Currently, to get the best image quality from low res’ DV footage, firstly run a de-interlace pass using Video Enhance’s Dionne model. Re-import the rendered file & choose Proteus model. Adjust settings on this model - including up-scaling - & render. To make matters more complicated I have discovered the de-interlace model that processes video at 50fps is the best. This means if your footage is shot at 25fps you need to re-import it & run a time remapping pass at 25fps before finishing with proteus de-noise, de-block & sharpen. PS: the added texture spoken of in the above video is probably due to the noise slider on when rendering. All of this is to say post processing of video, or film to video is a trial & error process. And if you are serious about this you will compliment your post production with other plugins, such as those made by REVision FX & Boris FX.
Seeing the dogs play in the opening scene, I imagined those dogs were very loved and missed since that was the chosen footage to upscale! Happy to know the dogs are well and still doing good in the world.
The Good thing about Topaz is that they keep improving. There is an update like every few days it seems. The Topaz today is miles better that the one I used a Year ago. The good thing about AI is the more time and training you do the better it gets. So don't be surprise if you redo this test a year for now you might get better results
I agree. I have VHS footage from when I was in the Navy in the late 80's early 90's. This didn't really help me decide if this is going to be good for me or not restoring these old videos. The videos he used weren't "damaged" enough.
@@woodandwheelz agreed. The title says VHS but in reality he recorded Digital8 480i quality. I'm looking for an upscaling solution and may be posting my results to my channel by the end of the week. Using REAL VHS footage from the 1980s/1990s.
I feel taking 480 and trying to upscale it all the way up to 4k is a bit of an overshoot and leaves too much up the AI resulting in a pasty oil paint effect. I would like to see how 480 upscaled to 720 or 1080 performs with the built in upscaling that most of our displays have.
youre not wrong in your observation. From my experience, getting 480 to 1080 is about the max i'd reasonably go. There is also the native upscaling with dvd and vcd players but back when they were popular most of us still had CRT sets. Thanks for taking time out of your day to comment!
Well then just take the new 1080p and put that back into the AI and then get 2k then put the 2k video back into the AI and get 4K I wonder how that would work
I've noticed this too, especially with animation (been reworking old Disney and Looney Tunes that were never remastered in HD). Going from a DVD copy to 4K makes it look really weird, but Topaz does amazing with taking 480p to 1080p, especially when you have it save the frames as 16bit TIFF (but boy does that take a lot of space for a feature length film!).
I got Topaz as well and I noticed the backgrounds are usually improved especially the clothes people are wearing. I feel if the VHS isn't wore and torn down a bit, you can enhance the footage fairly decently. However, if it's worn a bit or a lot, the restoration is very minimal. Good job with the trialing.
yeah. the clothes are greatly improved in almost every model from my experience. I find the backgrounds are improved through the deblocking process. Glad our experiences line up, and thanks for taking the time to comment!
@@retro-af What is deblocking? Is this a huge process in learning curve? Can I apply it to my quicktime, my FCP 7 Studio? What software you recommend? Which is the best? Tim S.
Before even starting to try to enhance the video, you wanna get it digitised properly. Simply plugging your VCR into your PC via an A/D converter won't give you the best starting point. The motors in those things turn the tape via rubber bands and pulleys. The heads were garbage to begin with, and have only gotten worse. If you get it done professonally, they will be recording from a player with direct drive that is finely controlled, and the machine wil have the best available playback head
For interlaced PAL footage the quality of AI upscaling is heavily depending on the first step: deinterlacing. To my experience Deinterlacing with QTGMC (an AviSynth filter, pretty easily useable in the free software StaxRip) is superior to Dione. The next step would be Upscaling, for which Gaia HQ preserves more details.
To be honest, you kinda lost me 5 minutes in. I thought the 720p downsampled and upscaled result looked amazing but then you said it's not impressive and overlayed the more blurry 720p sample, at the end I didn't really know which side was supposedly showing what result. You need to add some labels to your shots :D
This is a well put together video and I appreciate your sensibilities when it comes to “hallucinated” detail…(I don’t record video in place of a mushroom habit). I’d be interested to see how it functions on tape camcorders with better optics-my sense is that a lot of the original footage is struggling with some combination of diffraction from being stopped down too hard, glare, and lost contrast from the sunlight-and the lens was just a little softer than the sensor resolution to begin with.
Haha, nice content. The end is ilarious. At the office, we have old flat disk (i’m french, so for me its "disquette"). During children day, one say "hey, your 3D printed save button is really cool" LMAO xD
It's alright, man. I assure you, your channel is going to get big. The quality of production and passionate approach are the qualities that define a good youtuber, after all. Love your content :)
Oh this is awesome! Also love the clip of your daughter with the tape lol! OMG kids won't know of those great days, of Saturday morning and after school cartoon shows. Keep the memories alive!
Awe man. Sucks that government killed off saturday morning cartoons due to advertising to children. Those were the days for sure! Thanks for the dose of nostalgia and the comment!
@@retro-af Really?? Is that why they cancelled the cartoons? Oh man! I used to wake up on Saturday's and watch Iron Man, Captain Planet, Biker Mice from Mars, Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles after school, those were great days! I'm amazed the gov't cancelled them due to advertising, I'm Canadian and I guess now that I think about it, all the shows I watched were on Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC at the time, I don't think we ever had this in Canada. Oh boy this makes me think! No problem! I miss those days, simpler times, before smartphones, before cyber bullying and all that jazz, it's a different time now. Really wish we could go back in a ways. You take it easy! Just subscribed.
Seems like a lot of work and time upscaling and sharpening old 1980s VHS tapes. I have about 100 hours of VHS recordings from broadcast TV of Brooke Shields interviews on talk shows. I already had digitized them to 352 x 240 pixels which was quicker than full screen, and they look small sized. Without spending hundred of hours tweaking and using my computer solely to capture and improve the VHS ....what is the best FREE a.i. app to download....or at least reasonably cheap program? I live in San Francisco If there is a Brooke fan who has the time and application to devote time to upscale the dozens of hours of VHS recordings which are dated correctly then we could come up with better historical video than what I see on you tube of her career.
Great video - it would've been nice if all clips were marked with how they were shot, so that's my recommendation for future comparison-vids. Great job!
I marked most how they were shot except the intro, which was shot in 4k and video8 in parallel. In post, they were swapped during the flash animation to better convey my expectations. I think I could have done better conveying the 720p downgraded from 4k at the end though. Thanks for the recommendation!
Been testing topaz on and off since it came out. It still cant do what avi syth does, i restored over 300hours of footage, and even deinterlacing is better done using QTGMC. Would love for something ai to magically improve old 8mm, hi8, dv, vhs footage...
I bought Topaz to try and bump up old VHS, VHS-c, and Hi-8 videos to at least 1080p. After a couple of months now I only use it to improve videos I shot using a phone. It's really good at it.
@@JediMindfulness it's good software I guess. I've stopped using it because let's face it, AI is getting more powerful all the time and pretty soon you will be able to drop media into ChatGPT and Bard plus others and get better results. Just my opinion.
@@JediMindfulness nothing really other than Resolve. Trying to clean up old family movies where the scenes completely change every 5 seconds is horrible. I've decided to wait until ChatGPT can do it all for me one day.
I have been using video enhance ai professionally for years. No need for real 4k current DSLR quality on old VHS footage. The upscaling and improvement of the footage is already quite amazing. Technique is getting better and better.
How to improve so-called VHS footage when you're using an 8mm camcorder? Should we believe what you state in this video when you 're not sure about the difference between VHS and 8mm?
Thanks for the insightful video. This would help set some level of expectation with a lot of folks expecting to get a super clear video conversion if they buy the fancy AI software. I also been playing with the Topaz Lab software for the last 5 years. Not perfect conversion yet. Hopefully one day.
I deinterlace with QTGMC and then AI upscale with the Gaia preset. I choose high quality if it's a ripped dvd, but if it's blurry like above I would pick Mid Quality Gaia if the option is still there.
It's not about VHS or not, it's about the camera used. There are extremely old VHS movies that are very clear to watch, but I'm talking about real movies shot with professional cameras. While there are of course some technical limitations, VHS weren't as bad as some people would like to depict them.
I recently gave Enhance AI a try and was pleasantly surprised by the results. It really is too bad that it takes so long to process the video, since I was planning on using it to deinterlace and upscale home video transfers, but that just isn’t feasible right now. I also learned that it didn’t keep the audio when using frame rate doubling deinterlacing, meaning I’d have have to separately mux the audio back on after being processed by Enhance which is yet another step I’d have to remember to do. How were your render times? Just subscribed btw. This video reminded me of if Project Farm did software reviews.
I just made an uncompressed (huge) avi from virtualdub and saved the video as a .wav before using huffyuv compression to it. Its a shame mac cant handle huffyuv codec, so i just used the uncompressed footage for this video. Render times on my 2019 macbook pro (i7 with ati 3d card) were VERY long. About 1 hour per minute of footage. Its one of the reasons this video took so long to make! (and with each ai model as well) Thanks for taking the time out of your day to provide feedback, and great question! P.S. everyone keeps comparing me to project farm! its so hilarious.
What I get from this is that we're just not quite there yet. Especially in regards to where this tech would be the most useful, old VHS transfers. But, hey, as long as it gets there before Skynet becomes a reality, that'd be nice.
The key thing is that it is inventing detail. It may be correct at times but it may be incorrect as well. So it’s a good thing as long as one keeps in mind the limitations.
Thanks for this review. You start the video handling Video8/Digital8 tapes (at best 480i), but obviously those SD grades were not a great comparison against 4K. We've a few companies now offering enhancement upgrades to older media, but I think they are likely overselling what can be done with the AI. I've done old transfers through different capture methods, but old/bad VHS tapes seem to require the most babying; some of these have color distortion drop outs also, but this is another matter.
Yeah, for shoddy analog captures with rainbowing and distortion you would probably be better off with avisynth. There is only so much that can be done and the learning curve is steep. thanks for taking time out of your day to comment!
I don't anyone is suggesting that converting old VHS to 4k is going to deliver native 4k results as if recorded on a modern camera. Its just a way to upscale and improve detail to enhance the viewing experience.
I used Topaz to try to improve mini-DV footage. Sure I got a 16:9 format, but the quality was poor, too many artefacts. I just wish we had CIA equipment, film Enemy of the State, when the sharpened TV video from across an ice rink, from two pixels they managed to recover a face! AI has yet to impress me.
Good day, pal. I don't know how many latinos follow your Chanel, but I am one of those. I find really interesting this AI. May I suggest you to enhance some WWI and Vietnam war footage?
Wow, amazing! Thank you for this video. I love the end of the video. It reminded me when I asked my students what is a floppy disk. They made so funny faces when I explained it to them. 😄
that topaz software is interesting, but im still missing that "wow" effect that ai powered software tends to give me, i played around with it myself and all i got out of it (comparable to what was shown in the video) more or less looks like the same video enhancement gizmos you find in all the editing software from the past two decades
There's a significant difference in resolution between real VHS 240 horisontal *625 lines vertical (PAL) / 525 lines (NTSC) and the Hi8 400 lines horisontal that was used but referred to as "VHS" in the footage. It would have been really intresting with footage from an VHS or VHSC-camera as such footage often looks poor when viewed in a large TV or video projector screen. Also, I can't recall any info about how long time the rendering process took in relation to what computer was used. These AI-programs tend to choke normal laptops, taking days to render a videotape.
There's no substitute for RAW data! AI may certainly improve the look of upscaled video, but ultimately it's creating false detail and won't ever match the original 4K footage.
The opening and the thumbnail promised a lot but you did not show how to convert the video on the left of the thumbnail / opening seconds into the 4K one on the right. If you really did pull it off, please let us know the exact AI model and each setting in Topaz, as well as the exact version of Topaz Video AI you used.
I'd recommend to just learn how to use free video software like "handbrake" or avisynth with conventional, free filters(there's lots of suggestions online on which to use) instead, you'll get a similar result, without anything going wonky, and it will be much faster to process. Generally a mix of deinterlace, denoising, sharpening, and possibly some colour/brightness adjustment gets you much of the way there. With handbrake at least, these are builtin, and you don't need to go too deeply into it - just fiddle around with each a bit(especially whether to choose light/medium/strong for each enhancement) and see what looks best for your tape, on a short section of video first.
I have some VHS that you can work with that is actually Old video. VHS tapes from when I was in the Navy that have been sitting around since the late 80's early 90's. I already digitized them using the best VHS player I could find. I just want to "fix" them to share with fellow Shipmates.
"VHS" doesn't mean *any* video tape, despite this usage becoming increasingly common. VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, Video8, Hi8 etc are all their own different analog formats, plus Digital8, MiniDV & others as digital formats. There were also tapes that were used to record digital full HD or similar resolutions (such as HDV). What was likely recorded on the *Digital 8* camera is in the name - digital, just recorded on tape. This can be copied digitally to your computer without any loss, though it can be a pain to get firewire working without a desktop or an old laptop with firewire builtin (like an old Macbook, or many higher end PC laptops) Ironically digital tape camcorders are often one of the best ways to convert analog tapes to digital, *some* Digital8 cameras can play back Video8/8mm and Hi8 analog tapes, and internally convert them to digital. Likewise some Digital8 & MiniDV cameras have an AV input, then converts to digital inside the camera. The cameras I've tried all do so at high quality. Due to the method the recording here was captured, via analog, using what looks to a cheap "easycap" or similar USB capture device, the image has been degraded. Different capture devices can make a significant difference to the image quality, along with the analog output having to be converted from digital initially. Inevitably any kind of enhancement is going to work better when the initial video quality is higher.
@@retro-af I figure if a video gets slightly above average views & interaction, the algorithm assumes more people would also want to watch it. Keep putting out good content so you can quit your day job! Lol
From everything I’ve seen the better the source material the easier the upscale quality. Much easier to go from 1080 to 4k over VHS to DVD. Also old VHS footage tends to upscale terribly, hover you can get some good results in a lot of results if the source is clean enough
Does Topaz allow for a comparitive database? Can you take pictures of someone that is sharp, and use it as a baseline for converting a blurry image back to sharp?
This just goest to show that they trained the model is exactly the same way: by downgrading original 4K footage as it can recover that blurry artificial 720p back easily. What Topaz showed be really doing is running the 4K original at least through analog circuitry of a DV camcorder and capturing it back as interlaced mpeg file. Oh ai deinterlacer should ALWAYS be doubling the framerate: 50i to 50p, 60i to 60p
I'm more interested on using this technology with videogame emulators. Finding a shader combination that makes some SNES games look good on 4K TV is a real pain in the a**. But if IA can do this to a complex 720p video, I think it can do wonders with videogame frames that are much simpler.
Does using Topaz (or another AI based upscaler) require some pre-edit? Like, applying colour correction before upscaling it or something of that kind. I'm new to this kind of things, please help 🙏
I remember, someone contacted Topaz because of color science questions and they did admit, that Video AI "doesn't really care" about colors. At the time we been at version 2.x. Now they have 3.x already. But anyways, actually the program doesn't support color profiles (till 2.0 for sure), so you can loose details on the colors, but at least you cannot expect any positive changes.
It is not enhancing, it is merely cycles of selecting the closest match out of many small pictures with similar graphics. In the result the "enhanced" picture may look "better", but totally different from the original one.
You should really check out Christopher Hazard’s channel, he’s done some insane work upscaling old concert videos from the 70s-90’s, primarily old Grateful Dead shows.
however good and to the point this video is, all I could think of is how much this guy sounds like nic cage playing a telemarketing salesman with full conviction.
VHS has 320×240 pixels max. going to 4k is nonsense no additional gain compared to 2k and 1080p, no matter how good a AI Enhacer is, the source does not contain enough information.
I’m a camera nerd and phone nerd. I would shoot on older phones to get that retro quality. The same if someone would shoot on film and use vintage film lenses and tapes, but in the phone world? I like my iPhone but I like the look of the images on my earlier phones. The Samsung S7+, Zte Axon 7, etc
I think in order to get best possible results those companies would literally have to get any old camcorder model out there and train the ai on each individual camcorder, training by using old analog signal vs a signal from a modern 4k camcorder (just like 3:28).
I’ve had good results using Proteus to restore footage which was streamed in poor quality with many blocky artefacts. Not had quite so much success yet using it to restore old VHS footage without the result looking terribly artificial.
The way you’re so passive aggressive about the upscaled 720p downscaled 4k footage is hilarious😂. While it is an improvement over the downscaled footage, it truly doesn’t compare to the actual 4k video. Thanks for being honest about it, I think I’ll wait a bit longer for the AI to be improved
Lol, I came here just for the tutorial, and that was very well made. But the funny scene at the end with your daughter was funny 4X .. she was literally accepting the possibility of a VHS tape going into a laptop :D
It could work for some things, like creating splines for lines, which could then be redrawn as smooth(not jagged)/sharp lines, which is likewise why some people have made good free software to enhance animated movies. Similarly it works ok for other predictable things, like buttons as shown here. But for complex or unpredictable things, yeah it's poor. And like you said, if something's not visible at all in the image, or impossible to distinguish, it's not coming back.
Currently, to get the best image quality from low res’ DV footage, firstly run a de-interlace pass using Video Enhance’s Dionne model. Re-import the rendered file & choose Proteus model. Adjust settings on this model - including up-scaling - & render. To make matters more complicated I have discovered the de-interlace model that processes video at 50fps is the best. This means if your footage is shot at 25fps you need to re-import it & run a time remapping pass at 25fps before finishing with proteus de-noise, de-block & sharpen. PS: the added texture spoken of in the above video is probably due to the noise slider on when rendering. All of this is to say post processing of video, or film to video is a trial & error process. And if you are serious about this you will compliment your post production with other plugins, such as those made by REVision FX & Boris FX.
Thanks for posting your experience with this product! It makes a ton of sense given my workings with it as well
@@retro-af hello need your help for clearing some footage how can I connect you with its urgent pls reply
T
I downloaded their trial, it was absolute garbage. If I need to spend $500 to see what it does, not going to happen.
pixbim video upscale ai could be a cheaper alternative as this video enhance ai is very expensive.
Seeing the dogs play in the opening scene, I imagined those dogs were very loved and missed since that was the chosen footage to upscale! Happy to know the dogs are well and still doing good in the world.
They are still alive and spoiled. Dont you worry👍👍👍
I was thinking the exact same thing!
@@retro-af glad to hear 😊
@@retro-af amazing news
Ye
Man, I would love to see this technology applied to more historical footage.
Agreed
???
Them chimney videos from Germany gonna hit different.
Big foot footage
@@franko8572 Them footage of dead Nazis being stacked by my grandpa gonna hit different.
I think it's important to note that the upscaling will probably look better in motion than the pictures show.
I didn't expect to see you here theft king
@@XGAnimz why not?
@@SomeUsernameSomeoneElseTookIt He doesn’t know Lmao
don't you have a fan game creator to be dissing/lying about somewhere else
theftking, what have you to say in response?
I can finally upscale my childhood memories to 4k , and upload them to Instagram with a vintage 90s filter!
OG 90's: ❌
IG 90's: ✅
The Good thing about Topaz is that they keep improving. There is an update like every few days it seems. The Topaz today is miles better that the one I used a Year ago. The good thing about AI is the more time and training you do the better it gets. So don't be surprise if you redo this test a year for now you might get better results
ive noticed a doubling of AI capabilities every year as well. Dalle and openAI are examples of that.
DVDFab so much cheaper and theyre probably using Topaz's code
Old video footage on VHS or 8mm with degradation would have been a superior test.
I agree. I have VHS footage from when I was in the Navy in the late 80's early 90's. This didn't really help me decide if this is going to be good for me or not restoring these old videos. The videos he used weren't "damaged" enough.
@@woodandwheelz agreed. The title says VHS but in reality he recorded Digital8 480i quality.
I'm looking for an upscaling solution and may be posting my results to my channel by the end of the week. Using REAL VHS footage from the 1980s/1990s.
I got some home videos from 90-92 and I don’t think this ai stuff is enough to fix it, it’s so damaged
if there's anything that makes me feel old, it's kids not knowing what VHS is.
I'm only 26
I feel taking 480 and trying to upscale it all the way up to 4k is a bit of an overshoot and leaves too much up the AI resulting in a pasty oil paint effect. I would like to see how 480 upscaled to 720 or 1080 performs with the built in upscaling that most of our displays have.
youre not wrong in your observation. From my experience, getting 480 to 1080 is about the max i'd reasonably go.
There is also the native upscaling with dvd and vcd players but back when they were popular most of us still had CRT sets.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to comment!
Getting a 576p PAL video, then deinterlacing with QTGMC and then upscaling to 1080p is almost passable as HD.
Well then just take the new 1080p and put that back into the AI and then get 2k then put the 2k video back into the AI and get 4K I wonder how that would work
@@legoenginemechanic101 Doesn't help. Creates more artifacts.
I've noticed this too, especially with animation (been reworking old Disney and Looney Tunes that were never remastered in HD). Going from a DVD copy to 4K makes it look really weird, but Topaz does amazing with taking 480p to 1080p, especially when you have it save the frames as 16bit TIFF (but boy does that take a lot of space for a feature length film!).
I got Topaz as well and I noticed the backgrounds are usually improved especially the clothes people are wearing. I feel if the VHS isn't wore and torn down a bit, you can enhance the footage fairly decently. However, if it's worn a bit or a lot, the restoration is very minimal. Good job with the trialing.
yeah. the clothes are greatly improved in almost every model from my experience.
I find the backgrounds are improved through the deblocking process.
Glad our experiences line up, and thanks for taking the time to comment!
@@retro-af What is deblocking? Is this a huge process in learning curve? Can I apply it to my quicktime, my FCP 7 Studio? What software you recommend? Which is the best? Tim S.
Before even starting to try to enhance the video, you wanna get it digitised properly. Simply plugging your VCR into your PC via an A/D converter won't give you the best starting point. The motors in those things turn the tape via rubber bands and pulleys. The heads were garbage to begin with, and have only gotten worse. If you get it done professonally, they will be recording from a player with direct drive that is finely controlled, and the machine wil have the best available playback head
Is it worth it? Does it need good video card? Like RTX. Just wanna turn 240p to 1080p
For interlaced PAL footage the quality of AI upscaling is heavily depending on the first step: deinterlacing. To my experience Deinterlacing with QTGMC (an AviSynth filter, pretty easily useable in the free software StaxRip) is superior to Dione. The next step would be Upscaling, for which Gaia HQ preserves more details.
This is valuable to know, thank you.
To be honest, you kinda lost me 5 minutes in. I thought the 720p downsampled and upscaled result looked amazing but then you said it's not impressive and overlayed the more blurry 720p sample, at the end I didn't really know which side was supposedly showing what result.
You need to add some labels to your shots :D
I once took a photo of my dog that looked almost exactly like the thumbnail. You were a good boy, Jupi, rest in peace
All them 80s robbery vids will soon know the suspects 🤣
This is a well put together video and I appreciate your sensibilities when it comes to “hallucinated” detail…(I don’t record video in place of a mushroom habit). I’d be interested to see how it functions on tape camcorders with better optics-my sense is that a lot of the original footage is struggling with some combination of diffraction from being stopped down too hard, glare, and lost contrast from the sunlight-and the lens was just a little softer than the sensor resolution to begin with.
Aaaaaaaaaa
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Haha, nice content.
The end is ilarious.
At the office, we have old flat disk (i’m french, so for me its "disquette").
During children day, one say "hey, your 3D printed save button is really cool"
LMAO xD
Ahahahaha. Thats awesome!
We called them diskettes here as well.
Funny how floppy disks are now 3d printed save buttons 🤣🤣🤣
It's alright, man. I assure you, your channel is going to get big. The quality of production and passionate approach are the qualities that define a good youtuber, after all. Love your content :)
Still learning how to up my production quality more. Thanks again for the feedback!
Oh this is awesome! Also love the clip of your daughter with the tape lol! OMG kids won't know of those great days, of Saturday morning and after school cartoon shows.
Keep the memories alive!
Awe man. Sucks that government killed off saturday morning cartoons due to advertising to children.
Those were the days for sure!
Thanks for the dose of nostalgia and the comment!
@@retro-af Really?? Is that why they cancelled the cartoons? Oh man! I used to wake up on Saturday's and watch Iron Man, Captain Planet, Biker Mice from Mars, Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles after school, those were great days!
I'm amazed the gov't cancelled them due to advertising, I'm Canadian and I guess now that I think about it, all the shows I watched were on Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC at the time, I don't think we ever had this in Canada. Oh boy this makes me think!
No problem! I miss those days, simpler times, before smartphones, before cyber bullying and all that jazz, it's a different time now. Really wish we could go back in a ways.
You take it easy! Just subscribed.
@@KyleRuggles welcome to gen-z (im totally not part of it trust me bro), where society is cruel and doesn't know what grass is
Seems like a lot of work and time upscaling and sharpening old 1980s VHS tapes. I have about 100 hours of VHS recordings from broadcast TV of Brooke Shields interviews on talk shows. I already had digitized them to 352 x 240 pixels which was quicker than full screen, and they look small sized.
Without spending hundred of hours tweaking and using my computer solely to capture and improve the VHS ....what is the best FREE a.i. app to download....or at least reasonably cheap program?
I live in San Francisco
If there is a Brooke fan who has the time and application to devote time to upscale the dozens of hours of VHS recordings which are dated correctly then we could come up with better historical video than what I see on you tube of her career.
Great video - it would've been nice if all clips were marked with how they were shot, so that's my recommendation for future comparison-vids. Great job!
I marked most how they were shot except the intro, which was shot in 4k and video8 in parallel. In post, they were swapped during the flash animation to better convey my expectations.
I think I could have done better conveying the 720p downgraded from 4k at the end though.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Been testing topaz on and off since it came out. It still cant do what avi syth does, i restored over 300hours of footage, and even deinterlacing is better done using QTGMC. Would love for something ai to magically improve old 8mm, hi8, dv, vhs footage...
I bought Topaz to try and bump up old VHS, VHS-c, and Hi-8 videos to at least 1080p. After a couple of months now I only use it to improve videos I shot using a phone. It's really good at it.
That is my experience as well. It works nicely with hd shot cell phone videos.
is Topaz still a good software? I read reports that they no longer are legit... I want to get it though.
@@JediMindfulness it's good software I guess. I've stopped using it because let's face it, AI is getting more powerful all the time and pretty soon you will be able to drop media into ChatGPT and Bard plus others and get better results. Just my opinion.
@@rklein what are you using In the meantime?
@@JediMindfulness nothing really other than Resolve. Trying to clean up old family movies where the scenes completely change every 5 seconds is horrible. I've decided to wait until ChatGPT can do it all for me one day.
You almost had me with the first 10 seconds ngl.
I have been using video enhance ai professionally for years. No need for real 4k current DSLR quality on old VHS footage. The upscaling and improvement of the footage is already quite amazing. Technique is getting better and better.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to comment!
Cool! how to get them VHS better? i managed to get VHS rip (480p) up to a feeling of max 650p with three steps.
Any tips for that final touch? :)
How to improve so-called VHS footage when you're using an 8mm camcorder? Should we believe what you state in this video when you 're not sure about the difference between VHS and 8mm?
Thanks for the insightful video. This would help set some level of expectation with a lot of folks expecting to get a super clear video conversion if they buy the fancy AI software. I also been playing with the Topaz Lab software for the last 5 years. Not perfect conversion yet. Hopefully one day.
I still have the exact same D8 camera. So much fun in the early 2000s.
When the girl said to put it in the tv she ain't wrong about that one. Some did have built in VHS players. I miss mine.
I do remember the 2-in-1 tvs back in the day. Good times!
Is it me or is he talking like in a Kids Toys Ad from the early 90s :D
(thx for the Video!)
Trying to keep it retro!
Thanks for your comment!
I deinterlace with QTGMC and then AI upscale with the Gaia preset. I choose high quality if it's a ripped dvd, but if it's blurry like above I would pick Mid Quality Gaia if the option is still there.
I tried all the gaia's including the 3dfx one and i wasnt all that impressed. Proteus was hit or miss depending on the sliders.
It's sad that kids nowadays have no idea what a VHS even is.
It's not about VHS or not, it's about the camera used.
There are extremely old VHS movies that are very clear to watch, but I'm talking about real movies shot with professional cameras.
While there are of course some technical limitations, VHS weren't as bad as some people would like to depict them.
yup
I recently gave Enhance AI a try and was pleasantly surprised by the results. It really is too bad that it takes so long to process the video, since I was planning on using it to deinterlace and upscale home video transfers, but that just isn’t feasible right now. I also learned that it didn’t keep the audio when using frame rate doubling deinterlacing, meaning I’d have have to separately mux the audio back on after being processed by Enhance which is yet another step I’d have to remember to do. How were your render times?
Just subscribed btw. This video reminded me of if Project Farm did software reviews.
I just made an uncompressed (huge) avi from virtualdub and saved the video as a .wav before using huffyuv compression to it.
Its a shame mac cant handle huffyuv codec, so i just used the uncompressed footage for this video.
Render times on my 2019 macbook pro (i7 with ati 3d card) were VERY long. About 1 hour per minute of footage. Its one of the reasons this video took so long to make! (and with each ai model as well)
Thanks for taking the time out of your day to provide feedback, and great question!
P.S. everyone keeps comparing me to project farm! its so hilarious.
Get a Mac Studio, then it will wizz through the render like a hot knife through butter
Thanks for reminding me to upload my family videos into digital format
this tool is a godsend for old "Home-made tapes"
What I get from this is that we're just not quite there yet. Especially in regards to where this tech would be the most useful, old VHS transfers. But, hey, as long as it gets there before Skynet becomes a reality, that'd be nice.
The key thing is that it is inventing detail. It may be correct at times but it may be incorrect as well. So it’s a good thing as long as one keeps in mind the limitations.
Yeah. Im not sure it was trained on analog footage either. It works well with digital / hd content though.
As always. Try to keep the originals and in their highest quality as technology is always getting better
Great advice!
Thanks for this review. You start the video handling Video8/Digital8 tapes (at best 480i), but obviously those SD grades were not a great comparison against 4K. We've a few companies now offering enhancement upgrades to older media, but I think they are likely overselling what can be done with the AI. I've done old transfers through different capture methods, but old/bad VHS tapes seem to require the most babying; some of these have color distortion drop outs also, but this is another matter.
Yeah, for shoddy analog captures with rainbowing and distortion you would probably be better off with avisynth.
There is only so much that can be done and the learning curve is steep.
thanks for taking time out of your day to comment!
you should have labeled what side is what shot, gets confusing what is AI upscaled and what is original
Bro he did 🤦♂️
This feels like clickbait.
I have topaz I swear it feels like magic
I would LOVE to see old MLB videos from like 1970-2005 in 4k oh my god
Is that the chattahoochee river? Possibly by sandy slrings Atlanta? That looks like the exact spot I used to go to.
It's ozora lake at tribble mill park.
It does look like the Chattahoochee, doesn't it?
I don't anyone is suggesting that converting old VHS to 4k is going to deliver native 4k results as if recorded on a modern camera. Its just a way to upscale and improve detail to enhance the viewing experience.
Most American accent ever heard in my life 💀
Thanks for the feedback!
That's not really an American accent
@@TriflingToad lol
I used Topaz to try to improve mini-DV footage. Sure I got a 16:9 format, but the quality was poor, too many artefacts. I just wish we had CIA equipment, film Enemy of the State, when the sharpened TV video from across an ice rink, from two pixels they managed to recover a face! AI has yet to impress me.
"What's that? Oh, it's a tape." Hilarious! Thanks and I'm a subscriber to your channel now.
Good day, pal.
I don't know how many latinos follow your Chanel, but I am one of those. I find really interesting this AI.
May I suggest you to enhance some WWI and Vietnam war footage?
Wow, amazing! Thank you for this video.
I love the end of the video. It reminded me when I asked my students what is a floppy disk. They made so funny faces when I explained it to them. 😄
Teachers are so underappreciated these days!
thanks for sharing the floppy disk story. made lol!
It is impressive, but I am not sure I would like to watch a documentary-style film where big portion of the content has been completely halucinated😕
Looks like a simple matter of adjusting the sharpness to me.
TBH it looked pretty "crispy" before the upscale
It looked poor, worse than it should have, due to the wrong capture method.
that topaz software is interesting, but im still missing that "wow" effect that ai powered software tends to give me, i played around with it myself and all i got out of it (comparable to what was shown in the video) more or less looks like the same video enhancement gizmos you find in all the editing software from the past two decades
i agree. itll be interesting to see how the models work in the next couple of years.
It does do a decent job with cellphone hd content
It was him holding back laughing when he said, "Show me" that sent me over the edge 😂
🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍
Love Kai! He is so cute and reminds me of my little boy Bodhi who is 3. He is also a border collie
smartest dogs ever!
Me watching this video in 480p on my phone on UA-cam: 👁️🤷👁️
Keep it up man. Wow. This is Gold content.
There's a significant difference in resolution between real VHS 240 horisontal *625 lines vertical (PAL) / 525 lines (NTSC) and the Hi8 400 lines horisontal that was used but referred to as "VHS" in the footage. It would have been really intresting with footage from an VHS or VHSC-camera as such footage often looks poor when viewed in a large TV or video projector screen. Also, I can't recall any info about how long time the rendering process took in relation to what computer was used. These AI-programs tend to choke normal laptops, taking days to render a videotape.
There's no substitute for RAW data! AI may certainly improve the look of upscaled video, but ultimately it's creating false detail and won't ever match the original 4K footage.
Nice one. Pls keep the good work
Thanks for the comment!
I am curious in something else, how does it enhance 4K footage when 4K -> Enhance -> 4K? Does it improve it? Make a mess?
*Very cool but there is something nostalgic about watching grainy VHS footage. I would still want the original footage*
The opening and the thumbnail promised a lot but you did not show how to convert the video on the left of the thumbnail / opening seconds into the 4K one on the right. If you really did pull it off, please let us know the exact AI model and each setting in Topaz, as well as the exact version of Topaz Video AI you used.
Hot tip - bring your video to its native progressive state and then upscale x4 with “super scale” in Resolve and you’re set.
The mere fact that a smartphone camera now beats a device that was dedicated to only recording video and images is amazing.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I would love to see someone do this with old grainy paranormal videos
wouldn't be as freaky
@@retro-af I mean for the purpose of clarification
I need to remaster a 2.5 hour camcorder video from 1994. What would you recommend?
I think this video pretty much says to use TOPAZ
I'd recommend to just learn how to use free video software like "handbrake" or avisynth with conventional, free filters(there's lots of suggestions online on which to use) instead, you'll get a similar result, without anything going wonky, and it will be much faster to process. Generally a mix of deinterlace, denoising, sharpening, and possibly some colour/brightness adjustment gets you much of the way there. With handbrake at least, these are builtin, and you don't need to go too deeply into it - just fiddle around with each a bit(especially whether to choose light/medium/strong for each enhancement) and see what looks best for your tape, on a short section of video first.
That ending part makes me feel old even though I'm still from after the 20th century.
Pretty surreal!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I have some VHS that you can work with that is actually Old video. VHS tapes from when I was in the Navy that have been sitting around since the late 80's early 90's. I already digitized them using the best VHS player I could find. I just want to "fix" them to share with fellow Shipmates.
"VHS" doesn't mean *any* video tape, despite this usage becoming increasingly common. VHS, S-VHS, Betamax, Video8, Hi8 etc are all their own different analog formats, plus Digital8, MiniDV & others as digital formats. There were also tapes that were used to record digital full HD or similar resolutions (such as HDV).
What was likely recorded on the *Digital 8* camera is in the name - digital, just recorded on tape. This can be copied digitally to your computer without any loss, though it can be a pain to get firewire working without a desktop or an old laptop with firewire builtin (like an old Macbook, or many higher end PC laptops)
Ironically digital tape camcorders are often one of the best ways to convert analog tapes to digital, *some* Digital8 cameras can play back Video8/8mm and Hi8 analog tapes, and internally convert them to digital. Likewise some Digital8 & MiniDV cameras have an AV input, then converts to digital inside the camera. The cameras I've tried all do so at high quality.
Due to the method the recording here was captured, via analog, using what looks to a cheap "easycap" or similar USB capture device, the image has been degraded. Different capture devices can make a significant difference to the image quality, along with the analog output having to be converted from digital initially.
Inevitably any kind of enhancement is going to work better when the initial video quality is higher.
You have been blessed by the algorithm. Congratulations!
Yeah. I still don't get how a video is promoted or buried on this platform.
@@retro-af
I figure if a video gets slightly above average views & interaction, the algorithm assumes more people would also want to watch it.
Keep putting out good content so you can quit your day job! Lol
Your voice sounds like you could host America's funniest home videos lol
From everything I’ve seen the better the source material the easier the upscale quality. Much easier to go from 1080 to 4k over VHS to DVD. Also old VHS footage tends to upscale terribly, hover you can get some good results in a lot of results if the source is clean enough
Does Topaz allow for a comparitive database? Can you take pictures of someone that is sharp, and use it as a baseline for converting a blurry image back to sharp?
i need this filter for my nostalgia edit
Finally I can watch rumble in the jungle in 4k
Great video mate, you remind me of project farm a bit
I get that a lot!
Thanks for the comment.
“We can see that the ai added some texture to the horse’s rear end”
I’m so mature for laughing about that…
It's great to have a sense of humor!
This just goest to show that they trained the model is exactly the same way: by downgrading original 4K footage as it can recover that blurry artificial 720p back easily. What Topaz showed be really doing is running the 4K original at least through analog circuitry of a DV camcorder and capturing it back as interlaced mpeg file. Oh ai deinterlacer should ALWAYS be doubling the framerate: 50i to 50p, 60i to 60p
First thing that came to mind was using this software on the Bigfoot footage
🤣🤣🤣
I'm more interested on using this technology with videogame emulators.
Finding a shader combination that makes some SNES games look good on 4K TV is a real pain in the a**.
But if IA can do this to a complex 720p video, I think it can do wonders with videogame frames that are much simpler.
That would be an interesting shader for sure. I feel ya on getting 8/16 bit systems to look right on a 4k tv!
So all the alien and big foot videos bout to get exposed? 🤔
😂😂😂
Does using Topaz (or another AI based upscaler) require some pre-edit? Like, applying colour correction before upscaling it or something of that kind.
I'm new to this kind of things, please help 🙏
I remember, someone contacted Topaz because of color science questions and they did admit, that Video AI "doesn't really care" about colors. At the time we been at version 2.x. Now they have 3.x already.
But anyways, actually the program doesn't support color profiles (till 2.0 for sure), so you can loose details on the colors, but at least you cannot expect any positive changes.
It is not enhancing, it is merely cycles of selecting the closest match out of many small pictures with similar graphics. In the result the "enhanced" picture may look "better", but totally different from the original one.
If you focus on the quality, you’ve missed the picture.
You should really check out Christopher Hazard’s channel, he’s done some insane work upscaling old concert videos from the 70s-90’s, primarily old Grateful Dead shows.
however good and to the point this video is, all I could think of is how much this guy sounds like nic cage playing a telemarketing salesman with full conviction.
VHS has 320×240 pixels max. going to 4k is nonsense no additional gain compared to 2k and 1080p, no matter how good a AI Enhacer is, the source does not contain enough information.
I have yet to see products like this that just makes me cringe when I see the results.
Is there a similar program like this but for audio? It would be cool to here old timey voices how they actually sounded or at-least close to.
Yes! Adobe has a free audio ai tool but it is mostly for "spoken" audio
This guy sounds like the “but ‘cha didn’t” guy…
I wonder if we could implement this technology in upscaling ps1 era games to give full texture clarity at all times and prevent 3d models from jagging
Looks a bit better reducing noise but it doesn't look dramatically better.
I’m a camera nerd and phone nerd. I would shoot on older phones to get that retro quality.
The same if someone would shoot on film and use vintage film lenses and tapes, but in the phone world?
I like my iPhone but I like the look of the images on my earlier phones. The Samsung S7+, Zte Axon 7, etc
love the ending more lol. U should show a video of the baby scene/birth scene or w/e u have there and how her how vcr works.
I think in order to get best possible results those companies would literally have to get any old camcorder model out there and train the ai on each individual camcorder, training by using old analog signal vs a signal from a modern 4k camcorder (just like 3:28).
i agree and think we will see something like that in the next couple years.
Exciting times!
@@retro-af The software needs updating with AI neural models. What they use is not true AI
I’ve had good results using Proteus to restore footage which was streamed in poor quality with many blocky artefacts. Not had quite so much success yet using it to restore old VHS footage without the result looking terribly artificial.
Yeah. It's great at restoring digital formats. We are probably a few years away before we can restore analog to an acceptable level.
The way you’re so passive aggressive about the upscaled 720p downscaled 4k footage is hilarious😂. While it is an improvement over the downscaled footage, it truly doesn’t compare to the actual 4k video. Thanks for being honest about it, I think I’ll wait a bit longer for the AI to be improved
Lol, I came here just for the tutorial, and that was very well made. But the funny scene at the end with your daughter was funny 4X .. she was literally accepting the possibility of a VHS tape going into a laptop :D
It's still information that didn't exist to begin with. If it wasn't there, it's not there, no matter how cute it may look.
It could work for some things, like creating splines for lines, which could then be redrawn as smooth(not jagged)/sharp lines, which is likewise why some people have made good free software to enhance animated movies. Similarly it works ok for other predictable things, like buttons as shown here.
But for complex or unpredictable things, yeah it's poor. And like you said, if something's not visible at all in the image, or impossible to distinguish, it's not coming back.