When you’re editing a video, do you ever think you want to “zoom” (slowly get bigger) this part of the video? But if you make the video’s screen bigger and show it, the image quality will always get worse. In this article, we’ll show people just starting how to deal with it so that the video can be made bigger without losing quality.
Causes of image quality degradation when zooming in
Even if you have a 1920×1080 full HD video, you will get a different impression if you watch it at that resolution or zoom in to 200%.
It looks pretty good on small screens like smartphones and tablets, but the image quality worsens when you watch it on a big screen like a 4K computer or 4K TV.
For example, if you take a picture with a digital camera with a low number of pixels (dots), the image will be fine up to about A5, but it will be blurry if you enlarge it to the size of a newspaper. It’s the same line of thought.
I think it’s because of the video’s clarity (horizontal and vertical size).
When 1080p material is edited at 1080p, it is done dot by dot. However, if you enlarge a part to 2K or 4K, the original 1-pixel data will be drawn with multiple pixels, and the roughness caused by enlargement should be more noticeable.
To put it another way, “enlarge” means “add information.” There’s no way to get back the lost information during the shoot, so if it’s blown up, the quality of the picture will go down. It’s important to know this right away.
How to enlarge videos without degrading image quality with AI
When you zoom in, the image quality gets worse.
So, if you want to make a beautiful picture, you might think you have to decide whether to use zoom at the cost of image quality. In fact, AI can be used to solve this problem (artificial intelligence).
Deep learning is a new type of machine learning that lets AI predict and make “nonexistent pixels” needed to keep the image quality high when the video is blown up.
“AI upscaling” or “AI upconversion” is this kind of work. “Topaz Video Enhance AI” is said to be the standard software.
Topaz Video Enhance AI is a PC app made by an American company called Topaz Labs that improves the quality of videos. It works with both Windows 11/10 and Mac.
With AI, you can make videos from 480p, like a DVD, or 720p 1080p and 1080p 4K/8K bigger and with a higher resolution.
Topaz Video Enhance AI’s basic steps for enlarging a video are “Import video, Set enlargement size, Output video,” so it’s very easy and great. It’s easy enough for beginners to use.
Download and install Topaz Video Enhance AI, and then start it up.
The app can be downloaded and installed from the product homepage, where you can also buy a license. If you’ve never used the program before, you can start with the free trial version.
Step 1. When you open the program, the following screen will show up. Click “Browse” in the middle of the screen or drag and drop the video file (or files) you want to enlarge into the area inside the white dotted frame.
Step 2. After the video has been loaded, the screen will change, and you can adjust a number of different options.
The Video Enlarging Settings
AI Model: There are two ways to convert in “AI Mode”: “Suggested” (the light bulb icon) and “All Models” (the list icon). Once you get used to it, choose the best AI model that matches the original video. On the other hand, if you are not used to it, we recommend “Suggested.”
After you choose “Suggested,” you need to set “Video Quality,” “Video Type,” and “Video Artifact Type.” After you set these, “Recommended” at the end will automatically be set to the recommended AI model.
“Output Size”: You can choose the zoom ratio or the size of the movie you want to export (resolution).
“Video Format”: Choose the format you want to use for your video. There are several compression formats, like “MP4 – H.264” and “MOV – ProRes 422HQ,” but if you set it to “MP4-H.264,” you can play it in a lot of places.
Step 4. After making the above changes, you can immediately check the quality of the converted file by clicking “Preview.”
Step 5. Click the “Start Processing” icon to export the video if the confirmation after the preview is good. How long it takes to export depends on how long the video is, how big it is, and what kind of computer you have. The video file will be made in the same file as the source video by default.
This is the end of the guide on how to use Topaz Video Enhance AI to make videos bigger without losing quality.
Final Thought
If the video’s quality goes down, it will be hard to watch, and you won’t be able to enjoy it.
There are two good ways to keep the image quality from getting worse when you enlarge a video.
One is to use AI to fill in the missing pixels so that the video goes from low resolution to high resolution with the best image quality possible.
Another thing is that when you shoot, you should try to get the best quality you can. For example, the image quality will decline if you export content in full HD to 4K.
On the other hand, when you edit 4K content at full HD resolution, the content is shrunk and used, and when you zoom in, it goes back to its original size instead of getting bigger, so I don’t think it will be too rough.
But the higher the quality of the image, the bigger the file size needs to be, so both converting and editing put a lot of work on the computer.
If you don’t have a computer with a lot of power, use a reasonable image quality (resolution) based on what your computer can do.
