Topaz Laps Video Enhance AI / Smart, Powerful Video Conversion

if you follow me over at instagram or subscribe to my channel here on youtube you're probably aware that i recently went on a landscape photography trip to iceland well when i returned home from that trip and i started editing 4k video i discovered during that editing process that there were a couple of things i needed first for that photographic stockness video that i made i wanted to include some video from my previous trip there which was back in 2019 unfortunately the new video i was creating was all shot in 4k and all of my old footage from 2019 well that was all shot in 1080 hd second i had some 4k drone footage captured using a dji air 2s that i wanted to use but unfortunately that footage just moved too quickly and it wasn't possible to slow it down just on the premiere timeline because it was all captured at 24 frames per second so if i slow down and stretched out the video on the timeline it would just look unnatural and choppy and well kind of awful so to solve both of these problems i purchased and downloaded video enhance ai made by topaz labs now if you've never heard of this app before it is not a plugin for premiere or davinci or final cut but rather a standalone desktop application for mac and windows that uses machine learning to upscale and improve the image quality of lower resolution video like that 1080 footage i was talking about from 2019 and through an update that just came out only a couple a couple of months ago you may not even be aware of this or seen anything about it the app can now also create slow motion footage by slowing down video regardless of what frame rate it was originally shot at by up to 2 000 to begin topaz labs the developer of video enhanced ai they have not paid me to produce this video they are not sponsoring this video nor have they had any editorial input in its creation outside of answering technical questions that came up uh while using the software alright so let's begin by upscaling some 1080 video to 4k and by the way you might want to just pause this video for a second and check your youtube player settings down below to ensure that you're actually viewing this video in 4k alright so without further ado let's take a look at some footage for context here is the original 1080 video shot using a canon m50 upscaled 200 on my 4k premiere timeline and now here is the new 4k version created using video enhance ai with a new resolution of 3840 by 2160 to my eyes the 4k version not only looks better but surprisingly natural and what i mean by that is that it doesn't look fake it doesn't look like um like bad uprezzed video i don't think anyone looking at this 4k video would notice anything i don't think they would realize that uh that this was originally 1080 footage that has been converted to 4k so what's going on here what kind of magic is happening underneath the hood well when upscaling video video enhance ai the way it works is it walks through a low resolution video frame by frame and with each frame it analyzes the frames adjacent to it the ones that are immediately to the right and to the left to better understand the appearance of textures and shapes and objects that are in your video it is figuring out what needs to be done what is missing in that process of uprising 1080 to 4k and is then filling in that missing detail in data in a way that appears perfectly natural now the example 4k video you've been looking at that was exported directly from video enhance ai but there is another option available and that is exporting tiff images of each keyframe and then stitching those tiff files together using a program like quicktime in order to create your final 4k video now let's group all three of them together side by side and take a look at the difference this is really a subjective thing to decide whether the tiff version or the 4k version exported directly looks better to you but one thing i think we can all agree on looking at these examples is the noticeable shift in color and contrast between each version now personally i actually prefer the tonality of the 4k version exported directly from video enhanced ai i think it looks great and better than the original footage so i'm glad that the software made that change but it is a change and there may be times in which that change is not something that you want so i asked topaz about this i contacted their support team and they said that color profiles in your original video footage can change as part of the encoding process which means it could be it could create extra work for you if you are mixing enhanced footage from video enhanced ai with original footage that doesn't need enhancing and then trying to color grade everything together using the same settings alright so we took a look at upscaling 1080 to 4k but what about 4k to 4k what about high quality footage that just needs a little enhancement and perhaps a little bit of de-noising as well [Music] so here's some drone footage i shot a few years ago and i'm picking this footage because it was shot at twilight it was kind of dark there was not a lot of light reaching the sensor and as a result it created a bit of noise up here in the sky more than i would like and definitely some noise in the shadows and there's also some color noise happening in the waves and the water down here as well this is interesting because the original source video is generally okay it's high quality 10-bit 4k it's perfectly usable but the video enhanced ai version looks cleaner and smoother but without looking plasticky and without losing detail and sharpness which can sometimes happen when too much noise reduction has been applied [Music] all right let's shift gears once again and now take a look at slow motion changing a video from a native frame rate of 24 or 30 frames per second to 60 or even 120 is kind of nuts when you think about it because the software is effectively trying to invent frames that do not exist in the original source video it's using that machine learning that i've been talking about in order to create new frames and then blend those new frames in with the real frames from your source video this then increases the total number of frames so the video may be slowed down on a video editing timeline now as explained earlier for one of my iceland videos i wanted to slow down some 4k 24 frames per second footage shot using my dgi air 2s and just to remind you what that original video looks like here is the original 24 frames per second video which as you can see moves a bit fast and it just doesn't appear as slow or as cinematic as i intended by the way tangentially and i'll show you the slow motion version here in just a second but part of the reason why this footage is moving so quickly is because in my opinion the cinematic mode on the air 2s is not slow enough i wish there was a way with the controller and the settings to make the sticks a little less sensitive so the drone could then fly slower philip bloom one of my favorite people here on youtube actually created a great video on this topic in frustration he's been trying to hack his controller in order to do exactly this it's a great video and i'll link to it below if you'd be interested in checking it out [Music] i mean wild right i mean i think it looks really good if you do pixel peep and pay attention to small details i mean like if you just you know focus on one particular area of the image every now and then you may see something that just i don't know looks a little bit off but i don't think the average person is going to notice a thing i think it looks very real and i think it looks really nice without losing detail or sharpness where it counts there's a little bit of a little bit of like motion blur happening with some of the fast areas like that water but honestly i think it looks good that way because it looks like it was shot at a at a slower shutter speed i think the water if it was super sharp and super detailed i don't think it would look as good i think the slow motion looks uh appropriate and it looks like the kind of slow motion footage that i intended [Music] [Music] now as good as i think those results are there is however one downside that i need to share with you that is actually video enhanced ai running full screen on my new m1 mac mini over there it's currently creating some slow motion footage and i started this uh yesterday morning and right now it says it's going to be done in one day 17 hours now this is obviously a long time and i thought this was rather unusual so i contacted topaz support and inquired and asked you know what was going on and they recommended a couple of tweaks to the app preferences and turning off energy saving settings in mac os but unfortunately the recommendations didn't help they didn't speed up the app now part of the problem could be that i'm using an m1 mac mini here and the version of video enhanced ai that i'm using is not currently native it has to run through rosetta i was told that an m1 native version is coming which may speed up render times i hope so net result and really to state the obvious but the speed you get out of video enhanced ai depends on the length of your source material how long the video is that you're trying to upscale or change into slow motion and how fast your computer is so if you're downloading video enhance ai with the intent of using it in a project like a client project with a rapidly approaching deadline make sure you build in enough time in your schedule in order to be uh in order to be processing those videos using video enhanced ai because it might take a while oh and just so you know you can set up a queue in video enhance ai you can add in multiple clips with individual settings for each hit encode and let it run it probably wouldn't actually be a bad idea if you have multiple computers to put the software on a different computer than the one that you're editing video on um because i think i don't know maybe it's a m1 mac thing but i found that when i was running premiere and media encoder and video enhanced ai at the same time it really slowed down and maybe it's because all of it is trying to be pushed through the same pipeline i'm not sure all right let's begin wrapping up this video with positives and negatives what most impresses me about video enhanced ai is its intelligence because i could throw out at one video that is low quality super noisy i mean it's got some problems and another video that is high quality but it does have a little bit of noise it could use a little bit of enhancement and video enhance ai just automatically recognizes the difference between them and enhances both appropriately without me having to do much of anything i mean every video i tested it just seemed to instinctively know what needed fixing what to leave alone and how far to push it now control is there for advanced users if you want it if you want to delve into the different ai models and fine-tune the settings however you want that's there for you and you might actually get better results than using the built-in presets but for me after a while after converting a bunch of video i just learned to trust the software and let it do its thing which is great actually for non-advanced users who just want to clean up some videos without having to read a manual the main downside as mentioned earlier in the version i tested is the slow speed when creating slow motion video it was incredibly slow i mean it's running pretty slow right now 1080 to 4k generally took anywhere from i don't know an hour to a few hours depending on the length of the original source video so upscaling low res footage is much faster than using slow motion it's just something about slow motion right now that seems to need a little additional optimization and by the way quick tip in order to speed up editing you can actually set in and out points in video enhance ai very similar to using a video editor so video enhanced ai only exports part of a video instead of a whole video so you don't have to edit a video ahead of time you can just drag in the source video choose the particular uh choose a particular section that you want and then it'll export from there if you would like to try video enhance ai with some of your footage open up the video description below because i have provided a link there to a free 30-day version a free trial of the software that you may download for mac and windows install it put some video in it export it and take a look at the results and see if it works for you by the way if this video was recommended to you because you currently own and use video enhance ai and you're just curious to see the results that someone else was able to get out of it let me know down below let me know what you think about video enhance ai provide any tips for it that you would care to share especially if you have any optimization tips i would love to hear those and uh feel free we'd love to hear your feedback thanks so much for being here if you enjoyed the video remember to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel if you would like to see more videos from me in the future that's it see you next time

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 26,790

Keywords: landscape photography, photography, todd dominey, topaz labs, video enhance ai, video enhance, slow motion, slow motion video, video editing, upscale 1080p to 4k, upscale 1080p to 4k premiere pro, upscale 1080p to 4k davinci resolve, slow motion 24 fps, convert 24fps to 60fps, convert 24 fps to 60 fps, video editing plugins, video editing software, video enhance ai free trial, topaz labs video enhance ai, topaz video enhance ai, video upscaling

Id: qhc3I9AC63Q

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021