The short version: enhancing a video with AI tools means fixing four things separately, resolution, audio, colour, and pacing, using different tools for each, not one magic app that does the lot. I use Topaz Video AI for upscaling, Adobe Podcast for audio, and Descript for cutting dead air, and I’ll walk you through the exact order I do it in, including the one setting that makes AI-upscaled footage look plastic if you get it wrong.
What “enhancing” a video means once you break it down
People say “enhance the video” like it’s one button. It isn’t. When a client says their video “looks a bit rough,” they usually mean one of four separate problems: it’s blurry or low resolution, the audio sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom, the colour is flat or too warm, or the whole thing drags because there’s ten seconds of throat-clearing before anyone says anything useful. Each of those needs a different tool. Nobody sells you one app that fixes all four well, and if a tool claims it does, be suspicious of the audio quality especially, because that’s usually the bit that gets bolted on as an afterthought.
I learned this the annoying way, doing it backwards, upscaling a video before I’d fixed the audio, and having to redo the whole export because the audio sync drifted. Order matters. More on that below.
Step one: fix the resolution and sharpness
If your footage was shot on an older phone, in low light, or pulled off a Zoom recording, it’s probably sitting somewhere between 480p and 720p. That looks fine on a small phone screen and terrible full-screen on a laptop or on a client’s TV during a pitch.
The tool I reach for is Topaz Video AI. It’s not free, it’s a one-time purchase (around $299, though they run it down to under $200 in sales fairly often) or you can rent a licence monthly. What it does that a simple “sharpen” filter in Premiere doesn’t: it uses trained models to guess missing detail rather than just increasing contrast at edges. Feed it a shaky 1080p clip and it can output clean 4K.
Here’s the number that matters: a three-minute 1080p clip took 42 minutes to process to 4K on my M1 MacBook Pro. On an older Intel machine without a dedicated GPU, budget closer to two hours for the same clip. If you’re doing this for a client deadline, that processing time needs to be in your plan, not a surprise at 11pm.
The uncomfortable bit nobody tells you: pushing the “sharpen” and “reduce noise” sliders to maximum in Topaz makes faces look like plastic mannequins, especially skin. I did this on a testimonial video for a coaching client in 2025 and her team asked why she looked “waxy.” The fix is to keep noise reduction under 40% and sharpening under 50% on anything with a human face in frame. Full strength is fine for product shots, screen recordings, and text overlays, not for people.
Step two: fix the audio before you touch anything else
Bad audio is the single fastest way to make a video look amateur, and it’s the thing viewers notice first even though they can’t always name it. If someone’s watching your video and they can’t work out why it feels “off,” nine times out of ten it’s the audio, not the picture.
My go-to for this is Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech tool, which is free and does one job: it strips room echo, hiss, and background hum, and makes a voice sound like it was recorded in a treated booth even when it was recorded in a hotel room in Tel Aviv with the air conditioning running, which, for the record, is exactly where I recorded a webinar recap in early 2026 and exactly why I now check this before I record anything.
Steps I follow:
- Pull the audio out as a separate WAV file (Descript or Premiere will do this in one export)
- Run it through Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech tool
- Listen back on headphones, not laptop speakers, because laptop speakers hide sibilance and hiss
- Re-sync it to the video in your editor before doing any visual upscaling
If the voice still sounds thin or robotic after enhancing, don’t crank the AI tool harder. That’s usually a sign the AI has overcorrected and stripped natural warmth along with the noise, which is the same problem that shows up in AI-generated voiceover. If you want the deeper technical reasons AI audio sometimes sounds strange even after “fixing,” I wrote a full breakdown in what makes AI videos sound weird and how to fix it, worth reading before you spend hours chasing a fix that won’t work.
Step three: fix the colour, and check it on the platform it’s going to
Flat, grey, underexposed footage is the second most common complaint I get from clients sending me raw video for their LinkedIn or YouTube channel. AI colour tools like the auto-colour match in DaVinci Resolve (free version) or the one-click enhance in CapCut can lift this in seconds, matching skin tones and boosting saturation without you needing to understand colour grading at all.
But here’s a wrinkle almost nobody mentions: how a video looks in your editor is not how it will look once it’s compressed and re-encoded by Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn. Platforms apply their own compression and, in some cases, their own brightness adjustment on upload. I’ve had videos that looked perfectly graded in Premiere come out noticeably brighter and slightly blown-out once posted as a Reel. If you’ve ever wondered why your export looked fine on your desktop and washed out on the app, that’s not you doing something wrong, it’s the platform. I went into exactly why this happens and how to compensate for it in why Instagram Reels sometimes look brighter than your original video. The short version: grade slightly darker than you think you need to, by about 5 to 8% on the brightness slider, if the final destination is a mobile feed.
Step four: tighten the pacing
This is the enhancement step people skip because it feels like editing, not “AI enhancement,” but it’s the one that changes watch time the most. Descript lets you edit video like a text document, delete the sentence, the video clip disappears with it, and it has a “remove filler words” feature that strips out “um,” “so,” and dead pauses automatically. I ran this on a 14-minute unscripted talking-head video last year and it cut it to 10 minutes and 40 seconds without losing a single useful idea. That’s a 24% reduction in length just from removing noise words and hesitations, no re-recording needed.
Don’t let the auto-cut tool run completely unsupervised though. It occasionally clips the start of a word if you speak fast, so watch the full thing back before you export. I’ve sent a video to a client with a client’s name half-cut at the start of a sentence because I trusted the auto-edit completely. Fifteen minutes of review would have caught it.
The order that works, start to finish
Here’s the full sequence I use, in the order I use it, for a typical client video that needs all four fixes:
- Cut for pacing first, in Descript, removing dead air and filler words
- Export the trimmed audio and run it through Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech
- Re-sync the cleaned audio to the trimmed video
- Colour correct in DaVinci Resolve or CapCut, grading slightly darker if it’s headed to a mobile feed
- Upscale resolution last, in Topaz Video AI, with sharpening and noise reduction kept moderate on any footage with faces
- Export at the platform’s recommended settings (1080p minimum, H.264, and check the platform’s own spec page since these change)
Doing it in this order matters because upscaling first and then trying to cut or re-sync audio afterwards means re-rendering the whole thing again, which on a long video eats hours you don’t get back.
Where AI can’t help
This is the part most guides on this topic avoid saying plainly: AI enhancement tools cannot fix a badly shot video. They can sharpen blur, but they can’t invent detail that was never captured, they can clean audio, but they can’t remove a voice talking over yours in the background, and they can’t fix framing that cuts someone’s head off. I’ve had people send me footage shot sideways, in near darkness, with the subject three feet out of focus, and ask if “the AI” can sort it. It can’t, not to a standard you’d want your name on. AI enhancement is a rescue tool for footage that’s 70% right, not a fix for footage that’s fundamentally broken. If the raw footage is unusable, the honest answer is to reshoot it, which costs less time in the end than an afternoon of fighting software.
Free tools versus paid tools, and where to spend money
You don’t need the full paid stack to get started. DaVinci Resolve’s free tier handles colour grading for most small business use. Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech is free. CapCut’s basic auto-enhance is free. If you want a wider list of free tools that don’t try to upsell you halfway through, I keep an updated list at 30 free business tools, and several of the video and audio ones on that list will get you 80% of the way there.
Where I do spend money is Topaz Video AI for upscaling, because the free alternatives (mostly online upscalers with watermarks or file size caps) aren’t strong enough for client-facing work, and Descript’s paid tier, because the filler-word removal and overdub features aren’t in the free version. If you want the fuller picture of which tools I use across a whole marketing workflow, not just video, I’ve laid out the current stack in best AI tools for marketing in 2026.
A quick note on data and privacy
Most AI video and audio enhancement tools process your file on their servers, not locally, which means client footage, including anything containing names, faces, or spoken personal details, is being uploaded somewhere before it comes back to you. If you handle client video for a UK business, this matters more than people treat it. Before you upload a client’s raw call recording or webinar footage to any AI tool, check what that tool does with the data, how long it keeps it, and whether it trains models on it. I put together a full breakdown of which tools hold up under UK data rules and which just claim to in which AI tools are GDPR compliant for UK businesses, and it’s worth five minutes before you make uploading client footage a habit.
When to stop doing this yourself
If you’re doing one or two videos a month, the workflow above is completely manageable solo, an evening’s work once you know the order. If you’re producing video weekly, for multiple clients, or across multiple platforms with different specs, the enhancement step alone can eat four or five hours a week that you’d rather spend on strategy or client work. That’s usually the point where it makes more sense to bring in someone to build the workflow rather than keep patching it yourself, and it’s a conversation I have often with small business owners who got an AI consultant in specifically to set up a repeatable video pipeline rather than to run it for them.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free AI tool to enhance video quality?
DaVinci Resolve’s free version handles colour correction and grading well, and Adobe Podcast’s Enhance Speech tool, also free, fixes muddy or echoey audio. Neither has watermarks or export limits, which puts them ahead of most “free” online upscalers.
Can AI fix a blurry or low resolution video?
AI upscaling tools like Topaz Video AI can sharpen and add apparent detail to blurry footage, turning 1080p into clean 4K in most cases. It cannot recover detail from footage that’s severely out of focus or shot in near darkness, that needs a reshoot.
Why does my video look worse after using AI enhancement?
Usually it’s oversharpening or noise reduction pushed too high, which gives faces a smooth, plastic look. Keep sharpening under 50% and noise reduction under 40% on any footage with people in it, and save maximum strength settings for product shots or screen recordings.
Do I need different tools for audio and video enhancement?
Yes. No single tool does resolution, audio cleanup, colour correction, and pacing well. The workflow that works is Descript for cutting and pacing, Adobe Podcast for audio, DaVinci Resolve or CapCut for colour, and Topaz Video AI for upscaling, used in that order.
