This really doesn’t work as well as others competitors. I got WAY too many blocks of blur over parts of footage that really shouldn’t be difficult for it to replace. Topaz can you please keep working on this, it’s far from perfect and I may have to take my business elsewhere.
I haven’t checked out Video AI in a few months, and in that time it hasn’t made any noteworthy improvements, so don’t get your hopes up, it’s just a waste of time.
On these repeated issues, they have only just begun to paint the cake. No progress will be made for at least one feature update (10 weeks).
If you really want a response, show screen shots of their models compared to the competition. It worked like a charm for the last person who did that.
Anyway, the only other AI model I have tried that even comes close is RIFE. Compared to Apollo 8 with ‘Remove Duplicate Frames’ disabled, It was about the same. I suppose it does do scene change detection, but for me, I don’t find the slight fade scene transitions distracting at all.
Maybe I’ll have to do a test on something that’s not CGI.
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It’s not a “distracting” issue, when you go for video interpolation, you essentially want to remove the flicker caused by the difference in the picture, but Apollo will introduce flicker instead, which runs counter to the purpose.
Not in the 30 plus shows I have processed with it…
Apollo8 does strengthen the effect of small changes (more suitable for real video of short scenes), but introduces more flicker for large changes, and the flicker of some frames is even more obvious than the original frame, which is very unfriendly to rendering videos. A smarter scene detection will hopefully alleviate this problem.
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Only talking about the performance of Apollo, it is also very partial. It is smooth in scenes with small changes, but in scenes with large differences, the overall performance is not even as good as Chronos or RIFE.
That makes sense. A lot of the videos I’ve tried have large inter-frame changes due to fast movement, low frame rate, or both.
I don’t expect any AI upscaling/interpolation to be as good as a hypothetical video that was originally shot at the same dimensions/FPS as the upscale/interpolation.
But I do expect it to be better than the original, and that’s not necessarily happening.
If for traditional frame interpolation models, such as Chronos, they may have reached a bottleneck, but I don’t think this is applicable to Apollo, because Apollo rewrites the input source.
Models like Apollo should hopefully achieve better performance and versatility, but Topaz seems a bit persistent, focusing only on small scenes and small ranges.
Since I have RIFE available to me through SVP, I ran a killer clip I found in Star Wars. It’s a scene where an X-Wing is cruising above the surface of the Death Star. It’s all smooth motion, but the interpolation models make the tips of the X-Wing jump in and out of existence. I hope that’s what you mean by ‘flicker’.
All models ran at slomo 2.5X.
Chr and Chf looked about the same with heavy flickering.
Apf: maybe looked a little better, but still heavy flickering.
Apo: still flickering for sure, but about half as bad.
RIFE: Worse flickering than Chr to the point that it also made the Tie-Fighter flicker and warped the background.
I don’t have access (have not looked in-) to DAIN, but am curious how it fairs. If you request, I can share the 15 second clips.
I update my conclusion, on the current Apollo version, 1080p will also appear squares, but the probability is lower.
Hi.
just tested DAIN with your Star Wars clip with Flowframes 1.40 and its realy bad compared to your other example. even worse than RIFE.
What me suprise is that your RIFE-clip does not have a slight flickering in the brightness.
Some other clips from me with RIFE has flickering in brightness in each interpolated image and that looks like a slight stroboscopic effect but maybe your h265-compressed example blurred that effect.
In the discord forum, they know about the brightness flicker and in youtube videos you can see it sometimes. here for example on the green background youtube
But in my example the flicker is even worse and I think that is a general problem with all Rife-model
I hope that Apollo will continue to improve.
I used the version of RIFE that’s available in the Smooth Video Project. I would not be surprised if they have not updated their version of RIFE in a long time. I’ll try and see if I can find what version it is using.
I’m saying this because I used FlowFrames about a year and a half ago and never noticed any flickering.
It’s been a year since the interpolation model was last updated, and it’s frustrating and disappointing that Topaz has spent a lot of time in useless areas.
Even Chronos will appear square, and the so-called v4 version is even worse than v2.
There’s a new one in Alpha testing right now. It’s being built with 4K as a focus.
