Upscaling and restoration

Topaz Project Starlight

Name: Topaz Project Starlight
Author: Topaz Labs

Diffusion-based video restoration model that upscales, denoises, de-aliases and sharpens footage in one pass with no sliders, analysing hundreds of surrounding frames for temporal consistency.

An upscaling and restoration tool by Topaz Labs · read 2026-08-14 · sourcing medium

Resolution: 3840x2160
Weights: Not released
API: Yes
Commercial use: Permitted subject to conditions

Launched as a cloud-only research preview because the model is too large to run locally. Starlight variants are now also reachable inside Topaz Video (local and cloud rendering) and inside Astra's Precise mode.

In preview

research preview

Commercial use — Permitted subject to conditions

Presented as a research preview; commercial deployment routed through Topaz enterprise sales.

Depends on your plan tier. Commercial rights otherwise follow the Topaz plan tier
Commercial route is enterprise sales. Presented as a research preview; commercial deployment routed through Topaz enterprise sales

The conditions above were extracted from the licence notes recorded during research, and each one shows the sentence it came from so you can check the reading. Read the licence before you rely on any of this. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and this site does not tell you a model is cleared for commercial use.

Specification

Vendor figures, read 2026-08-14Read from Topaz Labs's own documentation on 2026-08-14. Vendors change these between model versions without announcing it, so check theirs before you commit a shot to a number. Sourcing for this entry is mixed. Some fields came from pages we retrieved, others could not be confirmed and are left blank. Check the vendor's current documentation

What it takes in: video
What it makes: video
Maximum resolution: 3840x2160
Aspect ratios: not established
Controls: upscale-factor, denoise, face-recovery
Weights: Not released
API: Yes
Pricing: No standalone price. Consumed via Topaz Video cloud credits, Astra credits or the Topaz API credit tiers; enterprise deployment via enterprise@topazlabs.com.
Released or updated: not established

Supported aspect ratios is not established here. That means no page we could retrieve stated it, not that the model lacks one.

Strengths

Genuinely strong on badly degraded footage where slider-based models fail
No parameter tuning required
Strong temporal consistency from multi-frame conditioning

Weaknesses

Cloud-only for the full model; slow and expensive relative to classic upscalers
Duration limits are described as 'coming soon' rather than published
Still labelled a research preview

Best for

Severely degraded archive video
Low-resolution web sources needing an HD/4K master
One-off hero restorations

Where the sources disagree

Recorded rather than resolved. Picking the tidier number would hide the fact that the vendor's own pages do not agree.

The Starlight page notes 4K export 'as of March 6' without a clearly captured year, so releasedOrUpdated is null while maxResolution is recorded as 4K. The page also says extended duration limits are in development, so no duration figure is recorded.

What to understand before using it

Explainers naming the mechanisms this model's own documentation mentions.

Conditioning and control: everything you hand the model besides noise names “conditioning”
Text encoders and conditioning: how a prompt steers the picture names “conditioning”
Character and set consistency: the weakest link names “consistency”
Temporal consistency: flicker, drift and morphing names “consistency”

MCP servers that front Topaz Labs

Servers in the media MCP directory whose own description or homepage names this vendor. Absence of a server here is not evidence that none exists: most publish no tool list at all.

InVideo Video generation
Create professional marketing videos with AI-powered generation, templates, and automated voiceovers.
Kie Image generation
MCP for kie.ai: 45+ image, 70+ video, 20+ audio models with model intelligence.
Picsart GenAI Image generation
Generate and edit images, videos and audio with 150+ AI models.
Topaz Image generation
RunAPI MCP server for Topaz: create tasks, poll status, check pricing.
Vicsee Image generation
Generate, edit and upscale AI video and images from any agent via VicSee.

See it from the vendor

Shotcraft hosts no sample output. Judging a model means watching its own showreel with your own eyes, and a clip re-hosted here would be a clip we chose.

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Sources

Read on 2026-08-14. A source that has changed since then will not be reflected here until the next pass.