The Fastest Way to Enhance & Upscale Video Footage To 4K | Comparing 3 EASY Methods

In this video, I use 3 different AI software from Topazlabs to upscale the same 10 seconds clip from 720p to 4k resolution, watch to figure out which method is best in terms of output quality and processing speed.

Download Video Enhance A.I:

Download Gigapixel:

Download Sharpen A.I:

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Videos used:

Enhance & Upscale Any Video to 4K Using Gigapixel's AI | NEW Method

How To Fix Low-Quality Footage With Sharpen AI:

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Tutorial Highlights:
Introduction(0:00)
Introduction to Video Enhance(0:54)
Experiment Starts here(1:39)
Comparing Results(8:31)
My Thoughts(10:01)
Outro(10:33)

#4k #Upscale #VideoEnhance

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Who am I?
My name is Mohamed Mehrez and I create videos about visual effects and filmmaking
techniques. Over the past few years, I've gained a community of viewers who are interested in
digital art, video effects, and using AI in their creative projects.

[MDMZ]

This is it! Since I published that Gigapixel video everybody has been asking the same question "Why not just use Video Enhance" Well here you go, a fair comparison between 3 different upscaling methods using different Topazlabs software, I'll let you be the judge :)

[breakream]

as a videographer and video editor, upscaling video to 4k, video enhance ai for me is the best. it has the least "processing" look and gives what i want for the size and quality. the other 2 add weird details+sharpening and color processing. i think gigapixel and sharpen are really good when it comes to a single photo, but for a video, especially when you tried an old footage of a person talking, it's video enhance ai. maybe it's all just depends on personal preferences.

[craigryan]

This stuff is pretty groundbreaking. I never would have believed something like this could be done and I always thought whatever resolution you filmed with was all you could ever get. I gotta believe hollywood is going to jump on this. It'd be interesting to see old shows that were shot on SD tape upgraded to at least 1080.

[warlordelos]

Video Enhance Ai: Looks faded and dull compared to the other two options but much faster.
Sharpen Ai: Most Natural & the Best of both words for processing time & sharpness. Looks perfect.
Gigapixel Ai: LONG waiting time almost 10x of Sharpen Ai with similar quality output.

Some other SW option's I've been looking at are:
Davinci Resolve 16
Premiere Pro - After Effects

[iridium]

Something to keep in mind is speed of Gigapixel will depend on compression speed of images, there should be a setting for that somewhere. Another thing is, you can turn off maximum ai quality, which will also speed it up. Difference between fastest and slowest Gigapixel can operate is something like 6-8x.

[vmafarah]

Please make sure gigapixel uses 2060 GPU. And also make sure in video enhance to make AI resource demand to full i.e. 500 in preference, at default it's values are 200%.Make sure everything is running on GPU, AI is GPU favourite parallel computing. Love from Kerala India❤️

[shree]

Thanks. I was almost gonna wait for god knows how many hours to upscale that Linkin Park video. XD

[martinsawicki]

Good tutorial. One note though. Don't use MP4 output with VEAI yet (they are working on it). It creates artifacts. For better quality use PNG or TIFF sequence output. Then add them to Media Encoder or whichever software you prefer and then use that to encode the video. You will see better results. Trust me.

[OIdiesCentral]

Many people complain about the process time but they have to understand, that 1.the soiftware has to add pixels of a picture in video frame, row by row and it's not a quick process when you have a several minute long vid, with 60 frame per sec with who knows how many pixels in each.2, cpu power and memory or the lack of both can also add to the process time.

[jbcablecom]

Thank you very much for this impressive work of comparison! Incredibly well explained with a very clear and precise editing.

[petersolomon]

MDMZ, since you posted this useful tutorial Topaz Labs’ Video AI (for both platforms) does run faster, and it has a range of features that include upscaling, de-noising, sharpening, slow motion, stabilisation and interpolating.

[samanmasiha]

THE BEST VIDEO FOR LEARNING GIGAPIXEL AI

[david_allen]

It was great to find your video and see this comparison. I had heard of Video Enhance A.I. and ended up getting all three of their main products (for different uses -- I'm a photographer as well). I find the Video Enhance A.I. quality to vary greatly by the codec used to upscale. Although Artemis seems faster, and on a frame by frame analysis looks better, it adds artefacts that make some videos look like plastic, where Gaia doesn't seem to do that so much, but isn't as sharp. I have not found any low quality video (e.g. SD video) that any of the codecs can upscale to decent quality HD or 4K (no shocker there!). But the most troubling upscaling is of interlaced DVD videos--there are only a couple deinterlace codecs (I think Dione TV and Robust?) and they have limited effectiveness, but do a credible job--not excellent, but ok.

I noticed 2 issues with VE A.I.:

1) The MP4s it makes for upscaled videos have extremely high bit rates (impractically high), and I usually have to compress to make them manageable (= playable over my gigabit home network without significant rebuffering). I usually reencode them to H.265 to get a video a fraction of the size of the MP4 VE produces with no loss in quality. Often the reencoded video is an order of magnitude smaller (GB -> MB).

2) Though there is no indication of it in the interface, VE A.I. downsamples 5.1 mc & stereo audio to stereo 96kbps regardless of the original audio bit rate. This forces me to separate the video/audio streams and use VE to upscale the video, then rejoin the video and audio streams. This is impractical for the 100s of DVD videos I would upscale.

Thanks for doing this comparison--I had planned to do something similar to determine best approach for a long list of videos I want to upscale (mostly DVD), but this has saved me much time. Great work!

One enhancement I'd suggest: for any future comparisons, it's useful to use videos with different content, like faces or fast moving vehicles or sports events or dark scenes with lots of shadows. I suspect that some codecs will perform better on some video types, with no overall 'best' codec. That would make it easier to pick a codec based on the type of video content. But that's a lot of work. Wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to take on that much. Seems like Topaz Labs ought to do it as a marketing tactic to sell their products!

[Primorskiy]

Excellent video bravo MDMZ!
1 - Gigapixel AI best quality! But for a long time
2 - Sharpen AI is very good! Time is acceptable
3 - Video Enhance AI is better than the source, but average quality, a lot of soap. It looks like the MP4 codec is not configured correctly in the program itself! We must wait for fixes in the program version update. For now, it's better to save as PNG or TIFF sequence output and then merge it into video in a good program!
And the cookies are all good, all three! )))

[sahilbakshi]

I always thought that quality can only be downgraded, but technology is changing things out of the box.

[LtSlapnutz]

This comparison was exactly what I was after. Thank you and great work!
How do these compare with much faster motion in video with high motion blur? Since the clip was slo-mo anyway it was hard to tell if Gigapixel might handle motion blurred areas 'too sharply' or such.

[pauls]

All 3 appear to have pros and cons. I Noticed in the video that all 3 add noticeable artifacts too. I guess to me 720P still isn't bad. I have seen higher res streaming video look worse.
What I can say though is I really love what AI upscaling does to even lower res video, as well as what they are doing to old video games.

[jadhsyjhduyhjy]

So 10 sec video takes 9hrs to encode in Gigapixel, 17mins in Video Enhance and 40mins in Sharpen AI. How much time would take to upscale my video of 49mins and 30secs?

[temiongcecilio]

PROCESSING SPEED is a deciding factor for me, specially when the results are great.

[poopfreak]

Very important to always export as a png or tga instead of a video file! That way you can can resume from desired frame if pc crashes or anything goes wrong!