How to use Phoenix Upscaler

What Phoenix can work with

Anything you can play. Phoenix reads whatever ffmpeg reads, which in practice means MP4, MKV, MOV, AVI, WMV, MPG, VOB and the rest. It does not care where the footage came from, only what state it is in.

Footage people bring it, roughly in order of how common it is:

• Phone video from 2010 to 2016. 480p or 720p, heavily compressed, shot on a phone with a tiny sensor. The single most common thing people restore, and often the most rewarding, because the subject matter is usually people you know.
• VHS and camcorder captures. Interlaced, noisy, colour-bled. Phoenix was built for these first.
• DVD rips and wedding videos. 720×480 squeezed onto a disc, usually interlaced, often with a soft transfer on top.
• Old downloads and archive clips. Anything that was 240p or 360p when you saved it and now looks like a postage stamp on a 4K screen.
• Film scans. 8mm and Super 8 transfers, where the grain is real and worth keeping rather than smoothing away.
• Your own back catalogue. Old uploads, gameplay captures, screen recordings and webcam footage that were fine on a 2012 monitor and are not fine now.

What it cannot do is invent a picture that was never recorded. A clip that is genuinely out of focus stays out of focus; a face that is twelve pixels wide has no detail to recover. Phoenix rebuilds detail that compression, tape and scaling destroyed, which is a different problem and a solvable one.

2. Add a video and pick a preset

Drag the file onto the window, or click to browse. Phoenix reads the resolution, the frame rate and whether the footage is interlaced, and shows you what it found.

The preset tells it what kind of damage to expect:

• Auto inspects the file and chooses. Right almost always, and the right place to start.
• VHS for tape and broadcast captures: heavier noise reduction, and deinterlacing on by default.
• Film for scans and archive footage, where grain is part of the picture and should survive.
• Faces for interviews, weddings, anything where people are the subject and their faces are what you will actually look at.
• Max runs the full stack. Slowest, and the one to reach for on a short clip that matters.

If you are not sure, leave it on Auto and restore a 30-second section first. Judging a preset on a short clip costs minutes; judging it on a two-hour tape costs an evening.

4. Set up Generative (optional, one time)

Generative is the only mode with an extra step, because it needs a several-gigabyte model and a GPU compute stack that the installer would otherwise force on everyone.

Click Install Generative in the app and leave it. It downloads the models and sets up the runtime, which takes a while on a normal connection and needs roughly 20 GB free. On AMD cards it installs into WSL, which Windows may ask to enable and which may want a restart. This happens once; after it finishes, Generative is just another option in the dropdown.

Restores are chunked, so a failure part-way through is not fatal. If a Generative job stops, Phoenix keeps the chunks it finished and offers Resume next time you open it, including after closing the app entirely.

If something goes wrong

The result looks soft, or barely different

Almost always the quality mode. Standard does no neural work at all, so on badly damaged footage the difference can be small. Try Enhanced first, then Generative. If you are already on Generative and the picture is still soft, the source may be out of focus rather than low resolution, which is not something any restoration can fix.

Faces look smooth or waxy

Too much restoration for the amount of real detail in the source. Try the Faces preset, which is tuned to keep skin texture, or drop from Generative to Enhanced. On a face that was only a few dozen pixels wide to begin with, a slightly soft result is the honest one.

Motion shimmers or flickers

Usually interlaced footage that was not detected. Set the preset to VHS, which turns deinterlacing on explicitly. Anything captured from tape or broadcast is interlaced far more often than people expect.

“Generative isn't set up on this PC yet”

Exactly what it says: the models and runtime have not been installed. Click Install Generative, or use Enhanced, which needs no setup and is a real improvement over Standard.

The job ran out of memory

Phoenix already steps itself down through smaller chunk sizes when a card runs short of memory, so seeing this means it reached the bottom of that ladder. Close other GPU-heavy applications, especially browsers with hardware acceleration and anything running a game. Failing that, restore in shorter sections.

It failed part-way through a long job

Reopen Phoenix. If the job was Generative, it offers to resume from the chunks that already finished rather than starting again. This survives closing the app and rebooting.

The app will not start, or the page is blank

Phoenix runs a small local server and shows its interface in a window pointed at it. If something else on your machine has taken the port, or a security tool is blocking local connections, the window can come up empty. Allow Phoenix through your firewall for private networks. Nothing is being sent anywhere; the connection is your computer talking to itself.

Windows says the file is unrecognised

SmartScreen again, on the installer. More info → Run anyway. It is the absence of a paid signing certificate, not a judgement about the file.

My drive filled up

A long restore writes large intermediates. Phoenix cleans them when a job finishes, but a job that was cancelled or crashed can leave them behind. The app shows where its working files live and how much space they are using, and will clear them for you.