- Is video upscale free?
- No. AI video upscale is a Pro feature: every frame runs through a neural network on our own GPU, so a 30-second 1080p clip occupies it for about 5 minutes. Image upscaling stays free for everyone at Upscale Image.
- What's the difference between the engines?
- Standard gives the best speed-to-quality ratio on real footage and includes a light denoise. Quality is a slower, more thorough engine that can recover more detail on sharp real footage at 15 to 20 times the processing time, so it is limited to clips of 15 seconds; on soft or heavily compressed sources it looks much like Standard, so try Standard first. Anime is trained on animation and keeps lines clean and colours flat without the halos a photo model adds.
- Should I pick 'Original size, sharpened' or 'Upscaled'?
- Original size is the right choice when the video looks soft or was heavily compressed and you want it crisper without a larger file: the AI rebuilds detail at 2× or 4× and the result is scaled back to the source dimensions. Upscaled is for when you actually need more pixels, for example a 480p clip you want at 1080p.
- How big can the output be?
- Up to 4K: the result fits in 3840×2160, or 2160×3840 for a vertical video. A 1080p clip at 2× comes out at 3840×2160, and so does a 720p clip at 4×. A video that is already 4K-sized can't be made bigger, so it can only be sharpened at its own size. A 4K result can run about 20 minutes, the longest we deliver as one file.
- How long does video upscaling take?
- About a quarter of a second per frame for a 1080p video, a little over a second for 4K and much less for small clips, so a 30-second 1080p clip takes about 5 minutes and a 4-second clip well under a minute. Quality mode is 15 to 20 times slower. Slow-motion sources at 120 or 240 fps are delivered at 60 fps, which cuts the work by 2 to 4× and plays back the same. One upscale can use up to 90 minutes of processing: about 9 and a half minutes of 1080p or 2 minutes 20 seconds of 4K, both at 30 fps. A longer clip is turned away before it uploads, with the longest length that fits.
- Will upscaling add real detail?
- The network rebuilds plausible detail that the source lost — edges become sharper, textures more defined, compression noise is smoothed. It is not magic: heavily blurred or tiny footage stays limited, but the result is dramatically better than a bicubic resize.
- How does this compare to desktop upscalers?
- Desktop tools with a large GPU budget still edge ahead on archival footage and offer more controls. For short clips and most social media content this gives comparable results, runs on our hardware, and needs nothing installed.
- Will upscaling fix a blurry or shaky video?
- Only softness from low resolution or compression. Motion blur and camera shake are baked into the frames and upscaling sharpens them along with everything else. Stabilize first with Video Stabilizer, then upscale.
- Should I trim the clip before upscaling?
- Yes. Work is per frame - roughly a quarter of a second each at 1080p - so cutting a 2-minute recording down to the 20 seconds you need removes about 3,000 frames, some 13 minutes of processing. Trim with Cut Video first.
