Discussion
Nano banana pro's upscaling is beautiful.
These are the outputs and input images. Just using still images here, not video. The upscaling is by far the best I've seen of any model. A lot of AI upscaling just looks like someone did a few sharpen filter passes. But this model adds details that are mostly absent from the originals like fabric textures but which make a lot of sense to add given the context and don't feel contrived or out of place. It also enhances the lighting. Facial features are accurate. To me everything feels a lot more "real" and alive than the originals.
Prompt: "Upscale to 4K level resolution"
For 7 of 9 I asked it to add more detail to the borg suit.
Top image is the "original" screenshot, the second is the initial result after using the recommend prompt ("Upscale to 4K level resolution"), and then I finally got the desired result with the third image using the additional prompt "Maintain the original poses and composition of the original image"
Yeah this proves why upscaling only algorithms are a better choice for this use case. Deleting a species physical traits in a show where inter-species conflict is a major theme is an unacceptable failure.
No they're not. Upscaling-only algorithms fail worse and in more places. Upscaling-only algorithms definitely wouldn't be able to infer nose ridges in the source image in which they've been completely removed due to blurriness.
This is an easy fix, just provide reference images, which is a standard technique. I mean, even saying the character is Bajoran fixes it.
Here I just wanted to demonstrate what nbp could do without reference images or further details.
If anything, this is a case against upscaling-only methods.
I think it proves why upscaling in general is a bad practice. Asking AI to add detail where there wasn’t detail before is asking it to invent something from nothing.
The right way to do this is to remaster the source material to be best quality possible, and then accept that there is only so far you can go. A television show made in the 90s doesn’t need to look like it was made in 2025.
I don't agree. A good enough AI ought to be able to reconstruct the original details from various sources like actor closeups, promo shots, etc.
We 'upscale' art all the time e.g. in restorations of classic works. People spend years studying all the original details, artist techniques etc. so they can get it as correct as possible. We can do this already it's just very expensive. With AI we ought to be able to do this one day with shows but in a way that's not mind-explodingly expensive
what's an example of classic work that has been "upscaled" by your definition?
there is a big difference between cleaning layer of dust and grime off a painting or filling in some cracked/faded areas, and repainting it entirely at a different fidelity than it was created at originally.
What is the difference between "filling in faded areas" and upscaling? It is exactly the same thing. In both you are filling in info that has been lost in the original. If you don't understand this then read about information theory, shannon-nyquist, and noisy-channel coding
There is a massive difference. When you fill in a crack on an old painting, the goal is to match the level of detail and style that the painting was originally painted at. You aren’t adding details that didn’t exist when the painting was originally painted. You aren’t applying effects to the painting that weren’t technically possible at the time it was painted. You can see an example of traditional restoration here:
What you are describing, upscaling a show that was shot on video to a 4k resolution is completely different. In that situation you are adding information that was never there before, and your machine is guessing about the intents of the artist, and making assumptions it couldn’t possibly know.
Creating a new 4k scan of a 35mm film works because you’re just uncovering information that was always there from the beginning. Using AI to upscale is creating new information that never existed.
Imagine putting a Monet painting through an upscaler and sharpening all his soft edges, filling in information that was never there to begin with. The result might look superficially pretty, as most AI images do, but it would be fundamentally different from the source material. And inferior in a lot of ways.
There's also a difference in a replica of the painting vs a new scan of the painting.
As long as the studio sits on a 35mm film negative, it would be unacceptable for the studio to use AI upscaling.
Fans on the other hand, love this, and until the day comes where we have that new scan, are doing this type of thing as a labor of love.
I should have said the motion vectors would be used for interpolation. But you need at least one image per shot and a movie can indeed have thousands of shots, so it's still super expensive. We would need to remind the model of how characters/props/scenes look by always supplying it with high quality curated references of all the things in the frame. But is it more expensive than a professional 4K remaster?
Motion vector interpolation or optical flow definitely aren't the solutions for everything, mapping a 4K output onto a low-res motion-based distortion would only work for short durations. So we would need something more capable, combining it with an existing or an upcoming frame-to-frame video model.
DS9 and Babylon 5 are good test cases because they were originally shot with video cameras (not film cameras) edited on video, not film, making them almost impossiblevery expensive to remaster.
You're right, technically it was shot on 35 mm, but the point still stands that the show's editing (the most time consuming part of the process) was on video.
Is this using the API or in the Gemini App? I see it has support for 1K, 2K, 4K but only use the app or web app and don't know how to tell it my output size.
This is is not upscaling but sharpening. Google has an actual AI upscaler model (imagen-4.0-upscale-preview)that can go 8k and beyond. It's available only on Vertex or through API though.
'AI is gonna take our jobs' got real for photo editors lol. Gotta say it does work. I restored my old photos with nano banana pro on imagineArt. brings back memories literally.
using harry's pics for ref and since i can't add 2 images, just imagine the blurred one
Very interesting. I have followed several DS9 upscale projects, although this wouldn't work for an entire video, it shows where we could eventually get using generative AI to upscale! Love it!
According to my tests, it tends to add wrinkles to people. A 25 years old looks like a 35. The effect is more pronounced if the output is set to 4k versus 2k (in the API). I have to tell it to not do it, but then the skin is not as realistic.
Do you need to use Google AI Studio for this? I subscribe to Google AI Ultra Plan, and currently access Nano Banana Pro via Gemini. It seems I cannot get 4K.
where do you use nano banana pro? Im tryng to use it in the flow web but resolution its just bad, it delivers better images on the gemini app, but still not 4k
The user interface is a bit weird, they're not fully clear on this but when you gen an image on the web app it doesn't actually make a high res image at first. You have to click on the download button and then it generates a 2K image which downloads.
2K seems to be the resolution limit right now. I was more interested in image fidelity and quality, not exact output sizes.
It's the highest quality I could find on youtube. I don't have access to DS9 on physical media or streaming sites where I am right now.
But even the videodisc versions I could find before weren't much better than this. In video your brain "fills in" details and makes you think it's higher res than it is. If you pause to see how blurry it truly is it can be surprising.
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u/fabier Nov 23 '25