I just bought this software - after using the Photo AI product. I am trying to get 1 video to be updated.
1 - do I need to preview before I Export?
2 - does exporting take what was just processed for the preview or does it start re-processing everything all over again? This would take the 20 hour process to be 40 hours for 1 simple video.
3 - why does it take multiple days to process 1 video?
4 - how many days is one video supposed to take to process?
5 - I have yet to process 1 video … do you have a sample walk-through video showing the steps? The written instructions are not detailed enough to be helpful.
6 - how long can I try this before I ask for a refund? Either I am doing something wrong, or this software is unusable.
You do not need to preview before exporting, but if you don’t you won’t know what you’re getting until it’s done.
Export is separate from preview. You’re not previewing the entire video, are you? Just do 10-30 sec bits at a few selected points to get an idea of what the results will be.
It is not possible to answer any of your other questions without knowing the specs of your system and source video.
agree with gene that it’s hard to know what “should” be process time without knowing your system specs, but the short answer is “probably”. On my maxed out 2019 Intel Mac Mini, that’s average process time for an a 10 hour video. My M1 Mini with 16GB of RAM is quicker, but it’s still a major time investment to let Topaz church these videos. It’s my major push to look at a Studio with an M2/3 Ultra. Also, unless you’re processing this on an internal hard drive, its going to drive up processing time a lot as well. Also, if you’re doing significant stabilization that’ll drive up process time. There could definitely be a bottleneck in your system, but this software is doing a lot of calculations per frame, so yeah, it’s going to take awhile!
You MUST use the GPU and not the CPU to do the processing. This can be set in Preferences.
You need a serious graphics card in a desktop PC. The best is recognized to be the Nvidia RTX-4090. Some others are close to it. Forget about using most laptops.
The amount of time it takes to process depends on what you are doing to your video. Every single thing you add to the processing loop delays completion. For example, are you doing frame interpolation? Do you really need to? I always set my output frame rate to the same as the input frame rate because I get faster results. Same with other enhancements.
Is your system overheating? If so, the GPU as well as the CPU could be throttling and drastically reduce throughput. Get a monitoring app to show you the GPU temp exactly as well as the CPU temp. Get a utility to manually crank the fan speed on your GPU to 100% to keep it as cool as possible. That’s what the fan is there for. I use MSI Afterburner which does an excellent job of reporting temps and controlling the fans.
What kind of drives are you using for input and output files? I hope they are not spinning hard drives. SSDs are better, but NVMe drives are at least 3X faster than that.
I can chime in on number 3…be prepared for processing to take a significant amount of time especially on lower end hardware.
I have what I feel is a decent setup (built my machine back in mid-2021) with AMD 5950X, 128GB RAM, and an RTX 3080 (10GB). Even with my setup, processing a 30 minute video going from 480p > 1440p output with frame interpolation and using Iris takes a good 3.5 hours.
On lower end machines, that same video could absolutely take days especially with a low end graphics card or even worse (onboard video).
