An AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI alternative for Mac
AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI is a capable, feature-broad enhancer sold as a subscription at roughly $120/year, with a product line that spans desktop software and browser-based tools. Crisp is $19 once, always on-device. The decision usually comes down to two questions: do you need colourisation, and how often will you actually open this thing.
| AVCLabs Video Enhancer AI | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | ~$120/year | $19 once |
| Colourise B&W | Yes | No |
| Face refinement model | Dedicated | General model |
| Processing | Local and cloud, depending on product | Always on-device |
| Timeline editor | No | Yes |
| Stops working if you stop paying | Yes | No |
Two things AVCLabs does that Crisp simply doesn't
Colourisation. Turning black-and-white footage colour is a genuinely different model and a genuinely impressive one. If you have family film from the 1940s, that capability is worth paying for and Crisp has nothing to offer you.
A dedicated face model. Faces are the hardest case in super-resolution because people are extraordinarily good at spotting a wrong one, and a model trained specifically on faces handles them better than a general one. AVCLabs exposes that as its own step. Crisp uses a general model and does not pretend otherwise.
Where the subscription is the wrong shape
Enhancing footage is bursty work. You digitise a box of tapes, or you rescue a client's badly shot event, and then you don't open the app for four months. A yearly fee charges you for the quiet months, and when you stop paying you stop being able to re-export the project you already made.
That is the structural argument, and it is the same one that made Topaz's move to $299/year in October 2025 so unpopular. A one-time licence has its own honest catch — updates eventually stop — but the software you already installed keeps working, which is not true of anything cloud-backed once the servers are switched off.
The cloud question
Mixed local-and-cloud is the hard case, because you have to know which feature is which before you can answer "did my client's footage leave my machine". For a lot of work that is a non-question. For anything under NDA, anything legal or medical, or a walkthrough of somebody's home, it is the whole decision.
Crisp is uniformly on-device — there is no per-feature checking to do, because there is no feature that uploads. That is a simpler thing to promise a client than a list of exceptions.
And Crisp edits
AVCLabs improves a file and hands it back; you assemble the actual cut somewhere else. Crisp has a timeline in the same app — trim, split, reorder, stills, per-clip looks — with the upscale applied once at export to the finished sequence. On a project where you'll discard half the footage, that ordering saves real GPU hours as well as clicks.
The straight answer
- AVCLabs if you need colourisation, if faces are the priority, or if you use this kind of tool monthly enough that a subscription pays for itself.
- Crisp if you want to own it, if the footage shouldn't leave your Mac, or if you'd rather cut and clean in one place. Free with a watermark, so you can test it on your own difficult clip before spending anything.
One thing to be careful about with colourisation
Colourising is the most impressive-looking feature in this category and the one most worth treating sceptically. The model is not recovering colour — there is no colour information in a black-and-white frame — it is guessing what the world probably looked like from everything it has seen. Grass comes out green, skies come out blue, and skin comes out plausible, because those are safe bets.
Clothing, cars, paint and furnishings are not safe bets, and the model will render them confidently in colours the objects never were. For a family film that is usually a delight and nobody minds. For anything documentary or archival, a colourised frame is an illustration rather than a record, and it should be labelled as one.