AI Remastering - Under The Hood
31*PLEASE ENSURE YOU'RE WATCHING THE 4K QUALITY STREAM TO SEE THE COMPARISONS*
Here's a little peak behind the curtain for all the people who ask what software I use for my AI remasters. This is a screen capture of Topaz Video Enhance AI (https://www.topazlabs.com/video-enhance-ai) running a preview of my upscale settings.
While TVEAI is a spectacular piece of software, don't get too excited - this 60-frame snippet had already been rendered in preview mode. I have a relatively high-end setup - and it still takes about 7 seconds to render 1 second of footage at 4K from a DVD source (assuming 24/25 frames per second). To put that in context, it takes about five and a half hours to render a 45-minute episode of Deep Space Nine. When you consider that there are 176 episodes of Deep Space Nine, that's quite a time investment.
Alongside that, the AI upscale is only one part of the process. I prep the footage for upscale first, and I do some tinkering to improve image quality overall. For those who would like to try this kind of thing themselves, I wrote an article about my processes for another project which you can read here: https://wcrespace.com/remastering-a-masterpiece
The article itself is over 18 months old at this point, so I have modified my processes a bit since then (and the underlying AI tech has improved a great deal over the last year and a half) - but if you're interested, it might give you a kickstart in the right direction :^)