- Whoa. Okay.
Look at that fan hitter that was mind blowing.
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 60 FPS remastered upload
of Rick Astley's, Never Gonna Give You Up.
So to learn more about how a 720P 30 FPS 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 Linus Sebastian
and today we will be looking at the Sunbeam Tuniq Tower.
(intense music)
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 Z16P 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 de-noise 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 gonna be fun, I get to see it now.
21 gigs?
Yeah, but 21 gigs
you're trying to take five megabytes
and turn it into 21 gigabytes.
This is the opposite of file compression.
7-Zip needs this function.
We make your files 2000 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,
(fingers clicking)
you know those Photoshop filters
that turn things into a painting?
What is my hand doing here?
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 Half-Life one.
My mom is like over here.
What's not really fair though
is I'm not actually comparing this to the original video.
Ah, crap.
(upbeat music)
How catchy is that?
Welcome to NCIX Tech Tips.
My name is Linus 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 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.
Whoa, 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 television,
that 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 out 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 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 used
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 Linus,
we tried but that Handycam you were using back then
just ain't gonna cut it.
Ah it's okay, buddy, don't even worry about it guy.
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 firetruck video happens to be available
in 720P, which should be even better than that.
Now because I'm a digital pack rat,
I actually have the original footage for this
but we're gonna just download it from YouTube
to show you guys what you could do
with a simple free trial of the VEAI software.
Now, of course, beefy hardware is gonna result
in significantly faster renders,
and those of you with older GPUs
are gonna have a pretty hard time
with this sort of workload, but the 3070 TI
in our Z16P 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 spec Co i9
and RTX 3080 TI configuration.
Speaking of extra budget, we've got Swacket V2 in stock.
It's neither sweater nor jacket,
it's a Swacket, lttstore.com.
Now VEAI 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 gonna 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 Z16P
thanks to its vapor chamber cooler
which would've been pretty awkward
if they'd sponsored this video and it 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 four by three footage
we selected specific pixel counts.
So we tried both 1080P and 4K.
One more housekeeping item.
We've got the one terabyte storage version of this machine,
and if you're planning to do a lot of this
you might wanna get one with more storage
because the Land Rider RC firetruck unboxing
ended up at a whopping 35 gigabytes
and that's before the 60 FPS conversion.
So for that, we take our 4K footage
which is still at 30 FPS,
we switch from recommended to all modes in VEAI,
and then we use one of the four Chronos options.
We're gonna go with V3 and go,
oh, 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.
VEAI 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 10s 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 gonna have the full versions of these
on floatplane.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 firetruck video then?
All right.
Okay, I'm not gonna do that yet though.
I'm gonna 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 lines on my shirt,
clearly aliased 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 fire truck,
Um, 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 LTT Store water bottle,
get that outta 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 wanna see what improvements you can get
through frame rate conversion
or de-noising without the upscale,
or maybe you've got some old interlaced footage
that you wanna fix.
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 Z16P laptop.
On top of its high tier specs,
it's got a thin and light chassis,
weighs only five and a quarter pounds,
and that's with the 16 by 10 golden ratio display
running at 165 Hz with a 100 percent coverage
of the DCIP three color space.
So thank you MSI again for sponsoring this video
sending over this absolutely sick laptop.
If you guys wanna learn more about it
you can check it out at the link down below.
We're also gonna have software we 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 a, throw your attempts
at the Sunbeam Tuniq 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.