Unclear picture!

[Sara]

Hello
I have a lot of MPEG, AVI and WMV files on my computer but a lot of them is really unclear and when I make a VCD I can't see the people's faces because the picture is even more unclear. I know that these files aren't always good but I there any way at all to make the pictures better and more clear. I thought maybe there was some kind of program I could use. Thanks for your help.
Sara

[Craig Tucker]

Garbage in = Garbage out.

If you have a poor source file, you will inevitably get a poor encoded mpeg, there is also always a degredation in quality with each encode that you perform.

There are filters that can be applied, but these are always at the expense of some other factor. For example a pixelled image can be softened to reduce the effect of the pixellization, but this is at the expense of image sharpness/clarity.