Astra From Topaz Labs

Astra gives you two ways to treat a clip, and they don't mix. Creative mode is for stylized results. It adds new detail, shifts mood, lighting and visual style, and pushes footage past what was actually filmed. Precise mode leaves the look alone and works on quality instead. It cleans and sharpens, yet keeps the original character. Choosing the mode is the first real decision, and it comes down to whether you want a different look or a better version of the same one.

Precise mode runs on Topaz's Starlight models, a diffusion-based approach the company says was the first built for restoring existing video rather than generating new footage. The lineup covers a range: Starlight Fast 1 and 2 for speed, Starlight Precise 2 for faces and fine textures, and Precise 2.5 for the highest detail recovery. Starlight Precise 2.6 adds better temporal consistency across frames and runs 15% faster. There's also Starlight Mini for fast motion and older low-resolution clips, plus specialized models like Proteus for general cleanup, Rhea for low-motion scenes, NYX for noise and Iris for faces.

Astra scales footage to true 4K, and the company markets up to 8x enlargement for AI-generated video. The claim is that it rebuilds detail rather than stretching pixels, which matters most on soft or synthetic source material. A 1080p clip or a low-res AI output comes back sharper and more defined, ready for a 4K screen or a larger deliverable. Output resolution is set to 1080p or 4K depending on the job and the plan.

Beyond resolution, Astra generates new frames to smooth motion or create slow motion. It can push footage to high frame rates, up to 120fps, which is the kind of smooth, deliberate slow-mo most AI video generators can't produce on their own. For choppy or low-frame-rate source clips, interpolation fills the gaps so movement reads as fluid instead of stuttering.

In Creative mode, Astra 2 exposes a set of controls for steering the result. Creativity and Sharpness each run on a 1 to 5 scale, and an optional prompt lets you describe the style you want, such as cinematic lighting or soft vintage tones. The trade-off is length: add a prompt and the job is capped at about 450 frames, or roughly 15 seconds. Drop the prompt and you can push the full frame limit. For anything longer, scene detection splits the video so you can apply prompts section by section.

Every Astra render runs in the cloud and draws on Cloud Credits, so the work doesn't touch your hardware. That means a low-power laptop can finish a job it could never handle locally, and you can queue several videos at once. Credits are bought separately or bundled through a monthly plan, and cost depends on the output size and the model used. Topaz also runs a dedicated column for Astra on its cloud render page, where you top up credits or subscribe.

Astra doesn't expect every clip to fit the model limits. Scene detection breaks a video into smaller segments automatically, and each scene can be processed on its own. That's how longer clips get handled: rather than hitting a hard wall, you let Astra divide the footage and run the parts. It also pairs with the prompt rule, since per-scene prompts are allowed in Astra 2 even when the whole clip is too long for one.