The best way to upgrade video quality to current standards is to re-record it at a higher resolution. But what if you don't have the time or resources to do that? How could you improve your video without recording it?
This article describes some AI-driven tools to help you improve the quality of older videos.
Resolution and Quality
Video resolution is the width and height of the image, and can be described in pixels (e.g. 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels tall) or in vertical lines ("1080P", for 1080 lines tall). The larger those numbers are, the sharper and more detailed your video will be. The lower the resolution is, the poorer the images will look. You can recognize a good-quality image when you see it. Old school VHS video ("SD resolution") from the 1980s only had about 240 to 320 vertical lines. Early digital video formats were only 720 x 480 ("480P").
Audio has resolution too, measured in bits per second (bps). The principle is the same: the higher the resolution, the better the sound quality. You know good quality audio it when you hear it. Poor quality audio might have a lot of background noise, or sound muddy and muffled, like an old radio program from the 1940s.
Improving Video Image Quality
Normally, if you just enlarge a frame of video from old-school SD video (720 x 480) up to 720P HD (1280 x 720), you just get a larger version of the same image, with no extra detail. In fact, the larger image will look too soft and blurry. It would be bigger, but not better.
Video editing software and various online tools also provide filters and effects to improve the sharpness, colour, and contrast of your videos, but to actually increase a video's resolution means adding extra pixels to make an image remain sharp at double (or more) of its original resolution.
Modern AI tools can effectively increase video resolution by generating extra detail where needed. AI upscaling creates realistic-looking versions of higher resolution by generating details algorithmically. If you cannot create or re-render a higher resolution video yourself from your original footage, maybe upscaling with an AI tool is a convenient alternative.
Improving Audio Quality
The reasons for "cleaning up" audio tracks are the same: improving the audience experience and clarifying the content. AI audio cleanup tools can remove unwanted background noise and improve the volume and clarity of a speaker's voice. If you cannot re-record the audio, or when regular noise reduction methods are not adequate, AI-based audio clean-up tools can make a noticeable improvement.
- Audacity - Free audio editor: https://www.audacityteam.org
This free, open-source audio editor has been around since 2000, and has had hundreds of millions of downloads. It doesn't have AI-based tools, but does has a huge suite of noise reduction and special effects abilities which can improve your audio.
- Adobe "Enhance Speech" AI Tool: https://podcast.adobe.com/enhance
Free and very easy to use. Does an excellent job of removing background noise from narration, while cleaning up and boosting the sound of the speaker's voice. (In my sample, this tool "wrongly" accentuated a background voice in the noisy room's background, when the main speaker was between sentences.)
- Using AI: Text to Speech for Narration
For cases where the narration cannot be re-recorded, or audio quality cannot be improved, maybe an AI-driven text-to-speech solution would be a good answer.
ClipChamp.com provides a free text-to-speech narration tool, allowing written words to be rendered as audio narration, spoken by a male or female voice, with an accent of your choice.