Adobe has their pretty far reaching Sensei program for example and Nvidia are making advances all the time, building upscaling into games with DLSS and their Shield media player. It is a rapidly emerging field in many industries, not least post production. and it was a quick learning curve trying to get up to speed on the topic and not a little scary to see how far reaching it is and how quickly it is entering every sphere of life (with Facebook being a well known example).

Enhanced upscaling or superscaling is now in Davinci Resolve, Adobe Camera Raw, Topaz Video Enhance AI & various online sites like Pixop, as well as a whole world of open source options (if you’re really clever and have a lot of time on your hands!) has come into this race with the claim of genuinely clawing back missing resolution. Hollywood has faked the “zoom in and enhance” effect for years, which became a meme for those in the know.īut in the last few years, A.I. There are open source solutions like using FFMPEG which have some high quality filters built in.

There is the After Effects “Detail-preserving Upscale” effect for example and there are hardware solutions like Grass Valley’s Alchemist (albeit primarily for frame rate conversion). There have been algorithms around for a long time for upscaling that get a bit more quality out of a shot than a simple zoom. But when it comes to delivering your project, what are the options? The question is – can it be done at a higher quality than simply zooming in?Īll the NLEs default to using a simple zoom when scaling and for good reason – it is not processor intensive and so doesn’t get in the way of your editing.

Maybe you’re working at HD and have heard that there are advantages in uploading 4K to YouTube and want to uprez the whole thing. Maybe you have some archive footage of a lower resolution or maybe one camera was set to the wrong resolution one day. The problem is that it is common to have a mix of clip resolutions in a project, especially when working at 4K. If you have an eye for quality, you will not be happy to include lower resolution clips in your edit. It might fail QC on a broadcast show or it might draw the ire of your client (even if they were the one who provided it!). The issue is that simply scaling the clip looks soft. Drop in a 720p clip into your HD 1080p timeline and scale it up to fill the screen and move on.

Upscaling or “uprezzing” is something most editors do every day without thinking much about it.

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