That’s one of the tools that’s been referred for years, but never really works that well. It can sharpen things, but won’t improve a video/image that’s poor quality.
I wouldn’t really recommend this for a full movie, but after seeing very lacking results from AI video upscalers, both in quality and ridiculous file sizes, I found interesting and surprisingly good results in extracting individual frames from videos, using an AI upscaler on the frames, then stitching them back together.
I’ve been doing this for some old/low res personal videos and some of the upscaled videos have even come out smaller than the originals despite being better quality.
Here’s a guide on using ffmpeg, but the end result may not yield greatly improved video quality. The short version is, a smart TV does it on the fly with basically the same results.
I’m not familiar with video effects specifically but I know a lot of AI upscalers have been used on older media. Be sure to test on a snippet first so you have an idea about what the denoising or smoothing will look like before you sink a lot of time in it. Some of them make everything too clean.
What movie is it? It may be worth looking online to see if anyone has already done it.
