I recently took the plunge on Topaz AI's photo and video enhancement software. It uses different AI models to clean up things like compression artifacts, sharpen contours, and upscale a photo or video beyond its original quality and resolution. It can also do frame interpolation, for example, converting a 30fps video into 60fps or 120fps by filling in AI-generated frames between the original frames.
The old "garbage in, garbage out" rule still very much applies in a lot of cases, especially on live acrion content, so don't expect that 320x240 video clip from the early 2000s to look like it was shot on modern equipment. One low-res low-quality video I tried ended up looking positively terrifying. But it can at least make modest improvements on a lot of content, and in some instances (like traditional 2D animation) it can really work wonders.
One particular use case I had in mind was remastering the Cobra inflation scene, a longtime favorite of mine. The cleanest looking version I had ever seen is one that I came across about 10 years ago, 640x480 25fps, and of course the file still had quite a few compression artifacts.
The results have been very interesting. Using multiple passes through Topaz Video Enhance, I eliminated 90%+ of the artifacts, upscaled the video to 4K (shadowboxed), and upped the frame rate to 120fps (nearly 5x). It took about 2 hours to finish all the renders, it does still have some artifacts (IMO, imperfections in the original animation that the AI didn't know how to handle), and the frame interpolation isn't perfect, but hot damn, overall the scene is cleaner, smoother, and has some fun new details that it didn't have before. I'll post it soon.
Seems like this could be a way to remaster a lot of our community's old and abandoned content. What would interest you?
Sounds fascinating and I'm looking forward to seeing a comparison.