Topaz Video review: 4K upscaling settings and limits

This review walks through Topaz Video as a desktop video enhancement tool for Mac and Windows. The speaker demonstrates importing footage by drag and drop, choosing a preset, previewing a short section, and exporting to a chosen folder. His usual choices are 4K or 4K with 60fps for complex movement or footage he wants to slow down. He leaves advanced settings untouched.

The examples show why source quality matters. In a blurry disc golf clip, the speaker finds that enhancement gives trees a painted appearance. A 720p AI-generated advertisement becomes too smooth for his taste. He reports better results with a phone advertisement rendered in 3D, an artificial landscape, and a 2D cartoon, though some edges remain blurry. These are his assessments of the samples, rather than guarantees for other footage.

Processing time is another limitation. The speaker says one model took about 1.5 hours to process five or ten seconds of his footage; the transcript does not reliably identify that model or specify his hardware.

His preferred local AI workflow is to generate video at 1080p and then upscale it in Topaz instead of generating at 4K. He presents this as a way to reduce generation costs. For live-action footage, he recommends a good Full HD source and cautions against expecting badly degraded clips to become convincing 4K.