How to Enhance a Video Using AI Tools (Without Making It Look Fake) - Lilach Bullock | AI Implementation Consultant
How to Enhance a Video Using AI Tools (Without Making It Look Fake) - Lilach Bullock | AI Implementation Consultant
摘要: The short version:
enhancing a video with AI tools means fixing four things separately, resolution, audio, colour, and pacing, using different tools
正文
The short version:
enhancing a video with AI tools means fixing four things separately, resolution, audio, colour, and pacing, using different tools for each, not one magic app that does the lot. I use Topaz Video AI for upscaling, Adobe Podcast for audio, and Descript for cutting dead air, and I’ll walk you through the exact order I do it in, including the one setting that makes AI-upscaled footage look plastic if you get it wrong.
What “enhancing” a video means once you break it down
People say “enhance the video” like it’s one button. It isn’t. When a client says their video “looks a bit rough,” they usually mean one of four separate problems: it’s blurry or low resolution, the audio sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom, the colour is flat or too warm, or the whole thing drags because there’s ten seconds of throat-clearing before anyone says anything useful. Each of those needs a different tool. Nobody sells you one app that fixes all four well, and if a tool claims it does, be suspicious of the audio quality especially, because that’s usually the bit that gets bolted on as an afterthought.
I learned this the annoying way, doing it backwards, upscaling a video before I’d fixed the audio, and having to redo the whole export because the audio sync drifted. Order matters. More on that below.
Step one: fix the resolution and sharpness
If your footage was shot on an older phone, in low light, or pulled off a Zoom recording, it’s probably sitting somewhere between 480p and 720p. That looks fine on a small phone screen and terrible full-screen on a laptop or on a client’s TV during a pitch.
The tool I reach for is Topaz Video AI. It’s not free, it’s a one-time purchase (around $299, though they run it down to under $200 in sales fairly often) or you can rent a licence monthly. What it does that a simple “sharpen” filter in Premiere doesn’t: it uses trained models to guess missing detail rather than just increasing contrast at edges. Feed it a shaky 1080p cli