AI restoration. A back catalogue the platforms will actually take.
Libraries finished at a resolution nobody buys any more are not dead, they are unlicensed. A restoration house fixes them a frame at a time and bills by the month. Our AI restores and upscales film and episodic material to current distribution specs per frame, with an artist checking every reel, in days rather than months.
Soft, low-detail source rebuilt by AI with real detail, not sharpened
EXR · DPX
What a restoration house does by the month, the model does in days
We are not a VFX lab with faster artists. We are an AI lab: the tedious, per-frame work that fills a vendor’s schedule is done by the model in a single pass, and artists are spent only where judgment matters. The result is the same deliverable, in a day or two instead of weeks.
| The job | Traditional VFX lab | Pixazo AI |
|---|---|---|
| Dust, scratch, gate weave | Cleaned by hand, frame by frame | Detected and repaired by the model across the whole reel |
| SD and HD to 4K | Optical or algorithmic upscale, soft and waxy | AI upscaling that synthesizes real detail, grain managed |
| Turnaround | Months per season | Days per reel |
| Cost driver | Artist-hours per reel | Per minute, by material class; one free reel gives the number |
Where the artist still matters: faces at close range, titles and graphics, and the grain decision. Every reel is checked before it leaves.
What restoration actually involves
Upscaling is one pass out of several, and on its own it rarely gets a title past QC.
SD and HD masters to 2K, 4K or 8K
Frame-level defect removal, splice marks
Frame registration, stabilisation
Dye-fade recovery, neutralisation, regrade
Blocking and banding on old digital masters
Broadcast-era interlaced sources to progressive
Consistent across an episode, not scrubbed off
Type re-set rather than upscaled
Per-platform spec, captions, loudness
What actually comes back
Stated here rather than after you have committed a library.
| Deliverable | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Restored master | ProRes 4444, DNxHR, EXR or DPX — 2K, 4K or 8K | Per episode or per reel, in your colour space, conformed to the distributor spec you are delivering against. |
| Comparison reel | ProRes or H.264 | Side-by-side against source, delivered before the full run so the look is signed off on a sample rather than argued about at the end. |
| Restoration report | PDF, per reel | What was done, pass by pass — useful for archive records and for a distributor asking what was touched. |
| Audio | Untouched by default | Original audio carried through frame-accurate. De-noise, de-click and re-conform are available as a separate line. |
| Trained look model | Model weights, yours | On a library run, we train on your approved frames and the model belongs to you. Your look, on your material, and it does not reprice when a vendor changes their rate card. |
The number that usually decides a library: on a 124-episode run, moving from commercial video APIs to a model trained on the approved frames took per-episode delivery from roughly $750 to under $30 — around $100K down to about $4K across the remainder, at close to the same quality. Two hours of GPU time bought that.
“Enhance” is not a real thing
An upscaler cannot recover detail that was never captured. What it can do is reconstruct plausibly — and on a face at small scale, or a line of credits, plausible is the wrong answer. Knowing which is which is the entire job.
- Soft SD or HD masters where the detail exists A well-shot negative telecined badly has a great deal still in it.
- Dust, dirt, scratches and splice marks High-contrast frame defects against known surroundings — near-solved, and very cheap at volume.
- Gate weave and jitter Registration is a measurement problem, and machines are better at it than people.
- Colour fade recovery Dye-fade is systematic, so it inverts systematically.
- Compression artefacts on old digital masters Blocking and banding from 2000s-era encodes.
- Consistency across a long run The hardest thing for a human team to hold across 100 episodes is the easiest thing to hold with a trained model.
- Detail that was never shot At extreme ratios the model invents. We will tell you the honest ceiling for your source rather than quoting 8K on an SD tape.
- Faces at small scale Identity drifts. A background performer can come back as a different person, and on a known cast that is unusable.
- On-screen type, titles and credits Upscalers hallucinate glyphs. Type gets rebuilt and re-set, never upscaled.
- Heavy interlacing plus fast motion Combing that cannot be separated cleanly without losing temporal detail.
- Badly degraded or warped film Missing frames, shrinkage and severe warp are a physical problem before they are a digital one.
- Streaming rips rather than masters Restoring a compressed delivery file caps the result. Always find the master first.
- Grain scrubbed to look “clean” Technically an improvement, editorially a different film. We rebuild grain rather than remove it unless you ask.
We would rather lose a library bid by telling you 4K is the honest ceiling than win it and hand you a title that fails a platform QC on hallucinated faces.
How a library moves through
Sample first, sign off the look, then run the volume. Never the other way round.
Priced per minute, and the rate falls with the library
Restoration is the one service where volume genuinely changes the economics rather than just the discount — because after the first run, a model trained on your approved frames does the work.
| Driver | Effect on price |
|---|---|
| Source condition | The biggest lever. A clean telecine and a scratched, faded print are not the same job at the same rate. |
| Target resolution and spec | 2K against 4K against 8K, and which distributor you are delivering to. |
| Library size | The rate falls sharply after the first run. On episodic volume the fall is an order of magnitude, not a percentage. |
| Passes required | Dust and scratch, weave, colour, artefacts and de-interlace are separate passes. Few titles need all of them. |
| Titles and type | Rebuilding credits and on-screen type is hand work, priced per card. |
| Audio | Carried through free. Restored and re-conformed is a separate line. |
Faster than a rate card: send one reel. We come back with a restored sample, an honest statement of the ceiling your source supports, and a per-minute number for the library. You compare it against what you have been quoted — and against what the catalogue is currently earning sitting unlicensed.
Frequently asked questions
What can AI restoration fix?
Dust and scratches, gate weave, flicker, colour fade and compression artefacts, plus upscaling from SD or HD to 4K for current distribution specs.
Does AI upscaling look waxy or over-sharpened?
It synthesizes detail rather than smoothing or sharpening what is there, and grain is managed so the result keeps the texture of the original. An artist checks every reel.
What formats do you deliver?
ProRes, DNxHR, EXR or DPX, to your distributor's spec.
How long does a restoration take?
Days per reel, instead of the months per season a frame-by-frame restoration usually takes.
Is my footage used to train AI models?
No. Footage is covered by an NDA before anything moves, is never used for training without your written consent, and is deleted on delivery.
How much does AI restoration cost?
We price per minute by material class. Send one reel free and you get the restored result plus a firm per-minute number.
Remastering is rarely only a picture job
Libraries going out to new territories usually need language versions and clearance work alongside the picture, For a single clip or an old photo, try the self-serve AI video upscaler or AI photo restoration. Libraries going to new territories also need AI dubbing and lip-sync, and increasingly an HDR version: see SDR to HDR conversion. See cleanup, paint and removal for logo and signage clearance, rotoscoping and matte delivery, or the full AI VFX Studio — including AI dubbing and mouth-matched lip-sync.
Send one reel. Get an honest ceiling.
No charge, no commitment. A restored sample, a straight answer on the resolution your source genuinely supports, and a per-minute number for the library — before anyone signs anything.
Send a reelSD & HD to 4K · Dust, weave & colour · Trained model is yours · Artist-finished
