hello David Clark here from DVC training and today I'm going to look at a new video a scaler from Nero I've done quite a few on different ones in the past and Nero then contacted me and said how do you fancy looking at as I should say at the outset I'm a big user of topaz and I still think that does the best quality overall but that's not what Nero are going for here and Nero have gone for good quality easy to use and not too expensive topaz is more expensive and need more fiddling so I'm just going to give you a quick run through on how I use Nero and show you some of the results I've had you might be familiar with Nero when I used to have a company making lots of computers we would always stick a version of Nero burning ROM to write DVDs and Blu-rays it's actually the same company of course less people are writing DVDs and Blu-rays these days so they branched out into other things and one of them is this now when you installed it you're lined up with an icon on the desktop for Nero Ai upscaler and a Nero start icon on a cou CP of others nuro start takes you to a list of lots and lots and lots of different programs obviously you have to pay for some of these now I haven't tried any of these I've literally just been using the upscaler I can launch the upscaler from here or I can just go straight to the desktop icon so I'm going to do that yep it presents you with a pretty simple interface obvious see up here is bringing stuff in and if you buy one of their little gizmos you can record VHS onto it haven't tried that I've literally just brought in some clips and done stuff with that now I'm going to going to start off with a couple of clips that I've used before in other videos because I thought it was a good comparison since I've tried these to death with other programs so this is high8 video it's got some diagonals in it it's got faces in it it's got plants in it so it's a nice little mix of different kinds of things typically things like diagonals don't come out too well when they get upscaled now once you've loaded up you got this interface here obviously showing you the before and an upscaled or an after of course I haven't actually chosen anything yet down here you get a timeline so if you want to you can choose to do a bit of it by just dragging through marking a start point and then marking an at point and then here just changes how you preview it main thing is you come over to here and you choose the model that you want to do so I can come in here and from the AI model there's five different variations here and I'll show you some examples of these clips upscaled using all of them I think realistic is my favorite versatile certainly is the longest but I think realistic does a slightly better job overall fast I didn't think it was that much better than the original but I thought realistic was pretty good face enhancement does a pretty good job on faces as well but I'll show you some examples of a couple of Clips done with all these different variations first thing I noticed actually loading up this is there are quite a few types of files that it doesn't load up so it doesn't load up lots of different Mo files for example a lot of my stuff when I've de interlaced it I have made a PR res Mo far and they won't load up into this but what will load up is MP4 files and also AVI files now my original AVI files they are not interlaced so I wanted to try those as well to see how well that worked but I'm going to start off with a totally de interlaced one a lot of AI UPS SC programs aren't that very good at handling interlaced video so I wanted to start off with something that wasn't interlaced and see how well that did it and literally you just come in here you choose your model you choose how big you want it to be there isn't a custom option here if I want to go out to HD I would just choose that this thing is also the same height as high definition but a bit thinner uh and in fact if you take a yeah stand a definition 4x3 image and you upscale it it comes out to 1440 by 1080 so it's 1440 wide by 1080 if I do that it's just going to stick black borders down the side I'd probably do that if I'm then going to take it to an editing program if what I wanted to do is just take this and use it like I'm taking a bit of a family video just want to show it to other people I probably go straight for high definition because sometimes some programs have had a problem seeing that and knowing what to do with it sometimes they just automatically stretch it to be highdea so if I'm just going to literally produce something at the end I'm going to give to somebody else I'd go for that if I'm going to edit I'd probably not bother to suuck in the back borders and go for that one so I'm going to go straight for high def on the frame rate this does do frame interpolation so I can make it be 120 frames per second if I want to I'm not going to because of course it's 50 already so I don't need to bother you when I first starting doing digital limites I had cameras that would do videos but they'd always be a bit small a bit pixelated in 15 frames a second so if I wanted to take something that say 15 frames a second and whack it up to 25 I could do this and then it would interpolate the frames for me again I'm not doing that I'm just upscaling it so essentially what you do is you choose your size you choose your model you can have a quick preview like it says here it's optimized for NVIDIA card which pretty much all upscaling programs are the better the Nvidia card the faster it is I'm using this in a system with a 3060 graphics card I haven't tried it on Lower spec graphics cards but I'm pretty sure it's going to be like all the other upscaling programs it will just go a lot slower I'm going to put it to 100% because everything always looks very good when it's shrunk down you really need to see it properly at the right size and now I can just do a quick compare between what it looks like upscaled and the original so there you can see I mean this is typical high8 stuff it's a little bit fuzzy it's actually buing quite a bit of definition to their faces and so on I think that's a pretty good upscale and this is high eight Originals they're never going to look like high definition like I said I can get a better result if I do a lot more fiddling and if I pay more money and use topaz but the whole point of this is it's simple and does a pretty good job I've used quite a few different upscaling programs and like I said I settled on topaz as the best quality most of the others I have found sort of weird things happening in different bits of the image yeah they do a good job in some bits and mess up other bits this seems to do a good job overall if you want to see what one of the other models looks like let's go to face enhancement I can preview it if I pop up pop with the task manager you can see here that it's hammering the Nvidia graphics card as you would expect there we have that 3 second preview with face enhancement on I think that's brought the faces out a bit better it's brought in some of the details has it brought in too many details as it sort of created too many things there and made it a bit Blobby and was realistic better of course that's a matter of opinion but again I'll I'll show you a comparison of them in a minute and apart from that you just click the upscale Now button and it exports on the export options so if I click on this little button here you can see you've got what kind of file you're going to make it is restricted on the types of files it's basically going to make an mp4 file out of h264 or h265 h265 obviously can do a good job and get it into a smaller space they're both quite compressed now again if I'm going off to an editing program I would like to stick it into a format which is not nearly as compressed like prores or something like that it doesn't do that it is really aiming for you to take a simple video upscale it and then just give it to people you can change the bit rate between low medium and high so on principle I generally go for high CU I'm probably going to edit it later on and then do you use the software the Nvidia or the Intel graphics card that I happen to have in here so you got these three different encoders generally I just use the Nvidia because I've got one and it's pretty good at doing that kind of thing frankly what I've been doing is just sticking it on high and then you click upscale and it gets off and does it now I'm going to put this back to realistic click upscale now and there we are it's now off and doing the upscaling up it's popped up it's gone in a particular folder now the folder it went into is this one here it normally defaults to going on the C drive so I just choose to stick it somewhere else I can pop back to that homepage the the import and the queue page just by clicking on the button up here I can click the folder button to bring up the folder and have a look at the clip that it's just done or I can click on this to get back into it and do a different variation so suppose I've done realistic I'd like to do a face enhancement and see how it is I can click on that click upscale and let it get on with it and the other thing that you can do here is once it's finished you can click that little rubbish bin there which will delete it from the list of jobs if you shut down the program it will also get rid of all the jobs you can stack out more videos here if you want to so suppose I want to bring in another one let's go here and bring in this other clip which is the other one that I generally fiddle with I like this one because it's got a lot of diagonals on it and diagonals are generally hard to scale again I can choose whatever model I want here choose the size and so on I can't do a preview cuz you know if I click on that it'll say sorry I'm exporting something so you'll have to wait but what I can do is just put that in there say upscale now and it pops into the queue and it'll do it after this one so I can stuck up lots of videos and let it get on with it I can pause the queue and I was hoping that if I pause the queue went imported another video gave it some settings I could preview it but I can't no I basically got to wait for all these queued up things to finish before I can do another preview what I can do is I can just use the same settings on lots of Clips so having decided I like the realistic model for example I can just come in here and grab another clip and make it realistic and say upscale now and it will go into the queue and then you just start the queue and let it get on with it I'm going to take this one off for the moment and I also take that one off there's also this thing down here which is quite nice if you got a queue of stuff you might leave it going overnight so you can just pop on this and then what to happen when you've actually finished now I don't want it to shut down the computer cuz I'm in the middle of filming this stuff but if I did that left a queue in there going and went off to bed it will shut down the computer when it's finished which is nice I don't like leaving computers on they use up power and we're supposed to be being economical with power for money and environmental reasons these days so it's nice that you can stack up a queue and tell it to shut down the computer once it's finished but it really it's kind of as simple as that bring in a video choose some settings export job done now like I mentioned those videos that I was using there they are progressive in the first place I wonder what would happen if I PED in an interlaced video so let me bring in the same clip this one here but it's an original DV avi file now again I like this one here because these diagonals can look very jaggy if they're not done properly you know this is what standard de interlacing looks like in say edius is lots and lots of jaggies so what's that going to look like if I shove it through Nero so again choose the model choose the setting click on preview and there you can see yeah it's it's coped actually it's coped with the deining it's still slightly jaggy down there and I think that the version that I de interlaced first and I did De interlacing it using qtm GC which is my favorite de interlacer I think that version does a slightly better job it doesn't look quite as jaggy here but actually it's not doing a bad job of De interlacing this stuff using the realistic model I did try using some of the others like ver versatile versatile is something which I find takes quite a bit longer than some of the other models and you can see that not doing such a good job I don't think on the de interlacing as realistic but I thought the realistic one actually did a pretty good job at handling interlaced video like this and this is a standard problem when you bring stuff into an upscaling program how does it deal with interlay stuff now AVC which is another one I did a video on I really like AVC for it colorization I think it's the best one at colorizing black and white footage that I've used but ABC has an deing tick boox which would have sorted this out for you things like hit P didn't deal with it very much at all topaz does topaz some models can detil stuff pretty well although again with topz I actually find it's better to De interlace it first anyway and I get better results but you can just pop DV in there and I think if you use the realistic version you'll be okay with the kind of results that you're getting you'll notice by the way here it goes goes to 25 frames a second cuz DV really is 25 frames a second it's just spit up into two Fields so you get 502 Fields a second or 25 full frames a second when I dealate it I prefer it to go to 50p using qtm GC because I reckon that does a good job and I can I've done videos about that so you can look at those on my channel but it was 25 frames a second in the first place so if I was using Nero I wouldn't bother I'd just go and stick it at the original 25 and now let's have a look at the results so what I've got here is I've got the original clip which was de interlaced in qtm GC and then various variations on top of it it's all in Da Vinci resolve which you'll probably be familiar with obviously this one has to has to be scaled by Da Vinci resolve because it's standard definition it's using Lanos one of the best scalings that resolve can actually do so first of all let's look here at the very first one which is the fast variation obviously it's a bit small here so I could just pop it up full screen and started playing now with the fast one to be honest quite difficult to see much difference between the two between my qtm gc1 and the one that's been done by Nero those actually look pretty similar on the other hand if instead of using the one that I de interlaced with qtm GC I used an avi file and I let resolve de interace it actually the Nero one does look better the result res olve de interlace one and resolve does pretty good de interlacing but the resolve de interlace one is a lot fuzzier this is using the free de interlacing that you get with resolve so this is in the free version and the full version I could turn up the quality in that and inside a resolve put it onto the neural engine which is their best one even then it's come out a bit sharper with the resolve deing but there's a lot of Fizz and a lot of noise around all these different things there's a lot of no there in his coat which is cleaned up nicely on the Nero one and of course I am using the fast one which okay it's fast but I wouldn't use that personally I'd use some of the others because they give much better results which is what I'm going to show you in a sec so yeah just wanted to quickly show you that so fast probably about the same as qtm GC let's have a look at the animation version yep now that's got a little bit sharper it's still tidier there's still less fuzz going on but you've got much more definition say around the very easy bits around here and a bit more definition on his face pop it up to the versatile one and again you've got something which is a little bit sharper a little bit cleaner there's less noise on it next we have the realistic version and I'm hard pressed to decide whether I prefer the realistic one to the versatile one it's tried a bit harder in the the plants around here to get some detail in but yeah it's it's a bit sharper and nicer than this one and finally the face enhance one so face enhance there has actually sharpened up this guy's face this guy's face quite a bit sharper obviously none of them making them look like my high eight stuff is high definition but then nothing really does that I mean I said you know topaz with a bit of fiddling does a better job than this but it still doesn't make my high8 original look like high definition and the final thing that I haven't got down here is I did do a variation from the original DV footage so all of these ones here were done from my deat thing if I just had the avi file and I wanted to put it in there this is the variation where Nero actually de interlaced it for me so let's just pop that up full screen now you see here what I do get when I'm de interlacing is particularly problems on diagonals like these guys swords and it's done a pretty good job of making that nice and sharp not a bad job on the detail it's a little bit fizzier than the one that came from qtm GC but not a bad job at all and the final thing I did was to do a variation again from the interlace avi file but this time using the versatile option going to think the realistic one there comes out a little bit sharper but still that did a fairly good job of deating it as well we look at the same stuff for the other clip so this is the one where we have this huge diagonal down here which can cause problems now my first one here that I got on the resolve side this is resolved doing the deating of my avi file and you see the sort of stuff that can happen and make it look really really na so instead let's put in the ones I de inter in qtm GC you can see I got better diagonals there and this is qtm GC versus the fast version again pretty similar to be perfectly honest but then pump it up to the animation version you can see the animation version is already getting a bit sharper the realistic version which I think does a better job than animation again you'll notice looking at his face there I mean again there's not a lot of detail in that face because it's very Overexposed but there's still more nonsense going on around his face there than there is in this one then the versatile version and the face enhance version face enhance you know does a better job on the face and it also adds quite a bit more sharpness and then finally I've got a variation which is realistic from the original DV so this is Nero doing the deing and upscaling rather than using something I deace somewhere else my qtm GC that I'm using to deace is fruit it's just an extra step you'd have to do again this one not quite as sharp as say the face enhance version but it is doing better around the face look at the the lips if you can see it right there on this version which is from the original there's just more lines it's it's smoother and nicer let's just pop It Up full screen so you can have a proper look at it although on the diagonals there it's not doing as good a job as it does with cmgc but overall better picture didn't take too much effort let's have a look at others I thought well I have actually got here some video which I recorded on VHS many many years ago off TV cuz let's bring in a bit of Barry Norman who doesn't like a bit of Barry Norman some of you might not even know who Barry Norman is this is a film program from 1980 which is reviewing films and on this particular footage it's typical VHS footage there's a bit of nonsense down here occasionally it jumps up and down and it's rather fuzzy this is just stuff that I've digitized saved it's interlaced and I wonder what it would do with that so I pop that in there again run a bit of realistic on that and again if I just zoom in a bit does a good job of cleaning it up it sharpens out these lines here quite a bit more than it does his face but again it has improved it if I go for a bit of face enhancement you can see there it's actually brought out quite a lot of details on his face although other bits have gone a bit Blobby but it's a definite Improvement on what was there in the first place and yes just to do a small section of this I'd mark an in point mark an out point and then just do that little bit in the middle again this is coming from an interlaced original yeah that's what the original looks like there's the old versatile model and a little bit of jumping that I'm getting with the video which comes out of the VHS in the first place that's not going away but again it has brought a bit more definition into his face again I think I still prefer the realistic version of this but just looking at that it's obviously see straightened out the line here it's given more definition onto his face if you go to their website it is $49.95 which is a yearly subscription if you want a permanent license it's £129 which you know comparing to Topaz is $299 for a permanent license I mean that's going to be about 250 260 quid obviously you're looking at something which is considerably cheaper here for what their intended aim is is thing that does a pretty good job and isn't too expensive I think it does exactly what it says on the tin you do get updates for the year of course and an update that happened only a couple of days ago is this one where you can make some adjustments to the video as well so I could add a little bit more sharpness to it and I could change the contrast a bit up the saturation if I wanted to and so on but that is like putting it on later on in your editing program so you notice the sharpness there is doing something the sharpness is just adding a little bit there but not very much you already using AI to upscale it so you don't want to add too much sharpness because it'll make it look really really bad so it's a nice little subtle sharpness there and obviously I can up the brightness a bit and the contrast a lot of my VHS recordings are a little bit dull I think so they could deal with that this is the sort of thing I personally would do in my editing program later on part of the point of this is you don't have to do anything else you can just pop it into here get it to do everything and then export a file let's just reset those so if you want to know more you can get a trial from the Nero webite site apart from just giving me a copy to play with they aren't give me any commission or anything else go to the Nero website try it out and if you like it say you can get a Year's worth £450 anyway hope you found that information useful don't forget to like the video subscribe to the Channel all that sort of thing and I'll see you next time
2025-03-16