color and position of pixels in frames adjacent to ones with the poor images, said Sean Varah, the company's chief executive, then adds information found in those nearby frames to make improvements. The enhanced videos can then be saved or uploaded to YouTube or other sites. The consumer program is adapted from the company's more powerful product, Ikena (about $7,700), which is used by law enforcement authorities to recover details like license plate numbers in low-quality video, he said. The image-enhancement algorithms are part of a research field called super-resolution, said Sanjay J. Patel, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 'Super-resolution is a class of techniques one can use on ordinary video to make it look better,' he said. Those include the computationally intensive process of seeking extra, compensatory information in nearby frames 'There's a lot of interest in the technology in research labs at universities and in specialized professional software for video processing,' he said -- for instance, in crime labs. 'But you don't see much of it in consumer products.' MotionDSP's software, called vReveal, can do some editing -- trimming clips or rotating sideways video, for example -- but its main function is narrower: to improve appearance by increasing resolution and smoothing out the effects of a bobbing camera. The software's job is to fix shaky, noisy home video, said Nikola Bozinovic, vice president of engineering at MotionDSP. 'It's pretty much for any standard-definition video you've recorded, including anything transferred from VHS,' Bozinovic said. Jon Peddie, who heads Jon Peddie Research, a consulting firm in Tiburon, Calif., said specialized software like vReveal might prove popular with consumers as more of them create and post videos. 'There's a huge potential market for products like this,' Peddie said. 'If two of us are at the same soccer game, each photographing it with a cheap camera, but I do some enhancing afterward,' that video will look better and get more views. The number of people who are shooting video or watching it at home is skyrocketing, said Mary Madden, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. 'The medium has been percolating through the online world at a rate that far surpasses other online activities,' she said. The market for video enhancement may also expand as video calling and conferencing become more mobile, she said. Skype, for instance, has demonstrated mobile video calling from a desktop computer to a mobile Internet device over WiFi. Bozinovic says MotionDSP has technology, now being tested, to clean up live video as it streams to the viewer. But before specialized software like vReveal catches on, consumers will have to be convinced of its value, Peddie said. 'The difficulty with this kind of product is that you have to see it or use it to appreciate it,' he said. To address this problem, vReveal is offering a one-month free membership, during which people can compare their before-and-after videos, then decide whether to buy the program. While vReveal works with Windows XP or Vista (and not with Macs), it will make its enhancements much faster if the machine contains a recent graphics processing card from Nvidia, Varah said. Nvidia is an investor and a marketing partner with vReveal; a specific list of cards is at vReveal's Web site. 'If you have other graphics cards, your computer will just use its central processing unit,' Varah said, but the process will be slower. Madden is expecting more people to take pains to improve their videos. 'You can't expect that everyone will become the next Martin Scorsese,' she said. 'But we are moving into a time when video becomes much more a part of everyday communication. We are all going to have to become video producers.' 