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We all take lousy, grainy, and jerky videos. And then we upload them to YouTube to torture our friends with the poor video quality.

But MotionDSP has a “video restoration” technology (see our coverage, which has demos) that can fix all that.

Dubbed FixMyMovie, it can take grainy and jerky video and turn it into smooth video with four times better resolution. Over time, the technology can consume a lot of graphics horsepower as it improves its ability to convert lousy videos into works of art. And that’s why Nvidia is announcing today that it has taken a stake in MotionDSP. The amount isn’t being disclosed.

Sean Varah, chief executive of the company, said that MotionDSP has a new version of its software, code-named Carmel, which uses sophisticated techniques to track objects across multiple frames of video. It then deletes the noise, or visual flaws, from the scene. And it can intelligently fill out the video with the right details if one of the frames becomes fuzzy or slows down. It does so by looking at about 60 frames of video and making comparisons among them. Then it mathematically enhances or deletes parts of the video, correcting for motion blur and poor lighting conditions.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company debuted its FixMyMovie consumer technology at the DEMOfall 07 conference. It received a small amount of funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture fund last year and has previously deployed a high-end video-smoothing technology for security purposes. Varah said that the Secret Service, CNN, law enforcement agencies and others are using it in a “CSI”-style video forensics work. That version costs thousands of dollars, but the consumer version will debut at under $100 early next year.

The company has 17 employees and was founded in 2005. It raised its angel funds in March 2006 and has struggled to raise more money for a while now. Even after the funds from the CIA, its backing totaled a mere $1 million. So it is taking the money from Nvidia as part of its Series A (first round). Varah said the company continues to try to raise its first round, despite the difficult fundraising environment now.

The technology was originally initiated by Peyman Milansar, an electrical engineering professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Over the past few years, MotionDSP has adapted that work and refined it so it could be built into products.

Over time, Varah said the technology could be used to smooth out real-time video, such as video confererence calls. Varah said that MotionDSP is using Nvidia’s CUDA programming language to tap the graphics chip’s power for its real-time version.

By doing so, Varah said it can improve video performance five-fold. Nvidia is investing in the technology out of the belief that it can increase demand for its graphics chips if it can create non-gaming applications that can increase overall graphics processing demand.

I can remember the first interview I did with Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, back when the company was coming out of stealth in 1995. Since 3-D games didn’t exist back then, Huang described his graphics chip as the ideal “Windows accelerator.” And if you remember those days, Windows needed a lot of help. Then came no less than 50 3-D graphics startups. They all came and went. Nvidia remains.

The company’s newest cell phone processors have more power than that PC graphics chip from 1995. And state of the art graphics processors can recreate a human head in uncanny detail, from the 5 o’clock shadow on a man’s face to the way light scatters underneath the skin and makes it glow.

Now the company is the big kahuna of graphics. It still faces Advanced Micro Devices, which bought ATI Technologies, and Intel is now moving into graphics chips. But now it’s Nvidia’s turn to encourage startups in the field of visual computing. Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to use the horsepower of the latest graphics chips to create rich applications from scientific computing to visual imagery from professional artists who are recognized by the nonprofit digital art group CG Society.

About 60 of those companies will talk about their plans at Nvidia’s Emerging Companies Summit, which takes place Aug. 26-27 in San Jose, during the Nvision 08 conference Aug. 25-27 at the San Jose Convention Center. Nvision 08 is Nvidia’s first major conference, featuring everything from a professional gaming tournament to a speech by Battlestar Galactica star Tricia Helfer.

Jeff Herbst, vice president of business development at Nvidia, said his company has invested in a variety of applications companies that exploit Nvidia’s chips and its new CUDA programming environment. The companies that will talk at the conference all fit into the tracks of visual computing, gaming, lifestyle computing, and high-performance computing based on Nvidia’s CUDA programming language. Over the years, Nvidia has invested in companies that exploit graphics, such as Keyhole, the satellite imagery company that was acquired by Google, which turned the application into Google Earth. Emerging companies scheduled to participate include Acceleware, Cooliris, Elemental Technologies, Emergent Game Technologies, MotionDSP, NaturalMotion, and Right Hemisphere.

“We’ve come to realize that visual computing is a platform in its own right,” Herbst said. “Without this ecosystem, our hardware won’t get used the way it should be.”

Calisa Cole, vice president of corporate communications, says that the time has come for these twin conferences because startups are plentiful and the benefits of visual computing are all around us. Our cars are better designed, digital movies are easier to edit, baby ultrasounds are clearer than ever, and bone scan results come back quicker.

Nvidia’s chips (as well as AMD’s) are the foundation for the visual computing ecosystem, including game developers such as Epic Games, which makes games such as the upcoming “Gears of War 2” as well as engines for graphics that game startups use to get into the business. There are hardware and software companies with applications ranging from airplane design to medical research to special effects animation.

Company conferences are starting to supercede industry-wide events in the tech industry. In a way, Nvidia is taking a page from the playbook of its biggest rival, Intel, which holds a variety of “Intel Developer Forum” (Aug. 19-21 at Moscone Center West) events to encourage an ecosystem around Intel products. It’s interesting that Nvidia’s first big event comes under a shadow; Nvidia reported a lousy quarter, which included a $200 million write-off related to technical problems with how its graphics chips are affixed to notebook computers. But Nvidia hopes that this era of visual computing will begin to overshadow the era of the microprocessor. The battle between Nvidia and Intel is just starting to heat up.

Speakers at the conferences include luminaries such as Jeff Han, the pioneer of multi-touch displays who was named one of Time magazine’s 100-most-influential people last year. Conference titles include “How We Crammed a Black Hole, a Star Cluster, and Turbulent Plasma into a GPU (and Live to Tell About It).” And for entertainment, there is the pro-gaming tournament and an evening music concert and light show dubbed “Video Games Live.” An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people are expected to attend Nvision 08, while several hundred are expected at the Emerging Companies Summit.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the nation’s intelligence services, has invested an undisclosed small amount of money into video enhancement company MotionDSP and also awarded it with contracts.

MotionDSP chief executive Sean Varah wouldn’t say what the CIA wants do with the technology. However, he said the investment lends credibility to the company’s technology, which was dismissed by Google during a pitch last year when Google told Varah that Google could something similar without MotionDSP’s help. However, the company’s technology has since gotten better, Varah said. The technology improves low-resolution images by tracking pixels as they change frame by frame, making intelligent conclusions about blurred objects or areas. Take, for example, a blurry photo of a person running in a white shirt in the dark. MotionDSP can follow the pixels of white as they move in a video, determine they are part of a coherent object and then reconstruct the shirt’s shape in a higher-resolution video.

See the “before” and “after” videos we’ve embedded below.

The company is conducting several pilot tests. It hopes to sell its technology to Internet video sites and mobile carriers to improve the quality of video captured by their customers. The company has raised a total of just less than $1 million, with $500,000 of that coming last year from angels. It has $1 million in contracts, Varah said.

The company is also helping to do filtering for videos, to help video producers avoid copyright violations. The DSP product comes in a desktop application, and also as a hosted Web service.

Mariachi Band (Unenhanced)

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Mariachi Band (Enhanced by MotionDSP)

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