Addison-based Topaz Labs has announced a “groundbreaking” AI-based tool that transforms old, low-res, or degraded video into HD quality.

Called Project Starlight, it’s the first-ever diffusion AI model for video enhancement and the only one to achieve full temporal consistency, ensuring seamless motion from frame to frame, the company said.

The new tool uses diffusion AI to upscale, enhance, denoise, de-alias, and sharpen video—without any sliders or manual adjustments, Topaz said. While OpenAI’s Sora and Runway use diffusion technology to generate new footage, Topaz Labs said it has optimized it for video restoration.

Topaz Labs’ Project Starlight restored a footage example of a NASA rocket. [Image: Topaz Labs]

“We’ve been working on image and video enhancement for over 20 years now, and in all that time, there was one main problem with video enhancement—that of temporal consistency,” Topaz Labs’ CEO Eric Yang said in a statement. “Even though we can make one frame look really good, as soon as you put those frames together, you can easily see motion artifacts and inconsistencies between frames and objects. But now, for the first time ever, we’re introducing Project Starlight, the world’s first diffusion model for video enhancement that fully solves temporal consistency. With it, you can get surprising results on everything from old home videos to professional shoots. We consider this one of the most important breakthroughs we’ve ever made.”

Free preview launching soon

Topaz Labs said that early tests confirm Starlight’s capabilities and that when it shared initial results online, the posts reached more than 1 million views and growing, with thousands of users requesting early access.

Topaz Labs’ Project Starlight restored NASA footage of a woman watching a rocket launch. [Image: Topaz Labs]

The company said that Project Starlight is available to consumers, professionals, and enterprise clients. Anyone able to upload a video can preview its capabilities, the company said.

A free research preview will launch next week in Topaz’s Video AI desktop app, allowing users to process three 10-second clips per week via the cloud. The company said that upscaling will be limited to 1080p for the free preview with 4K access launching in the future. Users will be able to buy extended cuts up to five minutes in length, if they’re satisfied with the preview results.

Topaz Labs said the full, paid version of Project Starlight is set to launch later this year, with local processing a goal for the future.

“Starlight is just the beginning,” Video AI Product Manager Anthony Martinez Cuervo said in a statement. “It’s the first of an entirely new series of models, and we see a clear path toward improving Starlight’s quality and speed even beyond this initial release.”

Follows launch of Gigapixel iOS app

In January, we reported on Topaz Labs’ new mobile app that it said allows users for the first time to enhance photos using AI on their phone for free.

Called Gigapixel iOS, the app allows users to recover faces, restore detail, fix focus, and upscale photos from their camera roll using AI.

The company said that unlike any other AI image editing app, Gigapixel iOS’ models are designed to run locally on the device, enabling core features to be used at no cost. The app focuses on realism, Topaz Labs said, retaining and sharpening all realistic details, while also increasing the resolution.

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