Pros
- Excellent quality upscaling
- Additional editing and enhancement tools
- Affordable
Cons
- Requires quite high res input to reach 4K
- Moderately basic editing tools
AI is an increasingly overused term in the tech arena. In fact, using AI to analyze and enhance video has, until recently, been one of the very few areas where actual AI has been used the longest. In my mind, it’s a real-world version of that scene in the original 1981 Blade Runner movie, where Harrison Ford enhances a blurry old photograph to add more detail and hunt for clues so they can solve the case.
In reality, this was technically impossible until comparatively recently, and you couldn’t actually add detail if there was none. But now, using Winxvideo AI, it’s finally possible to not only add detail with machine learning guesswork, but to have the software smooth and sharpen even the most dire old footage and stills into something usable.
This is a sponsored article and was made possible by Digiarty. The actual contents and opinions are the sole views of the author, who maintains editorial independence even when a post is sponsored.
What Is Winxvideo AI?
Winxvideo AI is a suite of tools for upscaling both still images and videos, refurbishing old footage using AI to detect and smooth the edges and planes of the image. Along with making legacy assets higher resolution, there are tools to retime (make slow motion by adding frames) and stabilize shaky, handheld footage.
Enhance images with Winxvideo AI, upscale low-quality (or just lower resolution) videos up to 4K, upscale and sharpen blurry images, increase video frame rates to 60fps for smoother motion, and stabilize shaky videos to make them smooth and clean.
Along with the core enhancement tools, you can also convert video to and from a variety of useful formats and codecs, MP4, HEVC, H.264, MKV, MOV, etc. Old videos tend to be in old codecs, so this is very handy. Another useful feature, compressing video by up to 90 percent with minimal loss of quality.
You can also enhance video with Winxvideo AI and more traditional utilities, such as a screen capture recorder, webcam recorder with “picture-in-picture with virtual background,” allowing you to use a green screen, then replace the background. You can also do rudimentary editing of video (trim, split, merge, and other effects).
All this adds up to an impressive suite of tools, which not only help you make your new videos better, but can also assist with the refurbishing of old assets, to bring them into the modern HD/4K video age. If you are like me, and a lot of the legacy videos you’ve made are HD but either 720 or 1080p, any way you can crank them up to 4K for use with modern assets is a good thing.
Best of all, you can harness your GPU (if you have one) to do the heavy lifting.
Optimizing Video with Winxvideo AI
Setup is minimal: just install the software, and after a bit of detection of your available GPU, it’s ready to go. Once it’s installed, you can load a video or still image file, select your options, and hit the button to process them.
Most of the features of the software are self explanatory, but the main tool of interest is the powerful engine to enlarge video from standard definition to HD and HD to 4K. I tested the former.
As luck would have it, when I began this review, I had just digitized an old concert movie I had on Laserdisc, and I was curious to see if I could use Winxvideo AI to successfully upscale the movie to HD, without any unpleasant artifacts.
The general rule with AI upscaling is “garbage in/garbage out,” so starting from the best source material you can find will always give you the best results. I figured this would provide a good stress test for this software, and as a bonus, I’d have an HD version of this film, which I love.
The concert movie in question is Home of the Brave (1986), and I had previously tried to upscale a VHS copy of this film with another software with really disturbing results. I wanted to see how far I could push it with Winxvideo AI. Let’s see if I can upscale it to 1080p HD for my movie server. This is the main reason someone would use this software, so this is going to be the main test.
It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I set it up and kicked off the render. Even with my (admittedly modest) GPU, the render time was about 15 hours. I sort of expected that, as upscaling operations are notoriously intensive. I set the thing off overnight and went about my business, with plans to return in the morning to see the results.
I was really impressed with the results. Although, if you scrutinize each frame carefully, you can see how each image has been smoothed and the edges sharpened. The effect is not unpleasant and is very watchable in motion.
My source wasn’t the highest resolution, at 608×368 and a non-standard format. Using 3x enhancement, I was able to get it up to 1824×1104 making it easily fall roughly within the bounds of 1920×1080, my target size. I started with this quality shown below.
And here’s the after. (Click on it to zoom in.)
Considering the images which make up the video were expanded three times, they were sharp, easily readable and there was minimal jittering from gate weave (an unfortunate byproduct of the film being shot on actual film).
Overall, it was an impressive test, and I now have a film I can view on my Plex server in HD.
Pricing
Winxvideo AI is priced for a yearly subscription (for up to three users/installs) at just $25.95. If subscriptions are really not your thing, they also offer a lifetime buyout price of $45.95 for one user. Family lifetime buyouts for three to five users are available for $57.95. Considering the cost of the leading pro AI upscalers, this represents really good value for the hobbyist and pro alike.
Final Thoughts
Let’s be clear, you can’t get something from nothing, and that’s never more true than with AI video enhancement and refurbishing old videos. The best-case scenario for upscaling is if you have 720 or 1080 HD footage and can enlarge and refine that into a fairly credible 4K image. What you can’t do is upscale a crappy old 360p VHS image and expect it to look like native 4K. That’s not possible even with the best AI. What you get in those instances is a sort of weird AI rotoscoped cartoon of the video.
I found some of the editing functions to be a little bit counterintuitive, but if you study up on how they work, you can get good results.
All that said, Winxvideo AI is an impressive set of tools that creates really credible upscales and enhancements from quite unpromising legacy input.
Subscribe to our newsletter!
Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox
Phil South has been writing about tech subjects for over 30 years. Starting out with Your Sinclair magazine in the 80s, and then MacUser and Computer Shopper. He’s designed user interfaces for groundbreaking music software, been the technical editor on film making and visual effects books for Elsevier, and helped create the MTE YouTube Channel. He lives and works in South Wales, UK.
