Does Anyone Know of a Free Video Upscaling Service?

Would love to upscale a few of the older grow videos and documentaries, as the quality is terrible on a lot of the classics, like Acapulco Gold.

Any ideas?

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was reading a reddit thread and some guy started making his own 4 months ago because he hated that u need to use complex tools or a paid service to upscale video.

, Im not sure how good it is but if He kept working on it since then, I imagine it could be potentially good !

I will say I have no idea if this will work for you, and I couldnt get it to work myself because I dont use chrome or edge. I tried the site on edge and the result came back saying the browser is missing a codec.

Reddit is probably a good place to search through other peoples comments about different services !

https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/13kszda/whats_the_best_freeopen_ai_for/

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Hey @jessethestoner , you could download Davinci Resolve for free and do it that way.

Issue is that upscaling won’t fix a lot of these issues.

When we upscale we are asking the computer to make up information that doesn’t exist… so a bad video transfer at 640x480i will still look bad on a 4K UHD even if up-scaled well.

Now if we can find the sources on film to rescan, or at least an original VHS copy that isn’t totally degraded this could be digitized and then up-ress’d with less issues as I assume the copies in your possession are already compressed for the web.

Granted I know things will change as AI gets more involved but that’s also a product of deeper computing in making up the info that isn’t there.

Most media players in TV’s will upscale to some degree, so if you upscale you’re just helping your tv by not making it do the work for you.

If you are familiar with pre-amps in audio you could think that way too. An bad preamp will make the feed sound bad no matter what; but a great preamp will help make a bad feed a little better.

But you cant get blood from a turnip.

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Just wanted to say I use davinci resolve and didnt know about this, thanks dude !

I will say, at the rate AI is headed, we should have tech that can upscale VHS soon enough, :slight_smile:

We already have AI models that surpass the amount of knowledge a human can learn in their lifetime IF that human read 24 hours a day their entire lifespan.

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Hello and sorry to be semantic, but as an audio nerd, I cannot help myself. Your comparison is fair, but IMHO it should be: "A bad preamp will make the signal sound worse (as in degraded, loss of quality), no matter what; but a great preamp will make a bad signal sound close to identical to the input, just louder.

IDK if you come from guitar background, where the color of the amp is what makes the sound “better”, but in many other purposes a preamp is meant to sound as transparant as possible :slight_smile:

Cheers,
eS :tropical_drink:

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@EnergySlammers I completely respect this. :+1:

Well said!

Absolutely again beautifully said!

I am in film production, initially a grip/electric/camera operator but in the decades playing the game I ended up a renaissance man and look after a non-for-profit for filmmakers. Sound is my weakest skill set in this field so I always appreciate clarifications from the many that know more than me.

On a weird note, I still have to know enough to care for a Protools 5.1 surround mastering suite, and a slew of analogue support including full-coat mag-dubbers. :rofl:

Life’s weird but when I’m making any sort of recordings it’s usually done in a combo of Reaper and Audacity; both of which i don’t know well at all either. :man_facepalming:

My work dictates a “what surprise combo of 1920-2024 tech am I gonna have to weave together now” kinda vibe. :sweat_smile:

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How do you get into this field? sounds fun and has a good mix of a few of my passions :smiley: ( music and film )

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You just go and do it? :rofl:

I used to rent from where I work as it has stuff you can’t rent from commercial houses. The vibe is a collective of artists all doing their own thing while supporting each other (but also competing tbh). One day one of the technical coordinators was moving to a different city so i put in my CV with the rest and ended up getting the job. It’s been a wild ride and I’m always learning, teaching and smiling so I’ve been doing my part to keep the place together since 2006.

This meant that I’ve been around during some major industry changes as folks dropped film for video, then video for HD, then everyone got sick of HD looking all the same regardless of how much you can do with it and then went back to film.

But the catch is that for the industry when things “change” they tent to write-off everything to do with it so now all the production companies are harassing us for film equipment as all the rental houses stopped supporting analogue film near 2013.

Ironically I get to tell HBO Max, Netfilx and other such commercial productions that we can’t rent equipment to them as it’s against our mandate as an artist run center :rofl:

“You can buy the film, but I can’t rent you a camera.” i gotta tell them. :man_shrugging:

They are not used to hearing “no” so it’s always me paraphrasing the no answer until the caller accepts it. :man_facepalming:

Fucking money makes people expect they will get their way. I say fuck you to that attitude. (but not actually fuck you cause that’s unprofessional)

You can totally do this on your own! I’m in my own weird category where I’m the Angus Macgyver of my workplace; which is both awesome but also exhausting.

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