Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “We Remastered My First Video in 4K!”.
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 Gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na result in significantly faster renders, and those of you with older GPUs are gon na, 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 gon na 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 wan na 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 gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na – do that yet though., I’m gon na 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 wan na 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 wan na 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 wan na learn more about it, you can check it out at the link down below. We’re also gon na 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 .