Video | Upscale

200% and 400% AI upscale

3 minute read

The more the merrier - at least when it comes to pixels!

When you want to enjoy any HD video on a 4K screen, use the help of AI upscale! You will have a perfectly sharp video - a real relaxation for your eyes.

AI upscaling filters are the most interesting ones. They increase the video resolution while returning details and making the video much sharper.

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These two filers should be applied when the video resolution is low. For today's standards, anything below 1280x720px is considered low.

200% upscale

Doubles the width and height of the video, e.g.:

  • 1280x720px → 2560 x 1440 px

This filter is ~3x faster than the 400% upscale and should be applied to make video resolution greater than 1280x720. E.g. if the video resolution is 800x600, we should apply the 200% upscale as it will make the video 1600x1200px.

400% upscale

Quadruples the width and height of the video, e.g.:

  • 640x480 → 2560 x 1920px

Why don’t we always apply 400%?

Well, the more pixels the better, right?

Yes, but the 400% is 3x slower and more expensive than the 200% upscale. There are also diminishing returns as we increase the upscaling factor.

After a certain upscaling factor which in most cases is 400%, you won’t get any more details in the enhanced video. It’s not possible to create infinite details from a limited number of starting details.tel

That’s why it doesn’t make much sense to have 400% upscale Full HD video (1920x1080px). While it will produce 7680x4320px output video, it won’t have nearly as many new details.

Improvement

Video upscaling is an area of active research and we expect to develop better algorithms that produce more details for the same input videos. Improvement takes a lot of R&D so it won’t happen quickly.

Sometimes the results are great, sometimes not so much

This is also an area of active research. It’s much harder to upscale older videos such as VHS or Betacam because their original quality is much lower and they don’t have many details to begin with.

No hard rule will tell you if the upscaling will work. The rule of thumb is: the higher the original quality, the better the upscaled version will look like.

Sanja Trbojević Montina

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