TO Microsoft has been criticized many times for shoehorning AI into many parts of Windows 11 and its programs, but one new feature it just released seems much more useful than others. Microsoft Clipchampwhich is the free video editor that comes standard with the operating system, gains an AI tool called Super Resolution Video that allows Rescale and increase the resolution of videos up to 4Kand it does so without cloud processing.
This feature is useful for enhancing videos recorded with older cell phones, highly compressed clips received through messaging apps, or low-quality webcam recordings. Clipchamp uses an AI model to generate additional visual details while increasing resolutionwhich makes the resulting video appear sharper and clearer.
There are other video upscaling services on the market, but unlike tools that rely on cloud processing, Clipchamp does all work locally. Microsoft notes that Windows can use the CPU of compatible computers or the NPU of the PC Copilot+ for processing, but not GPU. The feature supports compatible hardware amd, Intel and Qualcomm that has at least four cores, 32 MB of L3 cache and reaches 3 GHz.
He also explained that after adding a video to the Clipchamp timeline, you must select the option ‘Increase quality’ on the menu ‘Enhance video’. Depending on the resolution of the original video, Clipchamp may offer the options of 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4K.
Video Super Resolution cannot magically recover information that was never captured in the original recording. Instead, the AI model estimates the additional details, so Rescaled videos may contain visual artifacts or subtle distortions in faces and other elements. For this reason, Microsoft advises against using this function to process videos that could be used as judicial evidence, identity verification or medical images, where it is essential to preserve the original content without alterations.
Since the feature depends on your computer’s hardware capabilities, it is currently only available in the Clipchamp desktop app for Windows. and not in the web version. Video Super Resolution joins the editor’s range of AI tools, which could already generate videos from written instructions and also create subtitles with artificial intelligence.