whoo okay look at that fan header that
was mindblowing we use upscaling to enhance
the quality of everything from photos to games to nonsensical movie plots but
perhaps the most common use is the restoration of old or degraded videos
now the most basic upscaling techniques work by sampling each pixel and then
multiplying it to match the desired new resolution but that's only going to get
you so far and it certainly won't generate the kind of result we saw with
the 4K 60fps remastered upload of Rick
asley is never going to give you up so to learn more about how a 720p 30fps
video managed to look this good we
reached out to Topaz makers of the machine learning assisted upscaling
software used for that project and we used it to attempt a restoration of My
First Youtube upload my name is l Sebastian and today we'll be looking at
the Sunbeam Tech tunic Tower
as you saw already the results are
uneven but there are some really interesting reasons for that and on a
slightly less challenging but equally classic video we managed some really
amazing results and we did it on the MSI Creator z6p laptop that they provided
along with a sponsorship of this fun and educational project you can check this
puppy out down below Now using software like Photoshop to denoise and upscale a
still image is relatively simple especially for a talented digital artist
but video it's a whole other Beast not
only are you now dealing with thousands or even tens of thousands of frames but
if you want to Target a modern video resolution like 4K you could be
attempting to create literally millions of pixels that weren't there before are
you ready this is going to be fun I get to see it now 21
gigs yeah but 21 gigs you're trying to
take 5 megabytes and turn it into 21
gigabytes this is the opposite of file compression szip needs this function we
make your files 2,000 times bigger oh
God this is Nightmare fuel I think a
deep fake of a still might have actually been
better it looks like it's um you know those Photoshop filters that
turn it certain things into a painting what is my hand doing here fing what is
this you know what it looks like it looks like Tomb Raider era Graphics were
there lines on my shirt because it had no idea what to do my hands look like
they're from halflife one my mouth is like over
here what's not really fair though is
I'm not actually comparing this to the original video a
crap how catchy is that to techs my name
is lus Sebastian you know looking at the original video makes me look at the
upscaled one a lot more favorably it was
really bad you know
what the copper heat
pipes look
better and the shirt in certain spots to be clear I'm
not I am not saying this is perfect in certain spots it is sharper this looks
sort of better actually the one good thing I'm taking away from this is
that I think my hairline was always this
receded then
whoo okay it has these little flashes of
Brilliance where you're like oh no that actually looks a lot better you know if
I'm back here you know I'm like watching or whatever from my Tel Vision it looks
a lot better it really does look a lot better see if I can find a still where
it's decent it looks pretty awful but let me
explain why first up is the fact that our original footage is just
240p that's a total of 76,800 pixels to work with which might
sound like a lot of pixels but most of
them are just a blank wall behind me for the things that matter like say for
example capturing the expressions of of the human eye we've got about 20 pixels
per eye so good luck with that making matters worse the original footage which
we unfortunately no longer have was interlaced and it was rendered without a
proper conversion for those of you who don't know interlacing was a technique
broadcasters use to increase the perceived frame rate and resolution of
older footage it works by drawing half of the picture first as a series of
lines across the screen then drawing the second series of lines to fill in the
gaps and back and forth and so forth CRTs and some plasma TVs were made with
this in mind and when you see I instead of P next to resolution that means that
it is interlaced by contrast progressive
scan P refreshes the entire image with
each cycle so I'm really sorry young
lonus we tried but that handic cam you
were using back then just ain't going to cut it ah it's okay buddy don't even
worry about it luckily we don't have to go too far to find something that was shot at a higher
resolution this is more along the lines
of what video enhance AI is meant to work with now they say they can handle
as low as 480i without too much of this
but our famous firetr video happens to be available in 720p which should be
even better than that now because I'm a digital packrat I actually have the
original footage for this but we're going to just download it from YouTube
to show you guys what you could do with a simple free trial of the vei software
now of course beefy Hardware is going to result in significantly faster renders
and those of you with older gpus are going to have a pretty hard time with
this sort of workload but the 370 TI in our z6p managed to take our original
footage and crank it up to 4K in just a couple of hours and we could even cut
that down if we sprang for the max speec core I9 and RTX 380 TI configuration
speaking of extra budget we've got swacket V2 in stock it's neither sweater
nor jacket it's a swacket LTT Store.com
now vei has tons of different modes and features so you might need to run it a
few times to get exactly the result that you're looking for but you can also run
a quick render preview beforehand to see how it's going to pan out watch out by
the way because this type of heavy workload will make your components
pretty toasty fortunately we didn't have a problem with the Creator z6p thanks to
its Vapor chamber cooler which would have been pretty awkward if they sponsored this video and overheated we
settled on Artemis medium quality with a constant rate factor of zero this
adjusts the data rate the lower it is the higher the quality we turned off
film grain although for footage that was originally shot on film you might
actually find that a little bit of grain will help it look more natural and while
you can set your target resolution to just scale up which is ideal for 4x3
footage we selected specific pixel counts so we tried both 1080P and 4K one
more housekeeping item we've got the 1 TB storage version of this machine
machine and if you're planning to do a lot of this you might want to get one with more storage because the land Rider
RC firetruck unboxing ended up at a whopping 35 GB and that's before the
60fps conversion so for that we take our
4K footage which is still at 30 FPS we
switch from recommended to all modes in VII and then we use one of the four
Kronos options we're going to go with V3
and go oh um remember how the upscaling was
Conjuring millions of pixels to add to our frames well now we're creating
entirely new frames so as you guys can imagine this might take a while now the
old way to do this was the frame blending method which doubled the
original frames then Blended them together it's relatively simple to
implement but it typically results in a lot of motion Jitter another option is
Optical flow which analyzes the clips pixel by pixel frame by frame and then
uses the directional changes between the two frames to create an in between it's
pretty good but you end up with pixel occlusion when it gets things wrong and
pixels from one frame can actually block existing pixels in the next one VA
Chronos is sort of like a beefed up Optical flow it's using extensive
machine learning to predict the best intermediate frame between the existing
ones and they spent months training their neural network on tens of Millions
of frames to alleviate the pixel occlusion issues we've got a few samples
here so you guys can see them for yourself and we're going to have the full versions of these on float.com for
all of our subscribers over there I've been told the results are good but not
perfect and I think it's time to watch the fir trk video then all right okay
I'm not going to do that yet though I'm going to enjoy this in its 4K
remastered Glory oh it doesn't handle
motion very well does it
that is kind of crazy when it doesn't have to move and
when we're not looking at a
human it's kind of crazy sharp now I
don't I don't actually have the original file next to it right now but that seems
really good I think oh wow
you know where you can really see it is
the the lines on my shirt clearly alias
in the original version and look at this
blocking in the table here this just like low bit rate crappy blocking they
have smoothed it out a lot oh yeah like
right here that is undoubtedly a better viewing experience
the real the shaky camera the handheld camera is killing it that's another big
difference between this and the music video that fixed camera is a huge
difference maker I'm impressed that it's handling it as well as it is like that
shot right there where we just moved around the fir
Tru yeah you could convince me that was 60 frames per
second that shirt though you really see
it in the shirt okay I've got it it can
handle motion of the camera and it can handle motion of the host but not both
look at that non-lt store water ballb get that out of here oh wow it really
screwed up the carpet here though oh wow it bunged that up it's trying to smooth
it and it's like bye-bye texture so it's
not perfect but we also haven't spent a ton of time tuning this and it really
comes down to your use case like if you've got really low resolution footage
upscaling may not be the best option at all maybe you just want to see what
improvements you can get through frame rate conversion or D noising without the
upscale or maybe you've got some old interlaced footage that you want to fix
um speaking of interlaced footage we've got a dvhs player on the way so make
sure you're subscribed or you will miss our video on that little piece of Home
Cinema history one of the coolest things about this is that the minimum
requirements to do a job like this are actually pretty low but the stronger the
hardware is the faster it'll be and that is where our sponsor MSI comes in with
the z6p laptop on top of its high tier
specs it's got a thin Light chassis weighs only 5 1/4 lb and that's with the
16 by10 golden ratio display running at 165 HZ with 100% coverage of the dcip 3
color space so thank you MSI again for sponsoring this video sending over this
absolutely sick laptop if you guys want to learn more about it you can check it
out at the link down below we're also going to have the software re use Link
down below thank you for watching have you had better success upscaling 240p
footage let us know what techniques you used in the comments and hey maybe throw
uh throw your attempts at the Sunbeam tunic Tower video at us on social media
I would love to see what you guys come up with if you're looking for another video to watch check out our capturing
920k video video it's a lot of pixels