Topaz Video AI

You've got footage that isn't good enough to ship: an old 1080p interview that looks soft on a 4K timeline, a phone clip that's noisy in low light, or a 30fps shot you wish you'd filmed for slow motion. Reshooting usually isn't an option, and the built-in scaling in most editors just makes a blurry frame bigger. Topaz Video exists for exactly this. It's an AI enhancement tool from Topaz Labs that offers Precision Upscale, Creative Upscale, Frame Interpolation, Slow Motion and SDR to HDR conversion, aimed at rescuing footage you already have.

The interesting part is how Topaz now splits the product. You can run it locally as part of Topaz Studio, which advertises "unlimited local rendering," or use the browser-based Topaz for Web Video and the Astra plan, which bill in cloud credits. Astra's 400 credits a month cover roughly 10 minutes of HD video with 4K output, and extra credits cost $0.10 each. That math matters. If you're upscaling a short client deliverable, cloud credits are fine. If you're restoring hours of archival footage, the local route is the only one that makes sense, and the cloud credits expire at the end of each month with no rollover.

Topaz Labs says it's trusted by over 1 million photographers and filmmakers, and the endorsement from Victor Perez, co-founder of Krea, about bridging "fast iteration and final-quality output" lines up with how the tool is pitched. The catch is that the pricing page is a sprawl of overlapping plans: Studio, Studio Pro, Astra, Web Video, Web Image and Photo. Most of the marketing copy on the page is about image models, not video. You'll want to work out up front whether you need local or cloud processing, because that decision picks your plan for you.