Need advice for adding filters

[nocam1334]

I have a video that was originally 240x180. It's not very good quality, and I'm trying to make the most of what I have. I've already encoded with TMPGEnc 2.01 once an increased the bitrate, and also bumped up the resolution to 352x240, but made the picture a little smaller to keep the video looking half decent. That helped, but I'd like to make it a little better. I've heard the only other way to increase the visual quality is by adding filters. I have Adobe Premiere and After Effects, but I am not very familiar with them. If anyone has any advice on what filters may help I'd appreciate any advice. These are my specs:

Dell Dimension 8100 1.3GHZ
384MB RDRAM
TMPGEnc 2.01
Adobe Premiere 6.0
Adobe After Effects 5.0

[pinoy2201]

try virtualdub with the smartresizer filter then frameserve to TMPGEnc ...i think there is a guide on the left

[The VidKid]

You can't really do anything with bad video quality. You can turn a good video quality into bad easily (i.e. by lowering the bitrate, cutting the res in half, etc.) but going from bad to good is almost impossible. Think of GIGO -- Garbage In Garbage Out.. or think of it this way = You can take a brand spanking new car and beat the pulp out of it with a baseball bat (good to bad) but can you undo that without replacing any parts such as using paint and changing any parts that aren't already there? That's the same thing with video.

[Shabubu]

Remember to use precise bicubic resize to increase your frame size. Add a spatial smoother to try and get rid of the macroblocks that will happen with your resize. A temporal smoother may also help. Do all this in virtualdub, all this will be far from perfect but it will give you the best result possible.