AI Restoration & Upscaling
Most archives are not lost — they are unusable. A tape transfer from 2009, a compressed export somebody kept and the master somebody did not, a logo animation that only exists inside a finished advert. The material is there and it cannot be put on a screen that is four times sharper than the one it was made for.
This is the place AI has genuinely changed rather than merely entered. Upscaling and denoising models reconstruct detail that older sharpening could only fake, and the work after them is the ordinary work: matching grain, holding colour, and stopping a restored shot from announcing itself when it is cut beside something filmed last week.
Ahmed Gonaim is a restoration artist and filmmaker in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. AI Restoration & Upscaling for government bodies, brands, production agencies and studios across Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
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- AI Restoration & Upscaling
- BASED
- Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- EXPERIENCE
- 15+ years
- LANGUAGES
- Arabic · English
- STUDIO
- Direct Group · Riyadh
- Upscaling SD and low-resolution footage to HD and 4K
- Denoising, degraining and removing compression artefacts
- Repairing damaged or dropped frames, and stabilising unusable handheld
- Recovering colour from faded, washed or badly graded masters
- Rebuilding logos, titles and graphics that survive only inside a finished cut
- Frame-rate conversion and retiming without the plastic look
- An honest answer about what cannot be recovered
Archive film · brand history reels · anniversary and national films · old commercials · damaged masters
- Upscaling and denoise
- Topaz Video AI · Adobe Enhance
- Grade and finish
- DaVinci Resolve · After Effects
The model does the reconstruction; the grade and the grain decide whether anybody believes it. A restored shot that looks restored has failed.
How old or how bad can the material be?
Bring it and it gets tested. Standard-definition and old web exports restore well; footage that was never sharp to begin with — a long lens through heat haze, a night shot at the limit of its sensor — gains resolution and not detail, and that difference is worth saying before the invoice rather than after.
Will it look artificial?
That is the whole risk, and it is a finishing question. Upscaling models invent texture, so the work is matching that texture to the grain and lens character of whatever it sits beside. A restored shot inside a modern cut should be the one nobody points at.
Can you match restored footage to new footage in one film?
Yes, and it is the most common version of this job — an anniversary film that cuts twenty years of archive against material shot last month. The match is made in the grade, not in the upscale.