Topaz Video AI by Topaz Labs has reached version 4! This amazing video application can not only enhance existing video, but it can also give you better slow-motion, stabilize shots without a gimbal and make old DSLR HD video look great! See how it handles our 1990's video from a 1990's Hi-8 camera...just like back in the 1990's!!

I did a little experiment with my old Digital-8 video camera. I'm going to use Topaz Video AI software and see if it can work wonders.

Topaz Video AI is an application that takes existing video and, using AI help, can enhance it, stabilize it, sharpen it, slow it down, clean it up, etc.

As of this writing it's at version 4.0. I have used it a little bit in the 3.0 version. I've used it for some client work. It's amazing. But I just want to do a little fun thing where I purposefully shot on older technology to see can I bring this older tech a little bit closer to new tech?

Now full disclosure: this is not the best use case for this software. I'm kind of poking fun and, but taking High-8 footage from the 1990s and upscaling it to 4K is probably not what you want to do with this software.

So using a preset in Topaz Video called “upscale to HD” I took the old interlaced 480p video and ran it through.

Look at that, how amazing it is. That is insane for a video camera from the nineties. So not exactly a magic bullet, but if you play around with it a little bit, you could get some pretty decent results.

That’s well and good, but there are other reasons besides enhancing old video to use Topaz Video AI. Another reason is if you're starting with a pretty decent video.

We had HD video of Courtney doing a cereal commercial for us. It was a lot of fun to do, but it wasn’t shot in 4K. We shot it with Canon C-100, which is a very, very good camera. But if you want to put this out now, it's going to be 4K, right? Well, we can't go back and shoot this again.

So I ran it through Topaz with the “upscale to 4k preset” and voila!

Left: Original 1080 HD Video. Right: Upscaled Topaz AI 4k video

If we start to zoom in, we can see that it is much, much better. Look at the details. The eyes are smoothed out. It’s much sharper. And this is just me clicking a button. If you dial in and start playing with the different AI models that are in Topaz video, it gets insane.

We've had situations where we've gotten footage to edit and the a-roll footage is beautiful 4K.

But the b-roll footage they shot on an HD DSLR and not even with a gimbal. Topaz saved our butts and turned that okay b-roll footage into amazing footage.

The last thing I want to tell you about is the ability to do slo mo.

Topaz, AI's ability to take 30 frames per second footage and turn it into slow-motion footage is unparalleled. You can do this in Premiere Pro, but the results using optical flow and its frame interpolation can only carry you but so far.

Notice how some frames seem “corrupted” using Premiere Pro’s Optical Flow method to slow down the video. Topaz looks rock solid.

So those are all examples of why Topaz video AI is amazing and a little scary for videographers and such. Some say you may not have to even use a gimbal nowadays because it does have a lot of neat features like stabilization and motion to blur. Sometimes if your footage is a little soft focus as opposed to going in and sharpening, you could probably ask Topaz to enhance it for you.

Topaz Video AI is an amazing product that we use. It's not cheap. I think it's around $300 as of this writing. So for casual YouTubers, maybe a pass. For people in the industry, keep your eye out on this company because they are really doing some amazing things.

Topaz Video AI 4
By Topaz Labs
https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai