AI Video Upscaling with Topaz Video Upscale: Factors, Credits and What It Can Actually Fix

VdoBloom upscales video with one model — Topaz Video Upscale, on the Upscale tab — at 1x, 2x or 4x, and it is billed per second of your source clip: 3.2 credits per second at 1x and 2x, 5.6 credits per second at 4x, with a 30-credit minimum and a 600-second ceiling. That means a 10-second clip doubled to 2x costs 32 credits (about $1.60), while the same clip pushed to 4x costs 56 credits (about $2.80). Everything below is the practical part: what upscaling can and cannot repair, when a 1x restoration pass beats an enlargement, and how to order your workflow so you never pay to upscale a clip you end up discarding.

What AI upscaling actually does to footage

An upscaler does not recover detail. It infers plausible detail and paints it in, guided by what it has learned about how real footage looks. That distinction decides whether you will be happy with the result.

It works very well on footage that is soft: compressed exports, 480p or 720p renders, old phone video, footage that has been through several re-encodes and picked up blocking around edges. The structure is still there and the model sharpens and rebuilds it. It works badly on footage that is destroyed: heavy motion blur, blown-out highlights, faces that occupy thirty pixels. There, the model has to invent structure rather than reconstruct it, and invented faces do not look like the same person.

The honest rule is that a better source always beats a better upscale. If you can re-render the clip from the generator at a higher quality tier, do that instead of upscaling — it is usually both cheaper and better.

The Upscale tab and its three factors

Topaz Video Upscale lives at the Upscale tab. It is a utility model, so it does not appear in the normal model picker or in the public model directory — selecting the Upscale tab selects it for you. There is no prompt, no duration control and no aspect-ratio control. You upload a video and choose one thing: the factor.

• 1x — Original Size. No resolution change. This is the restoration pass: the model cleans compression artifacts, noise and softness while keeping the frame size. Use it when your delivery spec is already 1080p and the problem is quality, not pixel count.
• 2x — Double Resolution. The workhorse. 720p becomes 1440p, 1080p becomes 4K-class. This is what most people want after generating on a 720p tier.
• 4x — Quadruple Resolution. For large-format display, or for rescuing genuinely small source files. It costs 75 percent more per second than 2x and takes noticeably longer to process.

Exact credit costs

Pricing is per second of the source clip, not per output frame, so a long clip costs proportionally more. The 30-credit minimum means anything under about 10 seconds at 2x, or under about 6 seconds at 4x, is charged as 30 credits. At the Lite plan rate of $15 for 300 credits, one credit is $0.05.

Source clip length	1x or 2x credits	1x or 2x cost	4x credits	4x cost
5 seconds	30 (minimum)	$1.50	30 (minimum)	$1.50
10 seconds	32	$1.60	56	$2.80
15 seconds	48	$2.40	84	$4.20
30 seconds	96	$4.80	168	$8.40
60 seconds	192	$9.60	336	$16.80
120 seconds	384	$19.20	672	$33.60

The clamp is 600 seconds, so a ten-minute source is the longest single job: 1,920 credits at 2x. If you have a longer master, cut it into scenes and upscale only the scenes you actually keep. Plan and pack rates are on the pricing page, and one-time credit packs never expire, which matters for upscaling because it is bursty work — you do a lot of it the week you finish a project and none the week after.

Stills are a different, cheaper tool

If the thing you want to enlarge is an image rather than a clip, do not run it through the video upscaler. The image upscaler is a separate tab with separate pricing and face enhancement built in.

Image upscale option	Target	Credits	Cost
Riverflow 2.0 Fast	2K	10	$0.50
Riverflow 2.0 Pro	1K or 2K	18	$0.90
Riverflow 2.0 Pro	4K	27	$1.35

The workflow that stops you paying twice

Upscaling is the last step, never the first. The order that costs least is this.

1. Generate at the best native tier you can afford. A model that outputs 1080p natively gives a better final file than a 720p render doubled. Check the real quality tiers on the model you are using — Seedance 2.5 and its peers list their resolutions on their own model pages.
2. Cut and choose first. Assemble the edit, discard the takes you will not use, and only then upscale. Upscaling 60 seconds of which you keep 12 wastes roughly 160 credits.
3. Trim before you upload. Billing follows the source length, so a five-second handle at each end of every clip is real money across a project.
4. Pick the smallest factor that meets the spec. Most social delivery is 1080p. If your source is already 1080p and just looks soft, run 1x and stop.
5. Upscale once. Running 2x twice is not the same as running 4x — it compounds the model’s inventions. Choose the factor that reaches your target in a single pass.

When upscaling is the wrong fix

Three failure modes are worth naming, because an upscaler will not solve any of them. Temporal flicker — where a generated clip shimmers between frames — often becomes more visible after upscaling, not less, because you have sharpened the flicker too. Warped hands and faces stay warped; they simply become sharper mistakes. And a wrong aspect ratio is a framing problem: regenerate at the right ratio rather than enlarging and cropping. In all three cases the cheaper answer is a fresh generation, often on a different model, and comparing model specs before you spend again is time well used.

Frequently asked questions

Does upscaling change the length or the frame rate of my clip?

No. Topaz Video Upscale changes resolution only. Duration and frame rate come back as they went in, which is why the price tracks the source length exactly.

Why was I charged 30 credits for a 4-second clip?

Thirty credits is the floor for any video upscale job, at any factor. Below roughly 10 seconds at 2x the per-second rate would fall under that floor, so the minimum applies. If you have several short clips, it is cheaper to join them into one file and upscale once.

Can I upscale a video I did not generate on VdoBloom?

Yes. The Upscale tab takes an upload, so phone footage, screen recordings and old exports all work. The same caveat applies: soft sources restore well, destroyed sources do not.

Is 4x always better than 2x?

No, and it is often worse value. If the delivery target is a phone screen, 4x adds cost and render time for detail nobody will see. Match the factor to the final display, not to the biggest number available.

Will the upscaled file still have a watermark?

On a free account, yes — watermark-free downloads and commercial rights come with any paid plan, starting at $15 a month for 300 credits, and cheaper again on annual billing. New accounts get 10 free credits with no card, which is enough to try the image upscaler but not a full video upscale job.