Using Topaz AI for Legal Video Work

Our company does a lot of video production work for attorneys and law firms. We have been asked countless times over the years to try to sharpen/clean up surveillance video for various reasons. We bought the Ultimate Bundle and have used it for several surveillance video projects over the past few months. It takes 10 hours of work we would normally spend with Adobe products and really simplifies the process.

In my opinion, using Topaz AI doesn’t change the actual video, it enhances it. Would you agree with that statement? Topaz AI has the ability to detect and enhance the video for things we can’t see with the naked eye.

For instance: We enhanced a video where someone tripped over something. The surveillance video was poor quality but when we ran it through our Topaz AI it cleaned it up so you could clearly see what was tripped over. The actual video isn’t being changed, we’re not putting something in the video that wasn’t there, we are simply cleaning up the video to make it clearer.

My question is: By using Topaz AI to clean up the video is what’s recorded actually being changed or simply enhanced. I’m looking a definition of what Topaz AI does to the video to clean it up.

Double post:

I have often wondered about the utilization of AI upscaling software in legal paradigms; I knew it was going to happen, but based on what is actually done to the video, I think it can absolutely change the visual (facial) detail in a grainy image sequence. Based on your settings (and more specifically, the “Recover Detail” and “Improve Detail” settings), you can get a very different looking face out the other side of the process than you would otherwise.

I know this software will be used in courtrooms, but I think it’s very, very precarious. You guys need to be 100% certain that you’re only improving fidelity and removing noise, or other similar video upscaling modalities, because if you’re trying to capture detail that simply isn’t there, I don’t think that video meets the criterion for empirical evidence.

You’re on the forefront of a really scary potential shift in courtroom evidence proceedings. I hope you guys treat this situation with the utmost care and discernment that it undeniably warrants.