Products ::  Topaz Enhance ::  Enhance Low-Quality SD Video

Substantially improve the quality of an SD video

Standard-definition videos can have a whole range of problems, from compression artifacts and noise to color bleeding and interlacing. In this Do It Yourself guide you'll be correcting these problems from this video (3.1 MB) and enhancing it into this one (3.2 MB) in about 15 minutes. Here's the final SD_enhance.aep file.

This is the result:


Before and After Topaz Enhancement (3.4 MB)

What You'll Need
This tutorial deals specifically with Adobe After Effects CS3 (Mac or PC). If you have Premiere Pro or Digital Fusion on the PC then specific steps may be different although the general idea will be the same.

1. Download a trial version of Topaz Enhance through one of the links on the right and install. If using the Mac version, email te_evalkey@topazlabs.com for an immediate auto-response 30-day license key.

2. Download the original movie (3.1 MB) we'll be using for this Do It Yourself guide by right clicking the link and selecting "Save As...". Save it as SD_orig.mov for now.

Step 1 - Import Video and Deinterlace
Import SD_orig.mov into your new .aep project. Play it a few times. You'll notice that, in addition to quite noticeable interlacing effects, there's also high levels of noise, severe color bleeding, and a few other problems. We will be fixing all of this eventually, but first let's take care of the interlacing.

Create a new composition, name it deinterlace, and drop SD_orig.mov into it. It's important to make sure that your composition is of the same frame rate (29.97 fps) as SD_orig.mov.

Drag over Topaz Deinterlace* from Effects and Presets and apply it to the timeline footage. A dialog box will pop up informing you that a a few project settings have been changed in order for Topaz Enhance to work correctly.

Refer to the following screenshot for the next steps:



Make sure your movie is playing at High Quality (shown in RED).

Click the "!!! Field Order" option on and off (in LIGHT BLUE) and compare results. In this case, the default checked box works well, however, in other cases results might be better if it's unchecked. PAL usually works better with this option unchecked, and NTSC (as in this case) usually works better with it checked. The other options (DARK BLUE) are okay, so we'll just leave them at their defaults.

If you like, you can prerender the composition and view it frame by frame. You'll see that the formerly interlaced video has been turned into a very natural progressive video. We'll deal with overall enhancement in the next steps.

Step 2 - Remove Video Noise and Sharpen
We need to nest this composition into a new composition for our next steps. This is because any Topaz filter with a "*" suffix must be the very first filter in any given composition. Thus, any time you need to use more than one of these filters you must create a nested composition.

Create a new composition called denoise/sharpen and bring deinterlace into it. Then apply the effects "Denoise and Enhance*" and "Sharpen, Color Bleeding", in that order. Here's a screenshot of what your project should like:



Note that the first composition deinterlace is nested within this composition denoise/sharpen (PURPLE). This is important. Also, "Sharpen, Fix Color" doesn't require a new composition because it doesn't have a "*" suffix. See User's Guide for more details.

Feel free to experiment with the settings for either the Denoise and Enhance (BLUE) or Sharpen Color (RED) filters, but for this example adjust your settings to the values in the screenshot.

If you compare the current result with the original, you'll notice a distinct improvement in video quality. However, if you examine the video closer, there's still some random noise flying around that "Denoise and Enhance*" could not handle without losing details. We'll take care of this problem in the next step.

Step 3 - Clean Video and Enhance Contrast/Color
We will be using Topaz Clean (YC)* for the next step, which means we have to nest compositions again. Create a new composition called clean and bring denoise/sharpen in. Apply Topaz Clean (YC)* to it and experiment with the settings. Acceptable settings for this project are shown below:



The Threshold setting in RED controls the degree of cleansing that Topaz Clean does. The "Use Frames" setting in BLUE specifies how many neighboring frames to take into consideration when applying the filter. Generally, the higher this number, the better a result you get - but the processing will also be a lot slower.

Now if you compare the original to the enhanced version, it's almost like you captured them with two different cameras. You may also add an optional Curves adjustment effect to increase the contrast:



Render and compare the original video to your processed video. There is a large and noticeable difference between the original low-quality and noisy video and the result that you got through improving the video quality using Topaz Enhance. Here's the final SD_enhance.aep file.




If you have any questions or comments regarding any part of this Do It Yourself guide, please contact us at our Support page. We would love to hear from you!


Note for Premiere Pro users: Topaz Enhance will not automatically change settings the first time you apply it. Before you apply any Topaz filter, make sure to change your "Separate Fields" setting to OFF in (Interpret Footage) or you won't get the result you're looking for. However, Premiere Pro users do not have to "nest compositions" when using filters with a "*" suffix as in After Effects - the filters will still work if you apply them one after another in the same Sequence.