What is the best AI video upscaler for Kling and AI-generated footage?

For Kling, Seedance 2.0, and other AI-generated footage, Topaz Astra (running inside invideo) is the strongest upscaler — it's purpose-built for the plasticky, over-sharp look AI video produces. Pair it with a light grain-and-blur pass and a color grade to push the result closer to live-action film.

Run upscaling as the FIRST step of your post pipeline, before color. AI-generated clips from Seedance 2.0 and Kling come out hyper-sharp with a plasticky skin quality — upscaling cleans resolution and detail, then grain, micro-blur, and grade do the rest of the work pulling it toward live action. As invideo's creative director Hridaye Ashish Nagpal puts it: "When you are generating a lot with seed dance, there tends to be this ultra-sharpness, there's this very plasticky feeling on the skin."

invideo is an agentic video creation platform with the current generation models and upscalers built in, so the same project that generated the footage can upscale it without exporting anywhere else.

Topaz Astra on invideo — the default for AI footage. Topaz Astra is the upscaler invideo's productions reach for first on Seedance 2.0 and Kling output. It handles resolution lift while preserving the texture detail (skin pores, fabric weave, hair edges) that gets crushed by generic resize. Run it on every clip before you touch the timeline; it sets the ceiling for everything downstream.

Spin up an upscale sub-agent so it runs hands-off. Inside invideo you can create a named sub-agent — call it "upscale artist" — and hand it the batch. It runs Astra across all your selects without you babysitting clip by clip, which matters when a 3-minute episode pulls 41 keepers from 164 generations. This is the automation layer most upscaler comparisons skip: generate → sub-agent upscales → you grade.

The realism finish on top of the upscale. Upscaling alone won't kill the AI look — it sharpens it. After Astra, add a tiny amount of blur on top of the scene, layer film grain, then play with the grade until skin and contrast land closer to a live-action reference. Hridaye describes the exact recipe: "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." Skip this and the upscaled file still reads as AI.

Which model you generated on matters less than this pipeline. Whether the source is Kling, Seedance 2.0, or Veo, the artifact profile is similar — over-sharp surfaces, waxy skin, too-clean edges. The Astra → blur → grain → grade sequence is the same. Inside invideo the agent routes generation to the right model per shot AND keeps the upscale step in the same project, so you're not exporting between tools to finish.

Beyond the core pipeline: if you're delivering to social at vertical or odd aspect ratios, upscale BEFORE you reframe — you keep more pixels to crop into.

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 Ashish Nagpal, invideo's creative director