Phones with Video Boost

Video Boost is Google's cloud-based video processing on Pixel phones: the shooting happens on the phone, the heavy processing happens on Google's servers. The phone records the clip, uploads it, processing of the same class as the photo pipeline is applied server-side, and the improved version comes back down to the phone.

The reason is computational load: applying to every frame of a video something like what night mode applies to a single photo asks more than the phone's chip can do in real time. Moving the work to a server removes that ceiling.

Three things are worth knowing in practice: the result is not immediate — upload and processing can take minutes; until the improved version arrives you hold the phone's own ordinary recording; and the video is uploaded to Google to be processed, so this is not an entirely on-device operation.