Our Favorite Video AI Tool
Our favorite AI tool comes from a company called Topaz Labs. They have multiple tools that help increase the overall quality of footage or images. As you can imagine, that is major for PEG, as there are plenty of times projects that require media from other sources may not meet our high standards. So, let's get into some details of the incredible things Topaz Video and Photo tools have to offer.
I'm going to highlight each of the enhancement options available in the program and briefly explain why it's so important to us. To start, I will cover the aspect of these tools we use the absolute most: increasing the resolution of your media.
Increasing Resolution
This feature is self-explanatory and sounds simple, but I want to stress how incredible this is in the world of digital media. When we capture a clip, we keep it forever, but as time goes on we may not be able to continue to use it. This is because as technology improves, so too does the quality of the media we capture.
With this tool, we can refresh older, lower-resolution footage by adding pixels via AI. This allows us to take years of high-definition footage and make it usable in a 4K ecosystem without quality loss. We have always been able to scale up footage to try to use it in 4K projects, but that is a destructive way of utilizing old footage. Since those pixels don’t actually exist, it created a fuzzy, almost pixelated effect on that footage.
In the example below, I showcase the value of increasing resolution in older footage.
As you can see, this tool allows us to use otherwise low-quality footage in our projects, which means we can be more creative, and more flexible, using the shots we think fit the overall direction of the piece.
Denoising
The second amazing feature in Topaz I wanted to highlight is AI Denoising. Denoisers have been around as effects for a long time, but have never been perfect. There will always be some level of noise remaining, and due to the nature of how a denoiser works, the more you want a clip denoised, the softer the overall image becomes. Because these tools are not “smart” tools such as Topaz, they are reducing the general noise throughout the entire scene. Topaz can tell what the subject in a noisy shot is and retain the sharpness of that subject.
In my example below we had a lot of noise in the footage and needed to denoise it all, just look at the amazing difference between one of our initial footage and the footage denoised with Topaz AI.
Frame Interpolation
Next, another amazing new tool in our belts for cinematic story-telling: Frame Interpolation. This is the name of the effect inside of Topaz, but the easy way to think of it is “the ability to add frames to previously captured video.”
This is something most editing software can do when you are forced to use footage with fewer frames per second than you need. But, we generally avoid it because it doesn’t do a great job when pushed too hard (For instance, if you need to double the frame count in a clip from 30 to 60, it is pretty noticeable that something is off.)
Now we can use Topaz to double or even quadruple the number of frames in a single clip provided the action happening is not very fast. This allows us to take b-roll captured at normal speed, and make it super slow motion without it looking bad. That is a lot of explanation to say, we can make anything look super cool now! Check out one example below.
Much like these other tools inside of Topaz AI, this allows us to have even more creative freedom during the editing process than we have ever had before.
Stabilization
I will wrap up with this last awesome tool, which is stabilization. In Adobe we can stabilize clips with “Warp Stabilizer” or even stabilize a bit more manually in After Effects. In general, the success of these depends on the level of shakiness in the footage we are attempting to stabilize. While the same is true for the stabilization feature in Topaz, it definitely does an overall better job than anything we use in Adobe as it uses AI to analyze the motion in the clip and counteract it as much as possible. Below, I have a few examples of clips stabilized in Topaz AI.
Focus Fix
Ok, I know I said that would be my last one. But, I also wanted to shout this one out for any teams who have struggled with missed focus. Topaz has just added a feature allowing you to take missed focus and fix it with AI! This is a new tool so I have not tested it thoroughly (we never miss focus) but I am excited to see what it can do if the need ever arises!
This tool has changed the way we think when it comes to what is possible in video. We love it as a team and more and more I am getting requests from our editors to “run this through Topaz please!” AI content creation is certainly cool, but content creators using AI tools to create in an improved way is so much cooler. I love seeing these types of tools emerging on the market and I can’t wait to see what comes next!
