ScaleUp — AI Upscaling for After Effects & Premiere Pro

ScaleUp is a new AI upscaling plugin that allows you to upscale directly in After Effects and Premiere Pro. This is a tutorial for the plugin as well as a demo looking at my results comparing ScaleUp versus traditional scaling with bicubic sampling and the Detail Preserving Upscale effect when up-resing from 720 to 4K. The performance will vary based on your GPU, and the results will differ based on the plate or footage you're trying to upscale and how by how much you're trying to upscale. That said, I think the results are pretty good considering the price and ease of use.

0:00 Intro
1:03 Testing methodology
1:13 Bicubic sampling (free)
1:28 Detail Preserving Upscale (free)
1:52 ScaleUp (plugin)
2:30 Comparisons: Woman in red dress
4:14 ScaleUp trial
4:28 A more difficult shot and film grain
6:29 Sea turtle comparison
7:00 Old church comparison
7:37 Alley comparison
7:55 Text comparison
8:25 Outro

#aftereffectstutorial #4k #AI #upscale

[Widowmaker]

Damn that’s impressive. I was wondering when stuff like this would hit the market since NVidias real time up scaling hit the game market.

[petersolomon]

In 2023 there are a number of video plugins to individually or collectively enhance & upscale clips. I have been experimenting for three years with this technology & have found ReVision FX’ RexUp & Topaz Labs’ Video AI the best products currently available.

I use these products for enhancing video & scanned analogue motion film. The results rarely disappoint.

[Moggli]

the potato camera made me tear up hahaha

[dmeloTV]

Considering that you're upscaling from 720p... 1080p gotta give great results!

[Hyperdriveuk]

"By far the best.. " lol ya sure if you close your eyes and use your imagination. After the YT compression... the difference is extremely minor.

[ZynthAnimation]

Checked with my work-in-progress animation and I totally agree - ScaleUP is much better than Detail Preserving Upscale.
Nice find!

[xnox]

I am watching the video in 240p and can't tell the difference

[alsmith]

You actually really need to take a shot from a low resolution and upscale that.

[lumetriflow]

I like Detail-preserving's quality more

[jjglaser]

I could not get it to look good with 1080p 2d animation going to 4k. Edges of lines are either really blocky or too blurred when moving the sliders.

[Jubinell]

Thanks for the tutorial. I draged ScaleUp to the video in the preview window of After Effects, set size to Fit to Comp Width (it turns out to be 200%), Denoise to 0% and Sharpening to 15%, then exported using Media Encoder CC. After checking the exported mp4 file, I see that it has a gray 3x3 grid on top of the video. Furthermore, it seems to get stuck on the first few frames only (the audio advances, but the video does not). The video also keeps on turning red and blue cyclically after 2-3 seconds. Any ideas what I did wrong? Thanks!

[roknroller]

The Sample was Too High Quality to be able to Gauge Anything. Downscale and upscale is a e.g. pseudo-upscale and doesn’t show up the limitations, you need Good Quality SD like DVD’s etc

[sixtyfivewatts]

when we are looking for dcaling up, we not looking for 1080 to 4k , we looking for 640 webcam quality to maybe 1080 . sorry but this tutorial was not helpful

[thejrcitizens]

If most people, including myself, are making video for YT I'm not convinced that the cost of the software and the time it takes is beneficial to the viewers experience since YT re-processes it anyway.

[literaldeath]

Been trying to upscale with detail preserve, but it wont use my gpu. Project setting>mercury hardware accel is on

[АлександраСалмина-нм]

if i watch video in ae - everethin is works, but during render and after render parts video where i use scaleup
stay small.. can you help me?

[kabalor]

I have 2 questions.
1. Why do we need to upscale videos to 4k to upload on youtube? I have a 1600x900 video, why not just make it to 1080p & 1440p then upload?
2. How you make video like at 4:03 (which show 4 screens with different resolution)

[kooksvq]

Can u tell me how to get good quality without instant 4K and bcc on Ae ? And can u tell me what to use to get good quality? I really need it .

[aindadici]

It is not much better than using the built-in Upscale with a simple Sharp effect in After Effects. Not worth the processing time.

[princevasimalla]

Scale-up just smoothes everything even I reduce denoising to its ends it still smoothes out pixels and oh god it will take a minute to apply any changes over my gpu 😂, and I just quit upscaling a 1080P full length movie into 4K (2 hr 45Min)