Has anybody had any success using AI upscalers to improve the resolution of older wam videos? I've got some footage filmed over 15 or so years ago that's hard to look at these days I'd love to improve but wouldn't know how or where to start or even if it's worth trying.

topazAI works well for me though it's fairly expensive. it does work best with footage that's already of a decent resolution though.

Theres an 'AI' forum in the 'Groups' section...

I have had good results AI upscaling footage to HD that is over 30 years old.

https://umd.net/forums/1993-wam-shoots-upscaled-to-hd

But I do not have the hardware and software to do this myself, so I work with 2 of my fans who have the necessary hardware and software to do upscaling work for me. It not only requires purchasing expensive software you also need to buy a top of the line gamers pc costing over $2500 or more to do the rendering in a reasonable time. My pc is too old and slow to do the job efficiently which is why I outsource the upscaling work to 2 of my long time customers who have much better gear than I do.

If your media is only 15 years old, you can do a better job than myself, because 15 years ago was already in the Digital Video age when media was shot on DV camcorders. In my case, I am working from analog source media in the prehistoric VHS era, and it still works quite well.

I've thought about it...I tried a couple freebie things that would do like 10 seconds of video...honestly didn't think it looked good enough to justify purchasing the product to get the full video rendered. Incredibly slow for me too, as wamtec pointed out above me, you need a really good PC for that kinda stuff. I know there are better more expensive programs out there though that would probably do a good job. In the end it's just not worth it for me though, maybe I'll buy a better and more expensive PC when this one craps the bed.

Same for me. I only have a basic low end pc and the AI software rendering time for me was that it took 8hrs to render a 10 minute clip, cos I only have 8GB of ram on my pc and a low end graphic card. I sent the same 10 minute clip to my friend who has a top of the line gamers pc with i9 CPU and 128GB of RAM and an Nividea 4070 graphics card with 24GB of video ram....and he is able to render a 10 minute video in only 10 minutes. Also, you must render to a solid state drive because standard hard drives are too slow.

Basically, if you are a gamer who already has a gamer's level PC then it can be a fun thing to play with, but if you are an old timer like me who is not a techno boffin and does not play games then it can be expensive to buy an i9 or AMD Ryzen level PC

Yeah, it's one of those things that you wouldn't buy kit specifically to use but is a neat bonus to have. I've been messing around and get a similar roughly realtime processing time, it seems mostly to be gpu dependent. My 3080 is a few years old now but it's still pulling its weight.