Dione Final Output File Doesn't Look As Good As Preview / Looks Worse Than Original File

Topaz Video AI General
1

Hi. I’m trying to upscale some DVD quality 720x480 interlaced video and in the preview Dione Interlaced Dehalo V3 looks great (all Dione does) but after 8 hours of running two instances of Topaz VEAI (2x GPU) and two separate DVD’s worth of video files to my dismay the final output files look like garbage, with heavy pixelation, worse than the original files.

One of the DVD’s ran at 60 FPS, so I changed the model to a model that outputs to 60 FPS, at first I tried Dione interlaced DV but the result was the same so then I tried Dione Interlaced Robust Dehalo and the result was the same. Oddly there was some weird erratic movement while Topaz was processing the preview file so I tried changing the Field Order from Top to Bottom First and it made no difference.

Here is a snapshot of the original file @ 720x480:

original 720x480
original 720x4801891×1440 128 KB

And here is a snapshot of the output @ 1440x960, notice the heavy artifacting / compression, particularly noticeable under her eyes, this was not present in the preview:

Dione dtd-4 1440x960
Dione dtd-4 1440x9601880×1440 145 KB

These are still images, it looks far worse as a moving picture.

I have no idea what the problem could be, I’ve tried all versions of Dione and they all do this.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Edit:

I just realized that the Dione output files at 60 FPS have no audio.

So the input files are native 60 FPS and the only way I can have audio with Dione is if I output to 30 FPS? Huh? I don’t get it, not happy with this software.

2

What format is the output set to?

3

H.264, upon further investigation Constant Rate Factor is set to 30 by default, reducing that to 17 vastly improved the quality but now I’m taking a 1GB file and turning it into 3GB. I mean it’s par for the course for Topaz but in the end it’s a 3GB 1280x960 resolution file that is only 33min long. That’s high bit rate 1920x1080 file size.

4

I don’t know what they did with their implementation of H264. CRF 17 should be about the level that blu-rays are encoded in, but I kept getting grey boxes where things should be fading to black. I never tried lower. I just gave up and started doing image output and using ffmpeg to encode to H265—you have to mix the sound back in anyway.

5

mh yes, you are right. on the other hand it might be that h.264 is not that good at keeping soft shades especially in dark areas. h.265 should have improved on that.

6

Using h264 and h265 file codecs for input and output adds a whole other dimension of issues. Stick with file codecs that are the same for everyone and life would be so much easier dealing with this forum and product.