arkennemasis fal · Flux Video Upscale · $0.14-0.79/s

Video upscaling is one of the few jobs where local is genuinely competitive. upscaling.md has the ladder: SeedVR2 beats FlashVSR on heavy upscales, NVIDIA's RTX VSR is real-time but closer to Lanczos than to a diffusion model, and the KB's own summary of the community is that the RTX path is what one node author replaced a Topaz subscription with. So why pay?

ArkFal_blackforestlabs_flux_video_upscale is the hosted answer, and the honest pitch is convenience plus a mode the local tools don't have: a precise, source-faithful pass and a creative detail-enhancement pass, from the same node, at up to 4K. $0.14–0.79 per second of output video, billed on the delivered output only.

The price grid, which is the whole decision

| Mode | 1080p | 2K | 4K | |---|---|---|---| | precise | $0.14/s | $0.25/s | $0.55/s | | creative | $0.20/s | $0.35/s | $0.79/s |

A 10-second 1080p clip is $1.40 in precise mode, $2.00 creative. Because it bills the output, and you set the scaling factor, the priciest single setting is the one that pushes you into the 4K tier - so check what upscale_factor is going to produce before you run.

What you set

• video - required. MP4, at most 20 seconds and 50MB. Uploaded free, then billed.
• creativity - defaults to 1, which is creative mode. That's the more expensive of the two and it rewrites detail rather than preserving it. If you're upscaling a clip you already like and just want more pixels, set it to 0 for the source-faithful upscale. This is the single most useful thing on the node and the default points the wrong way for that job.
• upscale_factor - default 2. The source aspect ratio is preserved, so this multiplies both dimensions. This is what decides which price tier you land in.
• prompt - optional, and only meaningful in creative mode, where it guides what kind of detail gets invented. Leave it empty for precise.
• safety_tolerance - moderation strictness, default 2. Lower is stricter.

Optional shared controls: max_cost_usd (default $20, checked before upload), reuse_identical_run (on by default), extra_json, max_concurrent.

Outputs: video and video_path - no seed, no draft cache. It's a finisher.

When to call it, when to stay home

Call it when the clip came from a paid model and you want one more tier without a local restoration stack: 4K at $0.55/s is cheaper than the hours you'd spend tuning SeedVR2 for the same clip. Stay home when you're upscaling a lot of footage - 10 seconds here is a dollar and change, and a batch of twenty clips is a bill.

There's a fair argument that the sweet spot is creative at 1080p for compressed, soft sources: $0.20/s is where the model's ability to add plausible texture earns its money, and 1080p keeps you out of the expensive tier.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Hishamahmer/comfyui-arkennemasis

Restart after that, or use ComfyUI Manager and search arkennemasis. Then:

FAL_KEY=your-key-from-fal.ai/dashboard/keys

in the .env next to run_nvidia_gpu.bat (or in your ComfyUI folder on a normal install). No key input on the node, on purpose - workflow files store widget values verbatim, and a key in a widget is a key in every file you share. No model downloads; the upscaler runs on fal.

Two warnings

The live price badge on the title is computed at the 4K rate - the tag reads "$0.14-0.79/s" and the badge label says as much. The real figure depends on your factor and mode, so treat the badge as a ceiling, not a quote.

And the clip leaves your machine. For a client's raw footage, that's a decision, not a detail. Everything before the submit is free - bad inputs and a too-tight cap fail without billing you - and once a result is on disk, reuse_identical_run means re-running the same graph costs nothing.