How do you fix plasticky or waxy-looking skin in AI-generated video footage?

Fix plasticky AI skin in post, not by re-rolling generations: upscale the clip with Topaz Astra on invideo first, then add a tiny amount of blur, a layer of film grain, and a color grade pulled toward live-action film stock. The waxy look comes from ultra-sharp, texture-suppressed model output — more sharpening makes it worse.

The plasticky look is baked into raw generations — heavy Seedance 2.0 output in particular comes back with what one production team described as ultra-sharpness and a "very plasticky feeling on the skin" — so the correction is a short post-production pipeline applied after your generations are done, not another round of prompting. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with the current models and upscalers built in, so the whole pass can run in one place.

1. Upscale first with Topaz Astra on invideo. Run the upscale pass before any color work — it rebuilds detail cleanly and gives the later steps real texture to work with. One documented production used Topaz Astra on invideo as the explicit first step of its realism pipeline, ahead of the grade. If you have many clips to process, you can spin up a named sub-agent inside the invideo agent — an "Upscale Artist" — to handle the upscaling automatically while you keep directing shots.

2. Add a tiny bit of blur. A light blur over the scene knocks back the synthetic over-sharpness that reads as wax. Keep it subtle — the goal is to soften the digital edge, not to defocus the shot. Avoid additional sharpening filters entirely: since over-sharpness is the root cause, sharpening amplifies the artifact you're trying to remove.

3. Layer in film grain. Grain reintroduces the high-frequency texture that generative models suppress, and it's the single biggest step toward skin reading as organic rather than rendered.

4. Grade toward live-action film. Push the color grade until the footage sits closer to film stock — adjust until skin tones lose their uniform, poreless quality. A 4-person team that shipped a short film with international locations and VFX on roughly 20,000 credits (~$5,000) ran exactly this blur-grain-grade stack on top of its generations.

These steps stack — upscale, blur, grain, grade — and how far you push each one depends on your footage and delivery format. Beyond the fix itself: if you're still generating, character portraits made in Recraft carry pores, lines, and stubble into your references, so the skin your video model inherits starts less waxy in the first place.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

What we tend to do is put a tiny bit of blur on top of the scene, add a bunch of grain and then play with the grade till it comes closer to live action film.

— invideo's creative team