I absolutely love high frame rate look. I’m a motion smoothing lover. I had to do a quite a bit of experimenting with topaz and research on the internet and I found a way to do a workflow . This is a fantastic way to give your movie dvds perfectly smooth motion.
Here’s my workflow.
Turn off duplicate frames. Then Apollo 2 x 23.976, then take that file and rerun it in chronos fast to 120fps.
This results in the smoothest pans and unbelievable clarity with almost no artifacts. Stunning result. Apollo on its own has it’s issues(motion feels a little less natural and smooth than chronos) and chronos has artifacts when on it’s own.
But when you combine them like this, the output is incredible. The artifacts disappear and everything is smooth and natural.All the negatives disappear because chronos is better able to handle motion once it starts 48fps and can avoid the artifacts.
Try this out. It’s amazing. I’ve never seen better motion. Topaz really needs to list this workflow as the way to do it!!! I tried every model on their own and nothing really stunned me and there were issues with smoothness or artifacts. With this workflow, the results are out of this world. Nothing comes close and I’ve tried everything and every other program.
No problem. Thanks for making such a great program. Also, I forgot to add. I’d also advise breaking up the videos into 45 minutes max each first and put them in topaz as separate files. I’ve had some issues later in movies with smoothness if I do it all at once. I prefer to do them that way anyway personally in case my pc crashes or I need to do something on it in between.
I’ve never seen movie action sequences look so good before. It’s like going from gaming at 30 to 120. Can’t go back. lol Everything becomes so clear and slow scenes also look great too.
One quick question. How come the final file has variable frame rate when looked at under mediainfo? And it can’t be converted to CFR with handrake or shutter encoder. I’m guessing the timing of the frames from the two different motion interpolation algorithms is tricking it into thinking its VFR? No big deal since there are no stutter issues. I’m just curious. There are no stutter issues, which is what you usually get with VFR.
Take the 47.952 Apollo file, then use chronos fast set to 120fps with duplicate frames unselected.
There will be increased artifacts over just apollo alone, but less than chronos alone. The problem I have with apollo is this jitteriness and keystone cops like speed up effect when trying to get to 60 or 120fps. Apollo also has a speed up effect going from 23.976 to 47.952, but not from 23.976 to 95.904. But 95.904 doesn’t have smooth pans like chronos at 120.
Chronos fast or regular chronos has artifacts in fast moving sequences where you have complex geometry at 120fps. It’s almost looks like square panels of distortion in spiderman movies where spiderman is swinging . With the apollo/chronos fast combo I find it’s the best solution and reduces the artifacts, although it doesn’t eliminate all of them. Those fast moving scenes are tough and topaz does a way better job than any tv could do, which usually just stops interpolating.
Obviously make sure your tv is set to 120hz.
If you watch an entire movie you’ll start to see the jitteriness of apollo even at 120fps. The pans are way smoother in chronos. No comparison.
I had to switch from Chronos Fast to Chronos because there were blur patches being added to parts of the test clip.
My TV screen can only do 60Hz, so I’m not sure if it will even playback 120. Since going to 120fps adds a lot of processing time and I’m dropping frames to go back down to 60fps, I’m going to try out Apollo at 2X and Chronos at 1.25X. It’s working on my 15 second test clip, but I don’t think that’s long enough to really tell how well it’s doing. The 1.25X makes a larger file. That might mean it’s making more artifacts, or that it’s blurring things less.
I have a show episode processing right now doing 2X then 2.25X to get to 120fps then drop to 60fps. When that’s done I’ll run the 2X then 1.25X and see how they look.
It won’t play back at 120 if your screen is 60hz. It will play back at 60. You’re missing half the frames, which is why results will obviously be different.
Also I should also add in my personal experience if you’re staying at 60hz tv, then chronos fast is the best overall just imo. It smoother pans than apollo.
Chronos fast does have more artifacts than apollo though, but what’s the point in motion smoothing just to have jitteriness. I think it has to do with the fact that apollo can only do 2x or 4x so you essentially can’t take 24fps movies to 60 or 120 with just apollo.
It would be perfect if they had a model with the lack of artifacts of apollo with the smoothness of chronos with just one run. I find aion to have artifacts just like chronos and be very slow to process even on higher end system with it seemingly not using the tensor network.
I just find that you need to get 120fps to avoid occasional jitters even on chronos fast.
I should also add that the pans are the absolute smoothest with JUST chronos 120fps and No apollo at first, but then you get artifacts in fast motion. If topaz could figure out how to reduce artifacts with that smoothness of chronos 120 alone it would be absolutely incredible. Because even doing apollo 2x first then chronos reduces smoothness from just chronos fast 120 alone, but for fast paced motion it makes sense to do the apollo run first to reduce artifacts.
You are onto something good with this. I agree it’s not perfect, but it is better then either model alone. It’s also better than any TV screen I have ever seen.
The biggest down-side is that it take several hours more to do it this way.
I tried it with a few more movies. It’s not worth the encode time for me personally. It’s better than most tvs for sure, but my 120hz tv has such awesome motion interpolation that I prefer my tv’s motion smoothing. Topaz can handle fast action motion sequences really well with the 2 pass technique I used, but it’s still a bit jittery when panning. That’s the issue.
You either have smooth panning with chronos at 120fps and then a ton of motion artifacts or apollo with very few artifacts, but really jittery on pans and the motion doesn’t feel as good as chronos overall.
I tried to interpolate the movie “unfriended” and it was an artifact laden mess with just chronos fast to 60/120fps. Even in slow scenes I was getting blocks of blur. Weird! Also, chronos at 60fps still has jitters as well. You have to step up to 120fps for ultra smooth pans.
I’d really like to see topaz update these motion models. If my tv can do this on the fly comparably then there is not reason topaz can’t improve the motion interpolation models. I still think combining them is the best for right now if you want to use it. I’m sticking to using topaz for grain removal and upscaling 1080p, which it’s absolutely fantastic at and my tv can’t do anything comparable when it comes to noise removal and upscaling. I tend to use iris for that. You just have to be careful not to denoise too much or you end up with mannequin faces. I find default settings for most movies works well Unfriended looked incredible with iris upscale 1080p to 2k. Some movies the results are incredible. It depends on the movie though. Very few if any artifacts with that. I find nyx is obscene with oversharpening and turning people in lizard skin. lol So I found iris to be the best for high quality blu rays. Just my experience.
I tried a few samples with AiOn. It seems to better than both apollo and chronos , but I need to try a few full movies. I finally have a gpu with enough ram to use it. You need at least 16gb of video card memory. With less gpu ram it would fail to even finish most of the time. I’m not sure why aion is so slow and doesn’t seem to use my gpu. For some strange reason I don’t think it uses the tensor network I think. But it seems to be the best model. And probably doesn’t take any longer than the 2 pass method. I would advise Aion as the model of choice for going increase frame rate in movies with topaz. It’s not perfect, but it it seems its the best by far. It doesn’t have the jitteriness of apollo and it has less artifacts than chronos. There still are some, but it’s significantly less in a few scenes I’ve tested. With aion, the biggest weakness I’ve notice is very occasionally when moderate speed panning when there’s a light from a candle or headlight that is bright it cause a wobbling effect. But that’s only occasionally. Not everytime. Other than that , I don’t notice much else. If they buttoned that up just a bit more, it would be perfect.
Aion does a better job than the 2 method pass after testing a few movies. Aion needs enough memory though. I wasn’t able to use it properly before, thus the 2 pass method was the best previously. Now that I have enough video ram, aion is superior to everything including 2 pass method. You need at least 16gb of video ram. It’s very resource intensive.
I think two pass might be better than aion. But here’s the thing. I notice I get different results every time I do it. That’s what’s creating the confusion. There’s a lack of consistency. For example, I might do a movie and notice obvious one bit of stutter in one scene.
But then I go back and reprocesses that scene from original file before processing with the exact same settings and the bit of stutter is gone! Every run is slightly different, which should be improved. My tv processes motion the exact same way every single time.
