Topaz Vido AI for old SD footage

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Bob,

I am a great fan of Topaz Video A.I. and have been with it from the early days. Although yet to install it on my Davinci Studio as a plug-in.

Just over a year ago I had a 22-year-old PAL 4:3 master (Betacam SP) of a 24-minute discussion program with the now late President Carter. I upscaled to HD, without the side-black-bars and did a touch regrade. And it looked great.

I hear you on the perpetual licence v subscription. However, A.I. utility tools (and generative) is improving at a speed, where you are likely to have to update yearly anyway. In the case of Topaz Video, they are updating monthly, sometimes twice monthly. List here:
https://community.topazlabs.com/c/video-ai/video-ai-releases/69

However, there are other players out there, and Davinci is catching up on A.I. fast. If you look for “Superscale” inside Davinci Studio that might do the job for you.

RevisionFX is another one of my favourite packages which I am still learning and they have a perpetual licence for Resolve:
https://revisionfx.com/products/rezup/resolve/#features

If you have limited amount of work, and you can do it within one month, you should also look at BorisFX Continuum on a one month subscription:
https://borisfx.com/products/continuum/?collection=continuum&product=continuum&host=adobe&purchase-options=annual-subscription

Earlier this year Creative Cow and Aiarty ran a sweepstake, and their software comes with aperpetual for life purchase with upgrades.
https://www.aiarty.com/ai-video-enhancer/technology.htm?ttref=2507-aiverele-media-ccow-evt-dhm

The future is as we saw with Avid announcement at IBC where they have made agreements with some 600 A.I. companies to plug straight inside their tools, like the Media Composer. This will allow their users to select what A.I. tools they will use, and what not.
Reason for this is that what is best in class today, may be leapfrogged tomorrow by a competitor.

In other words, A.I. functionality and quality in Broadcast and Film Production is fluent, and will keep changing. That is before one realises, that you may use 4 -5, or more different A.I. tools to make up one piece of video – from voice cloning for a script to voice-over, background, foreground, key character in video with some vfx and sfx to complete the picture.

I recently with one client, where we had some low-quality video, coined the phrase “Let me A.I. Botox the speaker and see how far we can go before the face won’t move…”
We laughed, but that is the way we in some situations will be going.

If you want, I’ll be happy to throw one of your SD clips, and a HD clip through Topaz for you to look at. Alternatively, I am sure that there is a free trial too.

Please note that of all the name dropping above, this is only a fraction of companies that has software/apps that can enhance your video and audio.

Hope this helps?

Atb
Mads

community.topazlabs.com

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[Michael Gissing]

Ditto for Topaz AI. I’ve had some excellent results with old footage, upscaling and motion processing like ultra slo mo, blur reduction, frame rate conversion etc. Topaz includes OFX plugins for Resolve although I usually drive it standalone.

Superscale in Resolve is handy for punching in on footage but Topaz does a much better job in removing compression artifacts and upscaling.

[Ben Balser]

Nothing is better than Topaz, though some others are catching up quickly with AI tools now.

[Bob Cole]

Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply! I appreciate that this is a very fast-moving train, and so I am going to assemble all the video that I want to upscale from SD, and then ask your opinion again.