Real-ESRGAN is a practical super-resolution model tuned for the messy degradations of real footage — compression, blur, noise — rather than clean lab images. It is a common building block for OTT archive remastering and image-enhancement pipelines.
The book · Volume 6 of 7
AI for Video: A Complete Guide to Intelligence in Video Products: From Models and Inference to Computer Vision, Speech, Search, and Generative Video
Real-ESRGAN is a common first choice for archive upscaling, but it can invent texture that looks wrong on faces and text. Volume 6 covers Real-ESRGAN in detail alongside AI enhancement and generative video, model artifacts, deployment topologies and how to run an upscaling feature from prototype to production batch jobs. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Planning to upscale an old video archive with Real-ESRGAN?
Send us a few representative clips, and we will run a test upscale, compare models and estimate GPU hours and cost for the full archive. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
