This is a small clip from a 1991 movie, i used Topaz video ai to upscale it from 1080p to 4k.
I am very pleased with the result. Share your opinion?
2 Likes
Amazing isn’t it? Apart from some tiny aberrations such as the slightly unstable and overly sharp writing on some of the buildings (and very subtle at that) most people would never know the difference between that and an original at 4K.
I have just bought Topaz for a very large personal project. I own around 120 commercial DVDs that I have purchased over the last 15 years or so. Maybe 25% of them are movies and TV series that will likely never come to bluray but most are commercial disks of motorsport broadcasts from the 1970s to 1990s compiled by the companies that own the rights to the footage. Although the transfers were originally done in good faith and on the best equipment, they are all significantly flawed to a greater or lesser extend being 576i and with the tapes having seen better days or been dubbed to preserve them, etc. And the ones that came from early Betacam cassettes (early 90s) show occassional digital dropouts, etc.
One in particular that I used in testing Topaz was all but unwatchable. Not only was the source material pretty dodgy to begin with but for some reason it was not transferred at 50i but 25p even though the broadcast itself back in the day was 50i. This made it a stutter fest for a motorsport broadcast (which I cannot watch at anything less than 50 / 60i or better still, 50 / 60p).
Well, I put it through Topaz after experimenting with the various options and I am completely blown away. Not kidding, that footage now looks like was filmed yesterday using the best cameras on the planet. And it is now at a silky smooth 50p instead of 25p. I’d previously used Twixtor for the frame interpolation but Topaz blows Twixtor away so I will be doing them all again from scratch now along with the upscaling (Full HD is enough for these disks).
This Topaz program is a bargain at the asking price for what it achieves. When you consider that this project of mine will involve “restoring” about 500 hours of PAL 576i footage (of which around 100 of those hours also require frame interpolation), it makes Topaz a bargain.
My only concern is that living in Victoria, Australia where we have gone mad on solar panels and windmills with no backup for when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, there are going to be regular blackouts once we shut down our last coal power stations. So I was anxious to do this project and get it finished before 2026 when the blackouts start. I cannot imagine seeing Topaz working away for 12 hours and then there is a blackout and the work is lost!!!
1 Like
if the blackouts are not long (not more then ~15-20 min), you should buy a good powerful UPS. that would solve your issue.
I also have every now and then power cuts at our block, due to old Electric equipment at our area that can’t handle the electricity load some times. the power cuts we experience usually last not longer then 5 min, then the power comes back up again. the UPS I got saves the day, everything continues to work with no disruption.
I’ve long contemplated a UPS simply so that I can save stuff like spreadsheets or other tedious work (since even that last few minutes of work on one could be critical before I manually got around to saving it again). As for Topaz, I am mostly concerned with the roughly 50 hours of footage of 25p material I have that requires both upscaling to 1080p as well as frame interpolation to 50 fps (since it is motorsport and any sport in my view of any kind requires high frame rates of 50 or 60 fps). That where I really do not want power cuts since a one hour program will take 12.5 hours to render the output file on my machine.
If I merely upscaling only with Topaz it runs at half real time so that is far more palatable in terms of a failure due to a power issue. So i think I will do the motion interpolating / upscaling material once the present Summer temperatures here in Australia give way to Autumn where there is less strain on the Mickey Mouse power grid!!
With my settings on my machine I process this material at roughly 4 frames per second so that would make for around 12.5 times 50 hours or 625 hours actual number crunching time (I do not count the setting up time or input file preparation time).
you are missing my point, I was talking about the length of the power cut, not the amount of time you process. if the Power Cut is expected to be somewhere between 5-10 min, you can relay on the UPS even for your long hours of hours of processing as the Power would resume after “x” amount of minutes with no disruption.
I didn’t miss the point - I just did not comment regarding that. Our power cuts last for many hours so there is no power supply that would cover me over for the duration.
1 Like
My computer consumes about 500 Watts while processing TVAI. Jackery has this backup battery/Solar charging combo that says it will power 1000 Watts for an hour. You can get it for less without the solar panels.
If your computer consumes less, you can get one of the cheaper ones.
Wow!!
Here our whole house has a base power draw of about 300W (fridges, lights, router, a few Echo dots, the Mac Studio that is always on 24/7…) - so 500+ Watts just for one computer doesn’t sound really sane…
Oh that’s nothing. Here’s a list of several commonly available-to-me appliances. They list out general wattage usage.
I have half of those things listed. The main kicker being the electric clothes dryer. For an hour of that, (and it usually runs for longer) I could power the computer for almost 12 hours. My particular unit might not take so much, but the general outcome is still the same.
I believe that list is old. New electric cloth dryers consume about 1KW (more 900 Watts here), so if yours really sucks 5800 Watts you should think about replacing it. This might pay itself through the lower Power consumption after some time (at least with the prices we have here in Germany).
What still does use quite a lot of power is the washing machine and the dishwasher with about 2.5 KW (but just for the time it heats up the water) and of course the stove.
But that’s really OT now.
1 Like
I didnt expect enormous improvement that i got, i am pleasantly surprised.
