Upscale first, then colour grade. AI video out of models like Seedance 2.0 comes back ultra-sharp and plasticky, with subtle compression artifacts — upscaling on the raw, ungraded source cleans those before you bake in look, then grading on the higher-resolution plate gives you more latitude and avoids amplifying colour artifacts. The one exception: if a clip has heavy noise or banding, denoise before you upscale.
Run your footage through this three-step order: denoise (only if needed) → upscale → colour grade. The invideo agent is an agentic video tool with all current generation models and upscalers built in, so you can stage this pipeline inside it instead of bouncing files between apps.
Why upscale before you grade. Seedance 2.0 and similar models produce footage with ultra-sharp, plasticky skin and fine compression noise baked into the raw output. As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it: "when you are generating a lot with Seedance, there tends to be this ultra-sharpness, there's this very plasticky feeling on the skin." Upscaling that raw, neutral source cleans and resolves detail before you introduce any colour decisions. Grade first and your curves, saturation pushes, and contrast lifts get magnified by the upscaler — every chroma artifact gets amplified along with the look you wanted.
The denoise exception. If a clip has visible banding in skies/gradients or chunky noise in shadows, denoise it before the upscaler — otherwise the upscaler will sharpen the noise into the final plate. Community consensus on r/upscaling lands here too: restore first, upscale second, grade last. AI footage usually doesn't need heavy denoising, but check shadow areas and flat colour fields before committing.
Where to run each step inside invideo. Topaz Astra runs on invideo as the upscaling pass — point the invideo agent at your selected clips and have it batch them. You can spin up a sub-agent for this and just name it the upscale artist; it'll run the upscales without you babysitting each clip. Once upscaled, take the plate into your grade.
The post pass that actually sells the look. Upscaling alone won't kill the AI sheen. After upscaling, the documented pass is: a tiny amount of blur, a layer of grain, then the grade — "we 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." Grain especially needs to sit on the graded image, not under it, so add it at the end of the chain.
Animation and line-art footage. For hand-painted or Arcane-style animated AI footage, the order is the same — upscale first on the clean linework, grade after. Grading before upscaling on animation risks the upscaler treating your colour shifts as structural detail and hardening edges in ways you didn't intend.
So the canonical pipeline for AI footage: generate → (denoise if needed) → upscale → blur + grain → colour grade. Keep the grade as the last creative decision on the highest-resolution plate you have.
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.
— Hridaye, invideo's creative director