Review: Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI for Video — Video Uprezzing Robot Software for Windows 10 and the Cloud
We are at the point where 4K, 6K, and 8K video resolutions are becoming ubiquitous in today’s professional and home video recording . And because of the ubiquity, we need older footage to easily (and visually) edit seamlessly with this beautiful higher resolution media without causing a disturbance for the viewer. That is way easier said than done, but with a few different NLE plugins and tools it is becoming not only possible for everyone but starting to really look great.
Beyond sharpening your out of focus or low resolution media, what can you really do to improve footage? Luckily, there has been an entire professional dedicated to the art of dust busting and repairing media for decades. Today, we package those skills together withVFX magicians, colorists, and/or the all encompassing Online Editor — which is what I am.
There are a few tools out there that can improve your video footage with a few knob dials and slider moves such as BorisFX’s Continuum Magic Sharp: https://borisfx.com/products/continuum-filters/magic-sharp/ , Digital Anarchy’s Samurai Sharpen: https://digitalanarchy.com/Samurai-Sharpen-Video/main.html, Red Giant’s Shooter Suite including Instant 4K (https://www.redgiant.com/products/shooter-suite/), and even tools built into your common non-linear editor, color correction app, or visual effects builder. For simple issues in Avid Media Composer, there is a generic paint tool that can be formed into many different shapes, feathered, and tracked over the object you want to sharpen. In Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve there is an entire panel dedicated to this that can be tracked and shaped with the standard Resolve tools. For more intricate sharpening you can combine a lot of these sharpens with a fancy tracker like Mocha Pro or in Resolve using Super Scale with sharpening and noise reduction.
But what if you want to do none of the above? What if you want to enhance without doing anything else? A previously image only based AIplugin company named Topaz Labs: https://topazlabs.com/shop/, has jumped into the video enhancing game with their latest release of Gigapixel AI for Video: https://videoai.topazlabs.com/.
Gigapixel AI for Video is available as a beta software application for Windows 10 users, but requires a very beefy computer to run. During my testing, I took a 2 minute and 21 second — 1920x1080 clip I filmed on my Canon 5D Mark ii and uprezzed it to 4K, it took roughly 2.5 hours!
For background, I’m running it on a laptop that has a 6-core Intel i7, Nvidia RTX 2080 with 8GB of memory, and 32GB of system memory. This isn’t a slow system. That being said, sharpening and uprezzing are some of the most computationally dense processes you can perform on your system when editing video. While I was running the footage through Gigapixel AI for Video I noticed that the CPU (Intel i7, 6-core, 9750H) would toggle between 25% and 35% usage while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 would toggle between 10% and 30% usage. I would have preferred to see more usage out of the CPU and GPU while running the process, it feels like some power is being pulled back. Maybe this is a way to get you to pay them to do the processing for you. I’m sure they have loads of high end CPU and GPU combinations that are tuned for this. Either way you have options.
Gigapixel AI for Video works either by uploading your clips via the web or by using their Windows 10 app (in beta at the moment). They charge a base $2, and then $.001 for each 1M pixel when uprezzing by 2x or $.002 for each 1M pixel when uprezzing by 4x. For some real world costs, they show an example where a 5 minute, HD (1920x1080) clip running at 30fps is uprezzed to UHD (3840x2160) — essentially 200% enlargement, which would cost $20.66 at the moment. You can use the video anywhere as long as you paid for it, if you want to run samples or use video for non-commercial use then the beta Windows app or the “Free Proof” upload (up to 60 seconds) is for you: https://videoai.topazlabs.com/upload.
While I was testing out the Windows 10 app, I started thinking about how I know many people who simply won’t upload their video for processing. It is just a way of the professional world who can’t afford for their footage to get out. Obviously, the Windows 10 app would be the way to go. But Topaz Labs has a couple of security FAQs that may put you at ease. First, they do not train their AI detection using your videos. Second, here is how they protect your data (from their FAQ page https://videoai.topazlabs.com/faq):
How do you protect my data?
The whole process is automated. No human will examine your videos unless to resolve problems.
Transmission: Input video is uploaded securely over HTTPS to a secure Amazon s3 bucket. You will receive a secure unique link to download the output video that expires in 30 days.
Access: Only core Topaz engineers (for troubleshooting) have read/write access to the system. No one else can access it.
Data retention: Input video is retained until it is finished processing and then deleted. Output video is retained for 30 days until download link expires, and then deleted.
To compare the Gigapixel AI for Video enhancing to other methods of enhancing, I opened the same footage inside of Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro. I tried to perform similar enhancements to those of Gigapixel AI for Video but inside of Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro. For example, inside of Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 16.1.2 I used Super Scale in the Clip Attributes menu. Inside of Adobe Premiere Pro, I essentially did the same thing but without noise reduction. I also have Red Giant’s Shooter Suite, so I used their uprezzing plugin Instant 4K inside of Adobe Premiere Pro to see what it could do.
Inside of Adobe Premiere Pro, I started by first using the built in Lumetri Sharpening and Set to Frame Size scaling the 1920x1080 footage to the UHD (3840x2160) timeline resolution. I exported the footage as an .mp4 just like Gigapixel had done. It exported in about 6 minutes and 15 seconds. The results seemed appropriate to me. Adding the full 100 Sharpening in the Lumetri panel seemed to make the footage a little crispier but not too much. When comparing to Gigapixel I seemed to like the Premiere Pro export a little more because it was appropriate yet not too noticeable.
Second, I added Red Giant’s Instant 4K plugin which scales, sharpens, and adds anti-aliasing from one plugin. I exported using the same settings as before but this time it took 20 minutes. The actual uprezzed footage looked good. It seemed to do best job overall with adjustable user settings, although I pretty much left those alone except for ramping up the quality one notch. The downside to Red Giant’s Shooter Suite is that it will cost you $399. But the upside is that you get Instant 4K, Pluraleyes, Offload, and Frames.
Inside of Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 16.1.2 I used the same clip and enabled Super Scaling x4, medium sharpening, and medium noise reduction. The result was better than Adobe Premiere Pro’s sharpening and upscaling. I would say it is near where Red Giant’s Instant 4K is in terms of quality. Render time was a little better being in Resolve, it harnessed the CPU and GPU more when caching my footage. I noticed my RTX 2080 was running at almost 100% while caching. Then the export used my cache files so it took just a minute to export. But overall it probably took about 20–30 minutes.
The result from Gigapixel AI for Video was my second favorite result. It was a little overly sharp in some spots, added some extra noise in others, and took over 2.5 hours to render. It seems like the artificial intelligence that is inside of Gigapixel really likes textures. It will find things like stucco, bricks, grass, fabrics, and more and sharpen and maybe add contrast. It’s almost like an auto color and sharpen along with upscaling. One oddity that popped up was that inside of Adobe Premiere Pro, the export from Gigapixel was a drop-frame 23.98 Quicktime. Obviously, that isn’t possible and sometimes Adobe Premiere Pro does funny things like that. Resolve recognized the video at 23.98 non drop-frame, so not really sure what was going on.
In the end, Gigapixel AI for Video is an easy, set-it and forget-it uprezzing solution when used on a Windows 10 based computer with high end components. Even with high end components it will take hours to process so it might be wise to pick and choose your clips carefully and even export just the sections you need. It’s worth trying out if you have a high end Windows 10 computer. Even if you just try out the online test upload. You can see my results in action in my YouTube video below where I compare the original clip, Gigapixel AI for Video export, Adobe Premiere Pro export, Red Giant Instant 4K export from Premiere Pro, and Resolve 16.1.2 export:
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