Can I make my videos look better by applying some sort of color correction/scheme and or a sharpening effect? I have read about others doing this in Sony Vegas and I am curious about it in kdenlive. Any help would be much appreciated. Here's one of my videos on my youtube channel. I realize it's only SD capture and will never be as good as those that capture in 720p but I thought maybe I could make my videos slightly better with sharpen and or color correction. Thanks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXSNXYLjBeM

This is a DV video?
Regarding color correction you might want to take a look at the books written by Steve Hullfish; some of them are partially available on books.google.com.

it's captured using a Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge over firewire with kino which stores it as a avi type-2 open dml filetype. kino allows to capture as avi or dv but i chose avi. i can check out what you linked, thank you. would a sharpen effect make my text look any crisper?

There are several color correction and one sharpening tool in Kdenlive, look under "effects".
The sharpness effect has been added recently, so you need a recent build of Kdenlive for that.

BTW, your video does not look unsharp to me, also the colors seem decent, especially for a synthetic scene like that?

i am using 0.7.8 from sunab or is it sanub's repo for ubuntu. my goal is to try to get the text to render out more crisply but not even sure it's possible. i rendered this at 8000k dual-pass h264/aac in a .mp4. used progressive and rescaled to 640x360 from the original footage of 720x480

I see. No fps decrease ;) (I have been using FRAPS.)

Regarding sharpening, you will just have to try it. I assume that it might only look sharper when watching it in 480p on youtube since the smaller versions are scaled again.
Ideally you would have a sharpening effect that selectively tries to sharpen text only. But I don't know whether this exists already (it would certainly be possible). So the only advice I can give ? try it ;)

But since text does not stay for too long in your vide anyway, it might not even be necessary. Simply because it disappears before the eye remarks that it isn't really sharp.

Simon

trying this again but now I have a new capture device. I am using the HD PVR which captures in 720p@59.97. I'd like to sharpen it to look it's best but I don't understand the numbers. There's an amount setting and a size setting. is there a recommended setting? i have no idea what to choose.

The sharpen tool is a port of unsharp mask from Mplayer, the parameters are the usual ones for usnsharp masking, The "size" means the size of the blur, and the ampount is how much of the blurred version gets subtracted.

I am working now on some other sharpening algorithms like cubicUSM and Warp, but I'll need a few months more to get them finished...