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Best AI Video Upscalers

Compare the best AI video upscalers in 2026 — Topaz Video, Astra, SeedVR2, FlashVSR, Pixop, Aiarty, UniFab, HitPaw VikPea, AVCLabs, Winxvideo AI and DaVinci Resolve Super Scale — with verified pricing, maximum output resolutions, per-second API costs, open-weight licences and honest free-tier terms.

Updated September 2026

Quick answer: The best AI video upscaler in 2026 is Topaz Video, because its Starlight models are the only diffusion-based video enhancers with full temporal consistency, it renders locally with no upload, and it is the only tool here that outputs above 8K — Topaz caps the application at 16K, specifically 15360 x 8640 pixels. The best way to buy that quality without a subscription is fal.ai’s Topaz Proteus endpoint at $0.20 per 10 seconds of 1080p output. The best free upscaler is SeedVR2 from ByteDance Seed, released under Apache 2.0 and usable commercially, though it needs a datacentre GPU to run at 1080p. The one caveat that matters: AI video upscaling is far slower and far more expensive than image upscaling, because a one-minute clip at 30fps is 1,800 separate frames — AVCLabs’ own documentation concedes conversion times “ranging from 8 to 30 hours”.

This guide covers tools whose job is increasing the resolution of existing video. That is a different job from enlarging a still photograph, which is covered on best AI image upscalers, and a different job from cutting, masking and grading footage, which is covered on best AI video editors. Where a vendor sells both an image and a video upscaler, we cover only its video product line here. Every price is US list price taken from the vendor’s own page on 13 September 2026, and we write “not published” rather than repeating a third-party guess.

The current state of AI video upscaling: September 2026

Six things changed this category in the last twelve months, and two of them will make most published advice wrong within weeks.

Topaz Astra shuts down on 30 September 2026. Topaz’s own FAQ states that “On September 30, 2026, most video models and features inside Astra will be fully shifted to Topaz for Web and the Astra interface will no longer be accessible” (Topaz Labs). Astra was the product Topaz spent 2026 promoting — Astra 2 launched on 28 April 2026 with promptable upscaling in what Topaz called “the largest single release of AI models in company history” (Topaz Labs). Any guide still recommending Astra by name after this month is recommending a product you cannot log into. The successor is Topaz for Web – Video.

Topaz Video AI was discontinued, and the replacement is not an upgrade. Topaz’s own documentation is blunt: Video AI’s “v7.1.5 is the final version”, the new application is a separate product, and “Is Topaz Video a free upgrade? No” (Topaz Labs). Perpetual licences went with it. Chief executive Eric Yang wrote on 17 September 2025 that “perpetual licenses will no longer be available for our products” (Topaz Labs); existing holders keep the version they bought, receive no new models, and get no cloud credits. Most third-party articles still describe “Topaz Video AI” as the current product. It has not existed for a year.

The Adobe acquisition has still not closed. Adobe announced a definitive agreement to acquire Topaz Labs on 25 June 2026, with no price disclosed (Adobe). The US Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of the antitrust waiting period on 28 July 2026 (FTC). As of Adobe’s third-quarter FY2026 earnings call on 10 September 2026, the deal had not closed and Adobe’s prepared remarks still referred to its “agreement to acquire Topaz Labs”. Adobe has said Topaz products will remain available standalone after close. Treat every “Adobe acquires Topaz” headline as describing an agreement, not a completed transaction, and treat the widely circulated $700 million to $1 billion valuation as an analyst estimate rather than a disclosed figure.

Per-second API pricing replaced subscriptions as the cheapest route. fal.ai now resells Topaz’s Proteus model at $0.10 per 10 seconds of 720p output, $0.20 at 1080p and $0.60 at 4K, with no subscription. A one-minute 1080p pass costs $1.20. Against Topaz Video’s $59 a month, the API is cheaper for anyone upscaling less than roughly 21 minutes of 1080p footage a month. Notably, Topaz does not publish the credit cost of its own video API — its published credit table covers only the image endpoint — while its resellers publish exact per-second rates.

The open-weight leaders became commercially usable, which was not true two years ago. The three strongest current models are all Apache 2.0: SeedVR2 (ByteDance Seed, ICLR 2026), FlashVSR (CVPR 2026) and SparkVSR (ECCV 2026). That is a sharp break from the previous generation, where the best-known model, Upscale-A-Video, shipped under the non-commercial S-Lab License 1.0, and VEnhancer shipped with no licence file at all — which means all rights reserved, not permissive.

The category’s search results are written almost entirely by vendors. Of the roundup-format pages ranking for “best AI video upscaler”, the overwhelming majority are published by companies that sell one of the ranked tools, and in nearly every case that company ranks itself first with Topaz second. Digiarty publishes competing roundups under two brands — VideoProc crowning VideoProc Converter AI and Winxvideo crowning Winxvideo AI — while owning both products and a third brand, Aiarty. UniFab and Digiarty publish reciprocal negative reviews of each other. We have no product in this category.

The three types of AI video upscaler

Match the type to the job before comparing individual products. The failure modes are different for each, and paying more does not move you between them.

The distinction that matters more in video than in stills is temporal consistency. A single-image upscaler applied frame by frame — which is what Real-ESRGAN does in every “video” wrapper built on it — has no knowledge of the previous frame, so detail it invents changes between frames and the result shimmers. Topaz’s marketing claim for Starlight is specifically that it is “the first-ever diffusion AI model for video enhancement and the only one to achieve full temporal consistency” (Topaz Labs). That claim is a vendor claim, but the underlying problem it names is real and is the single best reason not to upscale video with an image tool.

Best AI video upscalers ranked (September 2026)

Ranked by overall suitability for a general user today, weighting output quality, maximum resolution, price transparency, free-tier usefulness, commercial licence and whether the tool runs locally. Prices are US list and per month unless stated.

Two tools deliberately absent from this table: Topaz Astra, because it closes on 30 September 2026, and CapCut, because its page is titled “Free AI Video Upscaler & Enhancer | 4K Online” while its own instructions require you to “Download and install CapCut Desktop” — there is no online upscaler, and CapCut publishes no price.

The best AI video upscalers compared

1. Topaz Video — best overall

Type: Reconstructive, generative and restorative, depending on model Price: $299 a year, or $59 a month without an annual commitment, or $39 a month on an annual commitment. A Topaz Video Pro tier is $699 a year. Topaz Studio, which bundles every Topaz application, is $399 a year, or $69 a month rolling; Studio Pro is $799 a year, or $79 a month on an annual commitment (Topaz Labs). Topaz no longer sells perpetual licences. Version: 1.7.0, released 11 August 2026 (Topaz Labs) Platforms: Windows 10 and later, macOS 13 and later on Apple Silicon. Intel Macs, Snapdragon processors, virtual machines, external GPUs and Linux are all explicitly unsupported (Topaz docs). Models: Starlight Precise 2.6 and 2.5, Starlight HQ, Mini, Sharp and Fast 2, plus Proteus, Iris, Nyx, Rhea, Rhea XL, Artemis, Gaia, Theia, Apollo, Chronos, Aion, Themis, SDR to HDR and Stabilization

Topaz Video is the reference implementation of video upscaling and the tool every competitor benchmarks against — including in their own marketing. It renders locally, so footage never leaves the machine, and it ships the broadest model roster in the category by a wide margin.

Why it wins: Topaz Video’s ceiling is 16K. Topaz’s documentation states the application “is limited to 16K. Resolutions over 15360 x 8640 may not run with default settings” (Topaz docs) — roughly sixteen times the pixel count of 4K, and beyond anything else here. The Starlight family is genuinely differentiated: diffusion-based rather than GAN-based, with temporal consistency built in rather than bolted on. Starlight Precise 2.6 added a sharpness control and runs up to 15 per cent faster than 2.5 (Topaz Labs). Version 1.7.0 also removed the Pro gate on Starlight Mini, which is now available on every tier. Unlimited local rendering means the monthly price is the whole price.

Limitations: Starlight is slow, and Topaz says so plainly: “Processing times can range from several minutes to multiple days depending on your video length, resolution, frame rate, and system hardware” (Topaz docs). The advertised 6GB VRAM minimum is misleading — the Starlight Series “exceeds the app’s recommended specifications”, with real floors of 10GB for Mini and HQ, 12GB for Precise 2.6 and 16GB for Sharp and Fast 2, and Sharp is Windows and NVIDIA only. On Mac, Starlight Sharp, Fast 2 and HQ are not supported locally at all, and Starlight on Mac needs 36GB of RAM. Cloud rendering is capped at 8K, not 16K, and the included 25 monthly cloud credits do not roll over. There is no free tier and no watermarked trial: Topaz’s trial requires a payment method. Topaz’s own pricing card also contradicts its documentation, describing Starlight Mini, Sharp, HQ and Fast as “Cloud access” when the docs state the desktop app “houses all the Starlight AI models that can be rendered locally”. We have followed the release notes.

Best for: Professional restoration, archival work, anything that must stay on your own machine, and any output above 4K.

2. fal.ai Topaz endpoints — best way to buy Topaz quality without a subscription

Type: All three, by endpoint Price: Precision (Proteus and 20 other classical models) $0.10 per 10 seconds at 720p, $0.20 at 1080p, $0.60 at 4K (fal.ai). Generative (Starlight) $1.20 per 10 seconds up to 1080p and $2.60 at 4K, or $0.60 and $1.30 using Starlight Fast 2 (fal.ai). Creative (Astra 2) $3.00 per 10 seconds up to 1080p and $5.00 at 4K. All figures are for 30fps sources; fal states the final cost depends on frame rate as well as resolution and duration. Maximum output: 4K Limits: Sources up to five minutes

fal.ai resells Topaz’s models as API endpoints with published per-second pricing, and it is the clearest pricing in this entire category. A one-minute 1080p Proteus pass is $1.20. The same minute through Starlight Precise is $7.20, which is an honest reflection of how much more compute diffusion costs.

Why it wins: You get Topaz’s models without Topaz’s subscription, without the GPU, and without the multi-day render. For anyone upscaling less than about 21 minutes of 1080p footage a month, the Proteus endpoint is cheaper than a $299-a-year desktop licence, and there is no commitment. fal also hosts the open-weight models directly — SeedVR2 at $0.001 per megapixel and FlashVSR at $0.0005 per megapixel, which works out at $0.25 and $0.125 respectively for a 121-frame 1080p clip.

Limitations: 4K is the ceiling, so this is not a route to 8K. Everything uploads, so it is the wrong choice for confidential footage. Unit rates are not comparable across endpoints — some bill per second of video, some per megapixel, and Clarity’s Crystal endpoint bills per megapixel per second — so you cannot rank them without doing the arithmetic for your specific clip. Note also that fal’s own “best video upscalers” guide ranks only tools fal sells access to.

Best for: Occasional jobs, pipelines, and anyone who wants Topaz output without Topaz’s hardware requirements.

3. SeedVR2 — best free and open-weight

Type: Restorative, one-step diffusion transformer Price: Free. Apache 2.0, commercial use permitted (GitHub) Weights: 3B and 7B variants (Hugging Face) Venue: ICLR 2026; arXiv 2506.05301 Hardware, in the authors’ own words: “1 H100-80G can handle videos with 100x720x1280. 4 H100-80G further support 1080p and 2K videos (sp_size=4)”

SeedVR2 from ByteDance Seed is the open-weight quality reference, and the permissive licence is as important as the quality. It is primarily a video restoration model rather than a pure upscaler, which makes it strongest on degraded sources.

Why it wins: Apache 2.0 means you can ship SeedVR2 output in a commercial product with no licence to negotiate — which separates it from most of the previous generation of academic video super-resolution. It is one-step rather than multi-step diffusion, so it is dramatically faster than the models it replaced, and users on r/upscaling report the 3B variant matching or beating Topaz’s Starlight on some sources. There is a ComfyUI integration endorsed in the official repository (numz/ComfyUI-SeedVR2_VideoUpscaler).

Limitations: The hardware bar is the problem. The authors’ own figure is an H100 for 720p and four H100s for 1080p and 2K — this is not a consumer-GPU model in its reference configuration, whatever community quantisations achieve. The repository has only nine commits and no activity since 27 January 2026. No maximum output resolution is published. If you do not own datacentre hardware, the practical way to use SeedVR2 is to rent it by the megapixel through fal.ai or WaveSpeed, which costs money but costs less than a single Topaz month for most jobs.

Best for: Anyone who needs commercial rights and quality without a per-use fee, and has, or can rent, the GPU.

4. Pixop — best for broadcast and archive

Type: Reconstructive and restorative Price: Per gigapixel processed, with no subscription at all. Super Resolution $0.079 per gigapixel; Deep Restoration $0.369; Deep Restoration 2 $0.486; Face Forward $0.551; Denoiser $0.413; InfiniteHDR $0.217; Motion Compensation $0.992. Encoders bill separately — H.265 $0.136 per gigapixel, ProRes $0.021. Storage $0.023 per GB per month. Minimum credit purchase $10 (Pixop, rate card updated 1 July 2026) Maximum output: UHD Discounts: Up to 62 per cent on Super Resolution at 1,000 gigapixels per job

Pixop is the only entry here built for broadcasters rather than creators, and its pricing model reflects that: you pay for the pixels you process, the platform generates a cost estimate before every job, and failed jobs are not charged.

Why it wins: Super Resolution at $0.079 per gigapixel is, counter-intuitively, one of the cheapest filters on Pixop’s own rate card — cheaper than its denoiser and eight times cheaper than motion compensation. For a rights-holder remastering a library, per-gigapixel billing with volume discounts is the only model here that scales sensibly into thousands of hours. Pixop’s own positioning is explicit: it “helps broadcasters and media companies enhance video with AI” and “deliver UHD HDR from HD pipelines - without costly infrastructure upgrades”.

Limitations: Pixop does not claim 8K anywhere on its own site — its wording is “Upscale HD/SD content to UHD”, and the “SD to 8K” phrasing circulating in third-party reviews is not Pixop’s. Pricing on the AWS Marketplace is separate, at 1 credit to $0.001, and volume and loyalty discounts do not apply there. Pricing for Pixop Prime, the licensed on-premises pipeline, is not published. There is no free tier and no trial.

Best for: Broadcasters, rights-holders, archive remastering, and any job measured in hours rather than clips.

5. Aiarty Video Enhancer — best-value desktop licence

Type: Restorative Price: Standard licence $79 a year (list $99), one machine. Lifetime licence $165 at the time of writing, against a list price of $235, covering three machines on one platform, with lifetime updates. Commercial use is included in both (Aiarty) Version: v3.5, 3 February 2026 (Aiarty) Free trial: No signup. “Batch export is not supported. Processing limited to 120 seconds; exported videos include a watermark.” Maximum output: 4K — x1, x2, x4, 1K, 2K or 4K Models: moDetail-HQ v3 (diffusion plus GAN, texture and detail), Smooth-HQ v3 (diffusion, faithful restoration), superVideo vHQ (grainy and low-light sources, x2 only) Hardware: 4GB VRAM minimum, 8GB recommended; Windows 10 x64 or macOS 13 and later including Apple Silicon; output limited to MP4 and MOV

Aiarty Video Enhancer is the most honest product in the consumer tier, and that is the reason it ranks here. It is the only desktop tool in this guide that does not claim 8K or 16K — it says 4K, which is what it does. A lifetime licence covering three machines with commercial use included, at $165, is the best value in the category.

Why it wins: Three machines and commercial rights on a one-time purchase, from a vendor that does not inflate its resolution claims. The Step mode uses tiled inference to run on lower-VRAM hardware at the cost of speed, which matters when the alternatives demand an RTX 30-series card.

Limitations: The 120-second trial cap with no batch export makes it hard to evaluate on the long-form restoration Aiarty markets it for. The SDR-to-HDR feature is labelled “HDR-(experimental)” in Aiarty’s own interface while the marketing sells it as a headline. Aiarty’s “3X Faster” benchmark cites an RTX 5090 paired with 8GB of system RAM, which is not a plausible test rig, and the comparison products are unnamed. Aiarty is a Digiarty brand, so its “best AI video upscaler” blog posts are vendor content.

Best for: Anyone who wants a one-time purchase with commercial rights, on modest hardware.

6. UniFab Video Upscaler AI — the most generous trial

Type: Reconstructive Price: Not published in any fetchable form. Every price on unifab.ai is injected client-side and renders empty in page source, including the checkout. The only static figures on the site are a four-product lifetime bundle at $199.99 and a “New Products Guarantee” at $119.00 a year (UniFab). We are not publishing a third-party guess. Version: Suite 4.2.5.0, dated 11 September 2026 (UniFab) Free trial: “30-day free trial, full access, no watermark” Maximum output: “Upscale videos to 4K, 8K, and 16K” locally; the FabCloud edition is capped at 4K Models: Equinox (general), Vellum (texture), Kairo (anime), Titanus (film and TV, sold as a separately licensed DLC) Hardware: “Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), 16 GB RAM, 8 GB VRAM, and an NVIDIA RTX 30 series or higher”

UniFab Video Upscaler AI is the successor to DVDFab’s discontinued Video Enhancer AI, and its 30-day unrestricted trial is the most generous in this guide — if the claim holds, you can complete a real project before paying anything.

Why it wins: Thirty days with full features and no watermark is a genuinely different offer from a 30-second watermarked clip. UniFab also publishes an actual speed benchmark rather than a vague claim: “720p to 1080p is approximately 1.3x the original video length; 1080p to 4K is approximately 3.5x the original video length”, tested on an RTX 4070.

Limitations: The unpublished pricing is disqualifying for a considered purchase — you cannot compare a product whose price you can only discover at checkout. The 8GB VRAM and RTX 30-series floor is the steepest published hardware requirement here. Titanus is a paid add-on on top of the app. The 16K claim is an output ceiling, not a quality claim, and UniFab’s own cloud edition manages only 4K. UniFab publishes multiple “best AI video upscaler” roundups ranking UniFab first.

Best for: Evaluating properly before buying, and Windows users with a recent NVIDIA card.

7. HitPaw VikPea — broadest model range, worst free tier

Type: All three Price: Windows, current sale pricing: $43.19 a month, $99.99 a year, $350.39 perpetual (HitPaw). List prices are $53.99, $124.99 and $437.99. Mac is a separate purchase. Version: V5.5.0, 25 August 2026 (HitPaw). Renamed from HitPaw Video Enhancer on 29 October 2024. Free tier: Preview only. HitPaw’s own FAQ: “The Free license only supports preview of HitPaw VikPea. With the Paid license, you can unlock all features and export your enhanced video.” Maximum output: 8K claimed Models: General Restoration, UHD Restoration, AI Generative, AI Portrait, Video Quality Repair, HD and Fast Sharpen, Animation, Professional Denoise, Frame Interpolation, Colorize, SDR to HDR, AI Colorist and more

HitPaw VikPea has the widest model menu of any consumer tool here and a properly maintained release cadence. It is also the entry with the sharpest gap between marketing and terms.

Why it wins: Twenty-plus named modes covering restoration, portraits, animation, colourisation and HDR conversion in one application, updated as recently as last month, with the UHD Restoration model made up to 35 per cent faster in V5.5.0.

Limitations: Two things should decide this purchase. First, the free version cannot export anything — it is a preview, not a trial, despite widespread third-party claims of watermarked free exports. Second, a perpetual licence does not buy unlimited use: HitPaw’s own comparison table shows the AI Generative, AI Portrait, AI Colorist, watermark removal and cloud features metered by credits on the monthly, yearly and perpetual licences alike. The generation features resell third-party models, so those credits are buying somebody else’s API. HitPaw’s published specifications are also careless — the minimum processor line offers “Intel i3 or AMD RX 580 or higher”, mixing a CPU with a GPU, no VRAM figure is published, and the Mac minimum reads “Apple M-series processor from 2015 onward”, which predates Apple Silicon by five years.

Best for: Someone who wants many restoration modes in one place and has read the credit terms.

8. AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI — best face and colour restoration

Type: Restorative Price: $39.95 a month; $95.96 a year (list $119.95); $149.90 perpetual (list $299.90) (AVCLabs). One licence covers one PC; Mac is a separate purchase. Refunds are five days on subscriptions, 30 days on the perpetual licence. Version: V5.3.0, 22 January 2026 (AVCLabs) Free trial: Unlimited downloads, but “Videos generated by the free trial version will be watermarked and the length of each exported video is limited to a maximum of 30 seconds” Maximum output: 8K claimed — “from SD to 1080p, HD to 4K, and even up to 8K” Hardware: NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti minimum, RTX 3060 recommended; Face Refinement needs 4GB of VRAM, 6GB recommended

AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI is a restoration tool first. Its 5.3.0 release added a premium colourisation model, SDR-to-HDR conversion, a film-grain effect and a Detail Balance control for reducing over-sharpening, which is a sensible set of additions for old footage.

Why it wins: It is still sold with a perpetual licence, at $149.90, in a category where the market leader abandoned perpetual licensing entirely. The face and colour restoration path — Face Refinement plus the premium colorizer plus grain — is the most complete treatment for degraded archival material outside Pixop.

Limitations: AVCLabs publishes the most alarming speed figures in this guide, in its own FAQ: conversion time “ranging from 8 to 30 hours”, and HD to 8K at “5 seconds for each frame” on a GTX 1650 Super, which works out at roughly two hours of processing per minute of 24fps footage. It also advises enabling only one AI feature at a time because combining them makes processing “exceedingly slow”. The lowest GPU floor here comes with the longest waits. AVCLabs’ online tool separately claims 16K on its marketing, 4K or 8K in its FAQ and 1080p or 2K in the actual application — three different numbers for one product.

Best for: Restoring old, damaged or black-and-white footage, if you can leave a machine running overnight.

9. DaVinci Resolve Super Scale — best if you already own Studio

Type: Reconstructive Price: DaVinci Resolve Studio is $295, bought outright rather than by subscription. The free edition is genuinely free with no watermark, but Super Scale is a Studio-only feature (Blackmagic Design) Maximum output: Blackmagic’s own description is “Super Scale high quality image uprezzing so you can create 4K and 8K images from HD sources” Version: DaVinci Resolve 21.1, announced September 2026

If you already own DaVinci Resolve Studio, your marginal cost of upscaling is zero, and Super Scale sits inside the timeline rather than beside it. That makes it the right default for a great many editors before they buy anything else.

Why it wins: A one-time $295 that also buys an entire professional post-production suite is the best value-per-dollar in this guide, and no round trip to a second application is required. Everything stays on your machine.

Limitations: Do not confuse Super Scale with AI UltraSharpen, which Resolve 21 introduced and which most 2026 coverage describes backwards. Blackmagic’s own release text says UltraSharpen is used to “upscale low resolution images” for stills, but for video it is “DaVinci’s most advanced sharpening tool to date” to be used “with upscaled videos” — a sharpener applied after upscaling, not an upscaler (Blackmagic Design). Super Scale remains the video upscaler, and it is a classical neural upscaler rather than a diffusion model, so it will not recover detail the way Starlight or SeedVR2 can. Blackmagic also does not currently publish Super Scale’s scale factors on a live page; the commonly cited 2x, 3x and 4x figures trace to the version 18.6 manual.

Best for: Editors already in Resolve Studio who need a good result without a second subscription.

10. Winxvideo AI — cheapest paid desktop tool

Type: Reconstructive Price: $34.95 a year for three PCs, renewing at $39.95; $54.95 lifetime for one PC; $79.95 lifetime family licence for three to five PCs (Digiarty) Version: V4.10, 19 August 2026 (Digiarty) Free trial: Not time-limited, but five watermark-free exports per AI feature Maximum output: 4K for video, despite site navigation copy referring to 8K Models: Gen Detail v3, Real Smooth v3, Anime, Zyxt

Winxvideo AI is the budget entry, and at $54.95 for a lifetime licence it undercuts everything else that is not free. Note that VideoProc Converter AI is the same company, at identical prices, with the same Gen Detail and Real Smooth models — Digiarty sells both, plus Aiarty, and publishes separate “best upscaler” roundups under each brand crowning a different one of its own products. Treat them as one product with two names.

Why it wins: The lowest price of entry to competent 4K upscaling, and the AI tools sit inside a full converter, compressor, downloader and recorder, which is genuinely useful if those are jobs you also have.

Limitations: Video output tops out at 4K; the 8K references on Digiarty’s site refer to handling 8K input and to image upscaling, which goes to 8K or 10K. This is claim inflation and worth knowing before you buy. Five free exports per feature is not enough to evaluate quality on real footage. No VRAM requirement is published. The lifetime licence covers one machine.

Best for: Occasional 4K upscaling on a small budget, bundled with conversion and compression work.

11. Clipchamp — best free option, and the most honest vendor

Type: Reconstructive Price: Free. 4K export requires Microsoft 365 or Clipchamp Premium; Microsoft does not publish a standalone dollar figure (Microsoft) Free tier: Real, with no watermark. Free accounts can upscale, but export is capped at 1080p. Maximum output: Targets of 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4K Platform: Windows desktop application only — Microsoft states the feature “isn’t available when you use Clipchamp in a web browser”

Microsoft’s Clipchamp is the only genuinely free, genuinely watermark-free upscaler here from a vendor with no incentive to overstate it. Microsoft’s own wording is that “The Upscale feature in Clipchamp uses AI-powered video super resolution”, and that “Upscaling a clip and exporting the project are separate steps”.

Why it wins: No watermark, no credits, no signup friction, and it runs a local model on your CPU or NPU rather than uploading. Microsoft is also the only vendor in this category that publishes honest limitations, stating plainly that “AI-enhanced details are estimates, not a factual reconstruction of the original scene” and cautioning against forensic, medical and identity use. Every other vendor on this page sells the opposite impression.

Limitations: Windows only, and not in the browser despite Clipchamp’s reputation as a web editor. It is hardware-gated on the local model. Free export is capped at 1080p, so the 4K target needs a paid Microsoft plan. It is a general-purpose upscaler, not a restoration suite — there is no colourisation, no face model, no interlacing repair.

Best for: A free, clean 1080p upscale on Windows with no account and no watermark.

12. Video2X — best free offline tool for anime

Type: Reconstructive Price: Free under GNU AGPL v3 Version: 6.4.0, the most recent tagged release, dated 24 January (GitHub) Platforms: Windows installer with a Qt6 interface, Linux via AUR and AppImage, and a container image for Linux and macOS. There is no native macOS build. Hardware: An AVX2 CPU (Intel Haswell or AMD Excavator and later) and any Vulkan-capable GPU — NVIDIA Kepler, AMD GCN 1.0 or Intel HD 4000 and later. No VRAM minimum published; by far the lowest hardware bar here. Models: Anime4K v4, Real-ESRGAN, Real-CUGAN and RIFE for frame interpolation

Video2X is the free answer for anime and illustration. It uploads nothing, watermarks nothing, limits nothing, and runs on hardware a decade old.

Why it wins: No account, no cap, no watermark, no resolution ceiling claimed, and it runs where nothing else here will — an Intel HD 4000 from 2012 meets the requirement. For an anime library, the Real-CUGAN and Anime4K paths are purpose-trained on exactly that material and need as little as 1.5GB of VRAM.

Limitations: The model set is anime-first. There is no face restoration, no colourisation, no stabilisation, no HDR conversion, and nothing tuned for live action — Real-ESRGAN, its most general model, is a single-image network with no temporal consistency component, applied frame by frame, and has had no release since 20 September 2022. Video2X itself has had no tagged release since January, though there are commits since. The AGPL carries redistribution obligations if you build a product on it.

Best for: Anime, cartoons and illustration, on any hardware, for nothing.

Open-weight and self-hosted video upscalers

If you can run a GPU — or rent one — the open-weight options are free and, in SeedVR2’s case, competitive with the commercial leader. The licence is the first thing to check, because two of the best-known models cannot legally be used commercially and a third has no licence at all.

The short version: use SeedVR2 if you need quality and commercial rights, FlashVSR if you need speed, Real-CUGAN or Anime4K for anime on modest hardware, and avoid Upscale-A-Video and VEnhancer entirely in any commercial context regardless of how good the sample clips look. Treat STAR, SparkVSR and DOVE as commercially uncertain until you have read the CogVideoX licence that governs their base weights — an Apache 2.0 wrapper around differently licensed weights does not make the weights Apache 2.0.

Most people run these through ComfyUI, which is GPL-3.0 and ships new stable releases roughly every two weeks. One warning that applies to every model here: a ComfyUI node is not the model. FlashVSR’s authors publish a side-by-side comparison showing that third-party ports which drop its sparse-attention module produce “noticeable quality degradation, especially at higher resolutions”. If you benchmark an open-weight upscaler through an unofficial node, you are benchmarking the node.

Upscaling APIs: what it actually costs per minute of video

If you are upscaling programmatically, or occasionally, subscriptions are the wrong pricing model. These are published prices as of 13 September 2026. All per-second figures assume a 30fps source unless stated; duration-billed endpoints charge more for higher frame rates.

The pricing insight that matters: the cheapest and most expensive routes to a one-minute 1080p upscale differ by sixty times, from $0.30 through WaveSpeed’s own model to $18.00 through Topaz Astra 2. That spread is not a quality ranking — it mostly tracks classical versus diffusion architecture — but it does mean the model choice is a bigger cost decision than the vendor choice. A second insight worth acting on: the ByteDance upscaler is priced identically on fal.ai and WaveSpeed, at $0.0072, $0.0144 and $0.0288 per second, which means both are passing through BytePlus list price with no markup.

Two cautions on the table above. Replicate hosts topazlabs/video-upscale, which has over a million runs and supports up to 4K and 60fps, but Replicate renders its per-model prices client-side and we could not verify a per-second figure, so we have not published one; its community models bill by hardware-second, at $0.001400 for an A100 80GB and $0.000225 for a T4. And Topaz itself does not publish the credit cost of a video upscale through its own API — the credit table on its developer documentation covers the image endpoint only. The most-cited brand in the category is also the least transparent about what its API costs, while its resellers publish exact rates.

Upscaling inside a generation workflow

Two platforms better known for image work also sell video upscalers, and they make sense only if you are already generating in them. We cover their image products on best AI image upscalers; this is their video product line.

Magnific, the company formerly trading as Freepik, offers an AI Video Upscaler with three model options — Topaz, Sharper Pro and Magnific’s own, in Precision and Creative modes. Magnific’s own words are “Upscale your videos up to 4K in one click” with frame rates boosted to 60fps, and its documentation lists a resolution ladder stopping at 2160p, so 4K is the ceiling and there is no 8K path. Its marketing page states support for “videos up to 8 seconds long”, which restricts it to single shots. Plans start at Premium $20 a month, or $14.50 billed annually, with Premium+ at $45 or $33.75 — and the feature matrix suggests the Topaz models are gated to Premium+ and above. Magnific does not publish the credit cost of a video upscale, giving only a band of “100 to 500+ credits” across all tools, and its pricing page and credits documentation contradict each other on whether credits roll over.

Krea’s Enhancer handles video as well as stills, adding frame interpolation to 120fps, slow motion up to 8x and film grain alongside the upscale, and it names the Topaz sub-models it runs: Proteus, Iris, Artemis, Nyx, Gaia and Apollo. Krea’s documented ceiling is “Up to 8K (model dependent)” on that Topaz path, while its own in-house Krea Video model stops at 4096 x 2160. Signed-in free users can enhance up to four videos per 24 hours. The catch is in the plan structure: the Free tier has no video models at all, and Basic at $9 a month, or $5.25 billed annually, gets only “selected” video models with a video concurrency of zero — you need Pro at $35, or $21 annually, for the full set. Krea does not publish a compute-unit cost per video enhance, warning only that “Upscaling videos can consume your compute budget quickly.”

Neither is the right choice as a standalone upscaler. Both are reasonable if the footage was generated in the same tab.

Upscaling built into software you already own

Before buying anything, check whether the upscaler is already on your machine. Three of these cost nothing extra.

Adobe Premiere is the surprise on that list. Premiere’s 2026 AI features are Object Mask, Generative Extend, Media Intelligence and the AI Assistant beta — none is an upscaler, and Adobe’s own what’s-new and beta-features pages contain no reference to upscaling or super resolution. The Topaz models people expect to find in Premiere arrive through Topaz’s own UXP panel, released on 7 to 8 May 2026, which sends media out to Topaz’s cloud for processing (Topaz Labs). It is third-party, credit-metered, and not covered by a Creative Cloud subscription. Adobe’s acquisition of Topaz has not closed, so no Topaz model has yet shipped into Premiere as an Adobe feature.

Filmora is worth knowing about for a specific reason: its Enhance (Local) mode is free, consumes no credits and outputs up to 3840 x 2160, provided you have an RTX 30-series card. Its other modes are metered — Generative Enhance at 2 credits per second, and a Topaz Starlight option at roughly 2 to 3 credits per frame capped at one minute. Wondershare’s own credits page also lists a flat “20 credits per time” for the AI Video Enhancer, which cannot be reconciled with the per-second rates, so check the mode before assuming a cost.

What your graphics card can and cannot do

NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution is not an upscaler you can export from. It is a real-time playback filter applied to streaming video in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and an RTX branch build of VLC, toggled in the NVIDIA app, and available on RTX 20, 30, 40 and 50 series cards (NVIDIA). It cannot save or export an upscaled file. The same is true of AMD Video Upscaling, introduced in Adrenalin 24.1.1 for Radeon RX 7000 desktop cards, which works up to 4K in DirectX 11 applications and single-display configurations only (AMD). Apple ships video super resolution as a developer API only — VTSuperResolutionScalerConfiguration, introduced in macOS 15.4 and available on iOS and macOS 26 (Apple) — with no user-facing toggle anywhere in macOS, Safari or QuickTime.

Offline export from GPU hardware is possible, but through a different product: NVIDIA’s RTX Video SDK explicitly supports “offline processing on creative apps”, and the Maxine VFX SDK exposes a far more granular video super-resolution filter. Neither publishes licence terms or cost, and we found no shipping editor that integrates them.

Use-case recommendations

For the highest possible quality, on your own machine

Winner: Topaz Video, $299 a year

Starlight Precise 2.6 is the strongest commercial video model, it renders locally so nothing uploads, and Topaz is the only tool here that goes above 8K. Budget 12 to 16GB of VRAM and a long render. Alternative: SeedVR2 if you have datacentre hardware and would rather not pay.

For upscaling occasionally

Winner: fal.ai’s Topaz Proteus endpoint, $0.20 per 10 seconds at 1080p

A one-minute pass costs $1.20 with no subscription and no GPU. Below roughly 21 minutes of 1080p a month, this is cheaper than a $299-a-year Topaz licence. Alternative: WaveSpeed’s own upscaler at $0.025 per 5 seconds if cost matters more than the Topaz name.

For restoring old, damaged or black-and-white footage

Winner: AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI, $149.90 perpetual

Face Refinement, the premium colourisation model and film-grain matching in one perpetual licence, on a GTX 1050 Ti. Expect very long renders. Alternative: Pixop Deep Restoration 2 at $0.486 per gigapixel if the library is large enough to justify per-pixel billing.

For a professional archive or broadcast library

Winner: Pixop, Super Resolution at $0.079 per gigapixel

Per-gigapixel billing with volume discounts to 62 per cent, cost estimates before every job, and no charge for failed jobs. It is the only entry here whose pricing model survives contact with thousands of hours. Alternative: Topaz Studio at $399 a year if you would rather render on owned hardware.

For upscaling AI-generated video

Winner: fal.ai’s Topaz Astra 2 endpoint, $3.00 per 10 seconds to 1080p

Astra 2 was built specifically to fix the distortions in generated footage, and taking it through an API sidesteps the fact that the Astra interface itself closes on 30 September 2026. Alternative: generate at a higher resolution in the first place — see best AI video generators, where several current models output native 4K.

For a one-time purchase with commercial rights

Winner: Aiarty Video Enhancer, $235 lifetime for three machines, discounted to $165

Commercial use is included, three machines are covered, and Aiarty is the only desktop vendor here that does not inflate its resolution claim. Alternative: Winxvideo AI at $54.95 lifetime if you only need one machine and no commercial rights.

For zero budget

Winner: Clipchamp, free

No watermark, no credits, no signup, a local model, and 1080p export on the free plan. Alternative: Video2X for anime, or DaVinci Resolve free edition for the rest of the edit, though Super Scale itself needs Studio.

For anime and animation

Winner: Video2X with Real-CUGAN, free

Real-CUGAN and Anime4K are trained on exactly this material, need as little as 1.5GB of VRAM, and cost nothing. Alternative: UniFab’s Kairo model or Winxvideo’s Anime model if you want a graphical application with support.

For output above 4K

Winner: Topaz Video

Topaz caps the desktop application at 16K and is the only tool here with a documented ceiling that high. Note that Topaz’s own cloud rendering stops at 8K, and that encoder choice constrains it further — H.264 High tops out at 4096 x 4096, so anything above 4K needs H.265, AV1, VP9 or ProRes. Alternative: none that we can verify. UniFab claims 16K but publishes no price; every API endpoint here stops at 4K or 8K.

For footage that must remain confidential

Winner: Topaz Video or Video2X

Both process entirely locally with no upload. Every cloud tool on this page requires you to send the footage to someone else’s servers, which rules them out for unreleased, licensed or sensitive material regardless of price.

What AI video upscaling actually does, and where it fails

Every tool in this guide is inventing pixels, frame by frame. A 4x upscale of a 1280 x 720 frame produces roughly 14.7 million pixels from 0.9 million, which means more than fifteen out of every sixteen pixels in the output were never captured. Do that 1,800 times for one minute of 30fps footage and the scale of the invention becomes clear.

Four practical consequences follow.

Video is not images, and the difference is temporal. A single-image upscaler has no memory of the previous frame, so the detail it invents changes shot to shot and the result shimmers or crawls. This is why Real-ESRGAN, excellent on stills, produces unstable video when wrapped frame by frame, and why Topaz’s central claim for Starlight is temporal consistency rather than sharpness. If you are choosing between two tools and one is a still-image model in a video wrapper, choose the other one.

Faces change. Generative models rewrite facial features enough to alter who a person appears to be, and at 24 or 30 frames a second they do it inconsistently. This is why Topaz ships a separate Face Recovery path, why AVCLabs gates Face Refinement behind a VRAM requirement, and why HitPaw sells a distinct AI Portrait model. Running a generative upscaler on a person is the single most common mistake in this category.

Upscaled video is not evidence. An upscaled clip cannot establish what a number plate read, what a document said, or who was in a frame, because the detail that appears to answer the question was generated rather than recovered. Microsoft is the only vendor here that says so on its own product page: “AI-enhanced details are estimates, not a factual reconstruction of the original scene”. Every other vendor markets the opposite impression, and courts and newsrooms should treat upscaled footage accordingly.

Time is the real cost, not money. AVCLabs’ own FAQ concedes jobs “ranging from 8 to 30 hours”. Topaz says Starlight can take “several minutes to multiple days”. UniFab publishes 3.5 times realtime for a 1080p to 4K pass on an RTX 4070. A ten-minute clip is not a ten-minute job, and on the cheapest hardware it may not be a same-day job. This is the main reason the per-second APIs are more attractive than their headline rates suggest: you are renting a fast GPU as well as a model.

Pricing comparison: what you will actually pay

US list prices as of 13 September 2026, with current sale prices noted where a vendor is discounting.

Cost strategy: if you upscale occasionally, use an API and pay $1.20 a minute rather than $59 a month. If you upscale professionally on your own machine, Topaz Video at $299 a year is the only tool that justifies a subscription, and Topaz Studio at $399 a year is better value if you also use Topaz’s photo applications. If you want to own something, Aiarty, listed at $235 for three machines with commercial rights and discounted to $165 at the time of writing, is the best one-time purchase here. If you have a library rather than a project, Pixop’s per-gigapixel model is the only one that scales. And if you already own DaVinci Resolve Studio or run Windows, try Super Scale and Clipchamp before you spend anything at all.

Related guides

If you need to enlarge a still photograph rather than video, see best AI image upscalers. If the job is cutting, masking, captioning or grading, see best AI video editors. To create the footage from a prompt instead of enhancing footage you have, see best AI video generators and, for no-cost options, best free AI video generators. For photographs, see best AI photo editors, and for the models behind these tools, see best AI models.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI video upscaler in 2026?

Topaz Video is the best AI video upscaler in 2026, because its Starlight models are diffusion-based with temporal consistency built in, it renders locally with no upload, and it is the only tool with a documented ceiling of 16K, specifically 15360 x 8640 pixels. Topaz Video costs $299 a year, or $59 a month rolling, and Topaz no longer sells perpetual licences. If you do not want a subscription, the same Topaz models are available through fal.ai’s API at $0.20 per 10 seconds of 1080p output, and the best free alternative is SeedVR2 from ByteDance Seed, which is Apache 2.0 licensed and can be used commercially.

What is the best free AI video upscaler?

Microsoft Clipchamp is the best free AI video upscaler for most people, because its Upscale feature applies genuine AI video super resolution, exports 1080p with no watermark on the free plan, requires no credits or signup friction, and runs a local model rather than uploading your footage. It is available only in the Windows desktop application, not in the browser. For anime and illustration, Video2X is the better free choice, because its Real-CUGAN and Anime4K models are trained on that material and run on GPUs as old as 2012. SeedVR2 is free and the highest quality of the three, but its reference configuration needs an H100 for 720p.

Can AI upscaling turn 1080p video into real 4K?

No — AI upscaling cannot produce real 4K detail from 1080p, because the detail was never captured. Upscaling 1080p to 4K produces four output pixels for every input pixel, meaning three out of every four pixels in the result are generated rather than recovered. Reconstructive models such as Topaz Proteus and Pixop Super Resolution infer plausible detail from surrounding structure and neighbouring frames; generative models such as Topaz Astra 2 and Starlight synthesise new detail from a learned prior. Both produce invented pixels, which is why upscaled footage cannot establish what was actually in a scene, and why Microsoft states on its own product page that AI-enhanced details “are estimates, not a factual reconstruction of the original scene”.

How much does Topaz Video cost in 2026?

Topaz Video costs $299 a year, or $59 a month without an annual commitment, according to Topaz Labs’ own pricing page as of 13 September 2026. Both include unlimited local rendering and 25 monthly video cloud credits that do not roll over. The Topaz Studio bundle, which includes every Topaz application, costs $399 a year or $69 a month rolling, and Topaz Studio Pro costs $799 a year or $79 a month on an annual commitment. Perpetual licences are no longer sold: Topaz ended them in September 2025, and a Topaz Video AI licence does not activate the current application.

Is Topaz Astra being discontinued?

Yes — Topaz Labs states that on 30 September 2026 “most video models and features inside Astra will be fully shifted to Topaz for Web and the Astra interface will no longer be accessible”. Astra 2, which introduced promptable upscaling with Creativity and Sharpness controls, launched only on 28 April 2026, so the product is being retired roughly five months after its major release. Existing Astra work moves to Topaz for Web – Video, which costs $29 a month list with 200 monthly credits.

Has Adobe finished buying Topaz Labs?

No — as of 13 September 2026, Adobe’s acquisition of Topaz Labs has been agreed but has not closed. Adobe announced a definitive agreement on 25 June 2026 without disclosing a price, the US Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of the antitrust waiting period on 28 July 2026, and Adobe’s prepared remarks at its third-quarter FY2026 earnings call on 10 September 2026 still referred to its “agreement to acquire Topaz Labs”. Adobe has said Topaz products will remain available as standalone offerings through Topaz’s own website after close, and that chief executive Eric Yang will continue to lead the team. No Topaz model has shipped into Adobe Premiere as an Adobe feature.

Does Adobe Premiere have an AI video upscaler?

No — Adobe Premiere ships no AI upscaling feature as of 13 September 2026. Premiere’s 2026 AI additions are Object Mask, Generative Extend, Media Intelligence and the AI Assistant beta, and Adobe’s own what’s-new and beta-features documentation contains no reference to upscaling or super resolution. Topaz models reach Premiere through Topaz’s own UXP panel, released in May 2026, which sends footage to Topaz’s cloud for credit-metered processing and is not covered by a Creative Cloud subscription. DaVinci Resolve Studio, at a one-time $295, is the mainstream editor that does include a video upscaler, called Super Scale.

What is the cheapest way to upscale video in bulk?

The cheapest published commercial route is an API rather than a subscription. WaveSpeed’s own video upscaler costs $0.025 per 5 seconds at 1080p, which is $0.30 a minute, and the ByteDance upscaler costs $0.0072 per second at 1080p on both fal.ai and WaveSpeed, which is about $0.43 a minute. Topaz’s Proteus model through fal.ai is $1.20 a minute at 1080p. For libraries measured in hours, Pixop’s per-gigapixel model at $0.079 per gigapixel for Super Resolution, with volume discounts to 62 per cent, is designed for that scale. The cheapest route overall is running SeedVR2 or Video2X on hardware you already own, which costs only electricity and time.

Can open-source video upscalers be used commercially?

Some can and some definitively cannot, and the licence is not what most people assume. SeedVR2, FlashVSR, SparkVSR and DOVE are all released under Apache 2.0, which permits commercial use. Real-ESRGAN is BSD-3-Clause, Real-CUGAN and Anime4K are MIT, and RIFE is MIT including its weights. Upscale-A-Video, despite being a CVPR 2024 Highlight, is published under the S-Lab License 1.0, which permits use only for non-commercial purposes, and VEnhancer ships with no licence file at all, which means all rights reserved by default rather than permissive. STAR has a split licence: its I2VGen-XL variants are MIT, while its CogVideoX-5B variant is governed by the separate CogVideoX License. Because SparkVSR and DOVE are also built on CogVideoX, read that base licence before shipping their output commercially — an Apache 2.0 repository wrapper does not relicense the underlying weights.

How long does AI video upscaling take?

Far longer than most vendors imply, because a one-minute 30fps clip is 1,800 separate frames. AVCLabs’ own FAQ states that conversion times range “from 8 to 30 hours” and that HD to 8K takes about “5 seconds for each frame” on a GTX 1650 Super, which works out at roughly two hours of processing per minute of 24fps footage. Topaz’s documentation says Starlight processing “can range from several minutes to multiple days” because diffusion models are slow regardless of hardware. UniFab publishes a more usable figure: 1080p to 4K takes about 3.5 times the original video length on an RTX 4070. If speed matters more than the last increment of quality, use a classical model such as Topaz Proteus rather than a diffusion model, or rent a datacentre GPU through an API.

Does my graphics card already do AI video upscaling?

Probably, but not in a way you can export. NVIDIA RTX Video Super Resolution is a real-time playback filter for streaming video in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and an RTX build of VLC, available on RTX 20, 30, 40 and 50 series cards, and it cannot save an upscaled file. AMD Video Upscaling, introduced in Adrenalin 24.1.1 for Radeon RX 7000 desktop cards, works the same way, up to 4K, in DirectX 11 applications and single-display configurations only. Apple exposes video super resolution only as a developer API, VTSuperResolutionScalerConfiguration, with no user-facing control in macOS, Safari or QuickTime. To produce a file rather than a better-looking stream, you need one of the applications or APIs ranked above.

What is the maximum resolution an AI video upscaler can produce?

Topaz Video publishes the highest verified ceiling at 16K, with its documentation stating the application “is limited to 16K” and that “Resolutions over 15360 x 8640 may not run with default settings” — though the encoder you choose constrains it further, since H.264 High tops out at 4096 x 4096 and only VP9 and ProRes reach the full 16K. UniFab claims 4K, 8K and 16K but publishes no price, and its own cloud edition is capped at 4K. HitPaw VikPea and AVCLabs both claim 8K. Aiarty claims 4K and does not inflate it. Every API endpoint in this guide stops at 4K or 8K, and Topaz’s own cloud rendering is capped at 8K rather than 16K. Treat all of these as output-size ceilings rather than quality claims, because no vendor publishes a quality measurement at those sizes.