DaVinci Resolve · scaling, colour pipeline and credits checked Nov 2026
Upscale a shot in DaVinci Resolve without breaking the grade
Resolve is a colour-first editor: it can make a clip fill a larger frame, and its own scaling options decide how that resize is computed, but none of them can put back detail the camera never recorded. This page covers where an AI pass belongs in a Resolve workflow, how to round-trip one shot through it without losing the node graph, and what the pass costs in credits before you commit a whole sequence.
Upscale the exported shot here
Export a five-to-ten second slice of the real problem — the shot that is soft, noisy, or cropped out of a smaller frame — then upload it as a supported file or paste a public HTTPS URL. Choose the model and output tier, read the preflight credit quote, and submit only when the quote matches what you budgeted for that one shot.
Browser upload limit: 500 MB. For larger files, paste a publicly accessible HTTPS URL. Each job supports videos up to 10 minutes.
Quick scene presets
Presets pick a model for a common scenario. You can still switch models manually below.
Upscaled preview
Compare the enhanced output before exporting the final file.
Upload a clip, paste a direct video URL, or load the sample. No example video is downloaded until you ask for it.
Tip: keep your original FPS and avoid pre-scaling. The upscaler handles cadence better than most NLE plugins.
Test before processing the full video
Upscaling cannot recreate detail removed by heavy messaging compression. Test the hardest 5–10-second segment first; a higher-priced model is not automatically a better fit.
This page is published by SeedVR2.net, which sells the hosted upscaler embedded below. It is a workflow guide, not a Blackmagic Design product page: Blackmagic Design does not endorse this service and nothing here is a Resolve feature. The behaviour described is what a timeline editor does with frame size and scaling; credit figures are read from this site's own billing table and yearly plan prices on November 9, 2026.
Five decisions that decide the result
Three of these belong to Resolve and two belong to this service. Settle them before you touch the timeline, because the order you do them in decides whether you pay for a pass you have to throw away, and whether the grade survives the round trip.
- What Resolve can do for you
- Rescale, not reconstruct
- What to hand over
- One shot at timeline size
- Billing starts at
- 5 seconds
- Accepted input
- 500 MB or a public URL
- How the clip comes back
- Replacement clip, relinked grade
The Inspector's retime and scaling controls, Super Scale among them, change how many pixels a clip occupies and how the new ones are computed. All of them resample the pixels already in the file; none adds information the camera did not capture.
Export the problem shot at the timeline's native frame size, before the grade is baked in, and upload that file. Handing over a graded or already-enlarged export gives the model artefacts and a look it should not be interpreting.
Billed duration rounds up from a five-second minimum and one source can run up to 10 minutes, so a long sequence is processed shot by shot rather than submitted whole.
A supported video file (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI and similar) of at most 500 MB, or a publicly reachable HTTPS video URL for a larger master.
The enhanced file returns as a new clip. Swap it in, then re-apply the timeline item's grade to it and confirm nothing is applied twice — once baked into the export, once in the node graph.
Where an AI upscale belongs in a Resolve workflow
Cut first, upscale second, conform and grade last. Edit the sequence at its native resolution so the story is locked, collect the shots that actually survive the cut, and upscale only those. Upscaling before the edit means paying credits for footage you will trim away, and it also means the model sees shots in isolation rather than in the sequence you will grade and mix.
There is one exception worth planning for. If the whole deliverable has to live in a larger frame — a 4K master from a 1080p edit, or a vertical version from landscape material — decide that before the edit, because the frame size changes how much of each shot fits. Upscale a representative scene first, judge it at full size, and only then build the sequence around it.
Keep the upscale out of the creative loop. Do not use it to rescue a shot you have not yet decided to keep, and do not run it twice on the same footage hoping for a second round of improvement: the second pass starts from the first pass's output and mostly amplifies whatever that output already got wrong.
- Lock the cut first, then upscale only the shots that survive.
- Decide the final frame size before the edit if it changes composition.
- One upscale pass per shot; a second pass builds on the first pass's errors.
Resolve's own scaling options, Super Scale included
Resolve gives you several overlapping ways to make a clip fill a frame it was not shot for. The Inspector's retime and scaling controls can resize a clip, and the quality setting under them — Super Scale is the well-known option — changes how the new pixels are computed when the clip does not match the timeline resolution. That is the honest description: a choice of resampling quality, not a different kind of operation.
What any of those settings does is take the pixels already in the file and work out new ones. A better quality setting produces a cleaner, less aliased resize than a cheap one, and on modest enlargements the difference is real and sometimes sufficient. What it cannot do is decide what a plausible edge, pore or letterform would have looked like at the higher resolution, because that information is not in the source for it to consult.
An AI model differs in kind rather than degree: it predicts plausible texture from patterns learned across many images, then writes that prediction into the new pixels. That is why it can hold detail that a resample smears away, and it is also why it can be confidently wrong — waxy skin, reshaped lettering, shimmering edges on a pan. Neither operation recovers what the camera missed; only one of them invents anything, and invention has to be checked.
- Super Scale and the other scaling settings change how a resize is computed, not what it is.
- A quality setting can be enough for a modest enlargement; it cannot supply missing texture.
- A model predicts detail, so it can be wrong in ways a resample never is.
The honest round trip: one shot out, one shot back
Export the test slice at the timeline's native frame size, from the original media, once, with a codec that spends its bitrate on detail. Exporting at the size you are aiming for defeats the exercise: the extra pixels would be Resolve's interpolation, and the model would then treat that interpolation as real image data. Export before the grade is baked in, or at least note exactly what the export contains.
Download the enhanced file and bring it back as a replacement rather than as a new cut. Replacing the clip keeps the timeline item's trims, transitions, effects and grade attached to the edit point; a fresh clip drops in beside the old one and usually drags a second grade with it. If the returned file has a different frame size, match the timeline's frame size in the Inspector transform controls instead of letting the clip be cropped by default.
Check the cadence. A clip whose timebase does not match the timeline will be conformed, which can wobble motion or shift sync. If the upscaler returns the same duration and frame rate you sent — the normal case when you export at the timeline's native settings — the round trip is a straight swap. If you deliberately changed cadence as part of the pass, expect to retime the clip and re-check any audio sync you rely on.
- Export at the timeline's native frame size, from the original media, once.
- Replace the clip so trims, effects and the grade stay attached to the edit.
- Match the timeline timebase; a mismatched cadence forces a conform.
Node graphs, re-imports and the double-grade problem
A grade in Resolve is a graph of nodes attached to a timeline item, not to the media file. That is good news for a round trip: replacing the underlying clip can leave the node graph where it was, pointed at new pixels. It is also the trap. If the export you sent the upscaler already carried the look, and the node graph then applies the look again, you get a double grade that is easy to misread as an upscaler artefact.
Plan the handover before you start. Either export a clean, pre-grade slice and let the node graph do all the work when the shot returns, or export a graded slice and temporarily bypass the nodes on the returned clip for a like-for-like comparison. Write down which one you chose. A single note in the timeline saves the half hour you would otherwise spend wondering why the returned shot looks more contrasty than the original.
Then verify the things a re-import can silently change: resolution interpretation, colour space and gamut tags, and any ResolveFX or cache tied to the old source. Compare the returned shot against the original at full size in the same viewer, with the same grade, before you judge the upscale itself. If you cannot make the comparison fair, you are not comparing the upscaler — you are comparing two different finishing chains.
- The node graph lives on the timeline item, so a replacement clip keeps it — and can double it.
- Export pre-grade, or bypass the nodes on return for a fair comparison.
- Re-check interpretation, colour space and cached effects after a re-import.
What a minute of Resolve footage costs in credits
At the Standard model, 1080p bills 540 credits per minute of submitted source footage, which is 32,400 credits an hour. That is the reference figure on this site and the one to budget with, because it covers most Resolve work: a 1080p timeline that has to become a clean 1080p master, or a 1080p shot that has to survive a 4K delivery.
If the deliverable genuinely needs a 4K frame, the same model bills more per second at 4K than at 1080p, and the difference buys compatibility rather than recovered detail. Convert to money at the Creator yearly rate of $0.0093 per credit: a minute of 1080p Standard work is about $5.01, an hour about $300. Creator's 106,800 credits cover about 197 minutes of 1080p Standard footage, or about 53 minutes at Standard 4K.
Read those numbers against your own timeline. Credits follow the duration you submit, not the length of the sequence, so only the shots that need the pass get paid for. A two-minute cut with forty seconds of genuinely bad footage is a forty-second job. That is the practical argument for the one-shot test: it confirms the settings, and it tells you the real per-shot duration before you queue the rest.
- 1080p Standard is 540 credits a minute, 32,400 an hour.
- At the Creator yearly rate that is about $5.01 per minute of footage.
- You pay for submitted duration, so only the shots that need it get billed.
What this page cannot promise
An upscale changes how existing footage is rendered, not what was recorded. The limits below are the ones that change finishing decisions, stated here rather than discovered after a render.
- No model recovers information the camera did not capture. Predictions can look sharper than the original without being more accurate, and at full size that difference is visible.
- Waxy skin, reshaped lettering and shimmering edges are the usual failure modes. They show up on close inspection, which is why a full-size comparison of one shot is mandatory before a whole sequence.
- The upscale request carries no audio handling. The soundtrack stays in Resolve and must be re-attached to the enhanced clip.
- This page cannot tell you how your specific node graph will behave after a replacement clip. Verify the grade on one shot before you trust the round trip across a sequence.
- Do not upload client, confidential or rights-restricted footage unless you are authorized to send it to a hosted service, and check the client's data terms before you do.
Sources for the Resolve facts on this page
Each linked page was opened on November 9, 2026. Blackmagic Design updates its software continuously, so the links are dated and the claims are kept narrow enough to check.
- Blackmagic Design: DaVinci Resolve
Blackmagic documents Resolve as an editing, colour, audio and visual-effects application, with colour grading as a distinct page in the workflow — which is why this page treats the grade as something to relink rather than something the upscaler can carry.
- Wikipedia: DaVinci Resolve
A background reference for what the application is and which pages of the workflow it exposes; used only for general description, not for feature specifics.
- Wikipedia: Super-resolution imaging
Super-resolution techniques reconstruct a higher-resolution image from priors and learned assumptions rather than from recorded detail, which is why their output can be plausible and still wrong.
DaVinci Resolve upscaling questions
Can DaVinci Resolve upscale video with AI?
Resolve includes AI-assisted tools for other jobs, such as isolating a subject for a mask, but its scaling controls are resampling operations: they compute new pixels from the ones already in the file. Super Scale is a quality setting for that computation, not a super-resolution model. To reconstruct plausible detail rather than resample it, export the shot, run it through an upscaling model, and bring the result back as a replacement clip.
Is Super Scale the same as an AI upscale?
No. Super Scale changes how Resolve computes a resize when a clip does not match the timeline resolution; it is a better-quality resample, and on a modest enlargement that can be all you need. An AI model differs in kind because it predicts texture that is not in the source. That prediction can hold detail a resample smears, and it can also invent the wrong detail, so compare one shot at full size before committing a sequence.
Should I grade before or after the upscale?
After, in most cases. A baked-in grade becomes part of the source the model reads, and a strong look can push it to estimate texture that is not there. Export a clean slice, upscale it, replace the clip, and let the node graph apply the look once. If you must export a graded slice, bypass the nodes on the returned clip so you are comparing like with like rather than grading the shot twice.
Will my grade survive replacing the clip?
The grade belongs to the timeline item, so replacing the underlying media can leave the node graph pointed at the new file. Verify it rather than assume it: check that the grade is applied exactly once, that resolution and colour-space interpretation match the original, and that any cached effects have been refreshed. If the returned file has a different frame size, set the transform to the timeline's frame size instead of letting the clip be cropped.
How many credits does a minute of Resolve footage cost?
At the Standard model, 1080p bills 540 credits per minute of submitted source footage, or 32,400 credits an hour; 4K on the same model bills more per second. At the Creator yearly rate of $0.0093 per credit, a minute is about $5.01. You pay for the duration you upload, so the practical saving is submitting only the shots that need the pass.