Playing a 1080p portrait-oriented video on a monitor that cannot display resolutions above 3840x2160 requires that the height be capped at 2160 pixels. To accomplish this, the video can be upscaled in pillarbox format to 3840x2160 or can have the height manually set to 2160 in Custom Resolution. Using the 2x upscale option or a 200 percent custom upscale does not work because the export’s height will be above 2160 pixels.
The problem is that processing the video with letterbox/pillarbox crop settings takes far longer than simply doing a 200% upscale or setting the height to 2160, even when all exports have exactly the same parameters.
Here is a sample video with custom height set to 2160:
Here is the same video using 2x upscale:
And here is the video with Pillarbox:
I understand that Pillarbox is adding more content to the video, but black bars are not that demanding on the processor to produce and these rendering speeds essentially make the Letterbox/Pillarbox option useless.
When inputting 4:3 aspect ratio video (640/480) and attempting an upscale, the ATSC and Blu-Ray standard is to output to a 1920/1080 file and letterbox the video (black bars on the left and right) within that 16:9 aspect ratio frame.
Topaz processing is very slow (about 8 fps) when I do this. However, if I adjust the output to 1440/1080 resolution (back to the 4:3 aspect ratio of the input), I see triple the performance, about 25 fps.
I can certainly process like this and then use ffmpeg to pad the output file with black bars on the sides to get back to a 1920/1080 frame size, but Topaz should really pick up that it only needs to process the portion of the letterboxed content and do this itself.
The performance hit if I do this is “only” about 30%. But that’s enough for me to just upscale in original aspect and then pad the letterbox in my video editor. I’m going to have to process there anyway to put back things like subtitles and surround or alternate language audio, so it’s the least of my problems.
Processing slows down any time you apply a crop setting to the video (Pillarbox/Letterbox is a form of cropping). The solution is to either keep the same aspect ratio or crop/adjust the video before putting into TVAI
I also noticed that just set it to 1920 x 1080 is faster than to set it to width of 1920 but I can’t confirm this to the latest version anymore. The Handbrake tool would remove the black bars added but with the same bitrate Handbrake produces a lower quality for couriosity when I just encode the video again to get rid of the black bars.
If you process video after TVAI is finished with it, you need to make sure you set the output bitrate to the same number that TVAI did. Quality is best if TVAI and your video editor/converter both use the same constant bitrate.
That s what i thought too but after testing the older h264 with identical bitrates on different video tools the differences in terms of quality were surprising. the worst quality was produced by Quicktime Pro. Today I use h265 main 10 but when re-enciding via handbrake I need twice the bitraet used with Video AI or the image quality gets worse than it was!
