There’s an age-old movie trope that we’ve all seen a hundred times. A cop gets their hands on blurry, grainy video footage and takes it to the precinct’s IT expert. After saying “enhance,” the techie mashes a few buttons and ends up with a crystal clear video that breaks the case wide open. Now, it looks like we’re closer than ever to making that trope a reality thanks to AI. This might be the ultimate tool to improve blurry old TV shows, home footage, and so much more.
Topaz Labs, maker of AI-powered photo and video editing software, announced its new Project Starlight, the first-ever diffusion model for video restoration. This AI upscaling tool promises to enhance old, low-quality videos to “stunning high-resolution.” The company calls this its “biggest leap since Video AI was first launched.”
Here’s how Topaz Labs explains this new technology: “Built with an entirely new model architecture, our diffusion-based approach uses 6B+ parameters and leverages the latest NVIDIA hardware. This is the most dynamic and wide-ranging video-enhancing method we’ve ever created, setting a new standard for AI video restoration.”
The technology behind Project Starlight analyzes hundreds of frames to restore details accurately. Since videos degrade due to compression artifacts, blurring, aliasing, noise, missing pixels, and more, it’s not easy to make AI video restoration tools to deblur a video perfectly.
Still, in one of the examples, the company shows how its model can automatically denoise, deblur, upscale, and anti-aliased footage. For example, its model can restore footage from professional cameras, such as Sony RX10, in high-frame rate mode with sensor line sampling.
Unlike other models, Topaz Labs says users just need to add the footage and watch it transform, as it doesn’t require manual tweaks or parameter tuning. With technology as simple as that, reliving old memories (public or private) will be as simple as the click of a button.
“Project Starlight unlocks new possibilities for your creative workflows, resurrecting iconic historical moments in crystal-clear details. From old home videos to professional projects, the future of AI video restoration is here,” says the company.
Although it’s still only available to early birds, people will be able to restore up to 10-second videos for free and up to 5-minute videos with credits in 1080p. An Enterprise version will support longer videos and outputs in higher resolution.
While the diffusion model for video restoration “takes time to process and is costly to run,” the company added these limitations. Still, it plans to continuously improve it to make it faster, cheaper, and better quality over time.
Below, you can check some of the video restorations this AI upscaling tool delivered:
