For some reason I recently thought: "I wonder how AI video upscaling is doing these days?"
I did a bit of research and settled on UniFab AI Video Upscaler as the one to go with. In an alternate universe I would have selected Topaz.
For context
- The videos being upscaled were made by me in the 2001-2006 time frame
- They were all made with DVD sources
- The "archive" format I opted for in that time era was MPEG-2 generated with a tool called TMPGEnc. The quality was a higher bitrate than DVD but it's not like it was going to get much better with more bits.
- The goal was to scale a number of videos (~25) to 1080p and make an additional archive copy of my old videos to watch on an HD television or whatever without looking so rough.
How did the upscaling go?
Not too bad at all! The cleaner the anime was to start with the better things generally went. The best anime to upscale were probably: Last Exile, Hellsing, Jubei-Chan 2, and SoulTaker
I used an animation profile in UniFab and it worked for most videos. Some really turned into AI garbage in some places which I would equate with old mpeg artifacts. It just looks like crap. It seemed to be the worst for characters at medium distance from the screen. Minor details just turned to mush/mess (no shock).
Fortunately the general high quality profile did fairly well for the few cases where the animation profile looked bad (Escaflowne videos for example).
A couple of the resulting AI upscales felt off sync wise. In a few cases the audio was offset by about 4 frames so I adjusted things using Adobe Premiere. I blame the archive format/export from long ago.
Processing on average was about 10fps using an RTX 3080.
Where are these supposedly not-too-badly-upscaled videos?
I still don't do youtube to avoid all the risks with copyrights... so they are available for download on my site (which proudly looks like it's from ~2001, because it is): NHMK Music Video Downloads (marked with AI Upscaled MP4)
Further story times: Hindsight 20 years later
I understood about
) (admittedly not much better now, ha)
I learned as I went along so my archived copies improved as the years went on... but occasionally dumb mistakes were made.
Archive your stuff
I failed to export some of my videos to archive format for whatever reason. Now I am stuck with old low resolution mpeg-1 or xvid versions. I also exported some to archive format without all the intros/outros (probably to send to cons). This is a bit disappointing as I liked some of the intros but am stuck with low quality versions of them now.
24 fps
The horror, the horror. If you know, you know. I am sure any sync issues further suffered from the result of working around this.
Not everything is worth upscaling
Apologies to myself 20 years ago. Not gonna bother...
... I'll stop rambling about the olden times now ... could go on for a while...
Conclusion
AI Upscaling was an entertaining adventure and trip down memory lane.