Which repair type to pick: Smart Repair or a scene

The short answer

Pick the Smart Repair card for most footage: it cleans, rebuilds detail, and restores faces in one pass. Open the Anime card for cel lines, Night & Low Light for dark noise, and Colorize B&W for black-and-white. Haze, rain, and heavy grain stay inside Quality Repair.

Why one model cannot cover it

• A natural-photo prior invents grain inside flat anime fills and softens the line
• A prior that ignores faces tends to plasticize them — the one region viewers police. Smart Repair restores faces as part of the pass
• Night noise looks like "detail" to a daylight prior, so a generic run can get dirtier

What each prior is for

• Smart Repair — default for messy real-world plates: old exports, screen recordings, social re-encodes. It adjusts to the source and restores faces in the same pass; start here when unsure
• Faces — no separate type: Smart Repair restores them, whether the person fills the frame or stands small in a wide shot. Interviews, family, wedding faces start there
• Special Scene Repair → Anime — protect hard edges and clean flats, which a natural-photo prior tends to break
• Special Scene Repair → Night Scene — separate grain from structure before rebuild. Concerts, surveillance-like ISO, night streets
• Special Scene Repair → Dehaze, Remove Rain, Colorize, Film Grain Removal — the archival fixes. Full order lives on restore old video

A short decision chain

1. Person is the subject → Smart Repair (it restores faces)
2. Animation / illustration → the Anime card
3. Dark and noisy → the Night & Low Light card
4. Everything else → Smart Repair, then 1s/3s/5s after download if two candidates are close

• Priors rebuild plausible detail, not lost photons — see 480p to 4K
• Mixed live-action + heavy illustration: pick the subject. There is no perfect hybrid
• Unread text still cannot be guessed. Where a scene offers a slower tier, it buys time, not legible letters

Read the preview before the long run

The prior is the choice that sets the training bias under the pass, and no other setting undoes it. Run Special Scene Repair's Night Scene on a daylight interview and the model treats pores and stubble as grain it should separate. On a 5-second preview the shadows look busier and the cheek looks slightly waxy. That is a cue to switch priors and preview again.

Smart Repair is still the sensible starting point for mixed footage: a screen recording, an old export, a social re-encode, or a face that fills the frame, since it restores faces in the same pass. Anime is the right choice when the picture is flat color areas with hard ink lines; a natural-photo model invents speckles inside those flat areas and softens the lines. Night Scene is the right choice when the noise is the damage, not a texture you meant to keep. Dehaze, rain removal, colorize, and film grain belong to the restoration path. They aren't a fallback to grab because the first options looked similar.

• Edges: the line should stay a line. A bright rim means the prior is inventing an outline
• Flats: anime fills and quiet skies should stay quiet. New speckles there are invented texture
• Faces: waxy cheeks or a smeared tooth line mean the output size outran the source, or a scene type ran on live action. Step the resolution down, or go back to Smart Repair
• Noise: if the shadows got busier, a daylight prior treated grain as detail worth rebuilding
• Text: letters that could not be read stay unreadable. No prior rebuilds a glyph the source did not contain

When two candidates look close, don't blend them in your head and hope the export lands in between. Export is the paid step on pricing; the 1s/3s/5s preview after download is where you rule out the wrong model, with no account. A live-action shot with a heavy illustrated overlay still has no hybrid that serves both. Pick what the shot is really about, preview that model, and accept that the other areas will look slightly less good. That compromise costs less than running the illustration model over real skin. These models rebuild plausible detail; they can't return light the sensor didn't record. A clean but small source only needs Smart Repair, which has no tiers. A crushed night street wants Night Scene first; then decide whether its General tier is worth the extra minutes over Fast. Anime is the only scene with a High Quality tier. Switching models is cheaper than moving up tiers: a 1-second preview comparing Smart Repair and Anime on the same illustrated frame tells you more than a 5-second preview of the slowest tier on the wrong model. The repair type decides the result; the tier decides the time.