Feature Request - Compression Artifacts Removal

Video AI Ideas
1

Hello Support Team,

I’d like to suggest a feature that could significantly enhance your software and help many video producers globally. In video production, workflows often involve dealing with compressed footage, which introduces artifacts such as pixel variations, visual distortions, and data loss (example video shown below).

Please note, I’ve attempted to address this issue using your denoising features, but they didn’t resolve the artifacts. I believe the AI is understandably trained to target actual noise rather than artifacts, which seem to be completely ignored.

I also tested various settings under Theia - High Fidelity & Details, including the “Fix Compression” feature. While it helps to some extent, it doesn’t seem designed to target red artifact blocks or other compression issues. If there were a dedicated feature to specifically address artifact removal (targeting red artifact blocks, banding, and more), it would be incredibly useful.

In my case, I made an error during video encoding, overcompressing some footage in my project (example video below). This resulted in the artifacts I mentioned earlier. Despite this, the videos remain of high quality, which leads me to believe AI could restore the lost details by analyzing other areas of the frames and recovering the data.

If any software could achieve this, it’s likely Topaz Video AI, which I already use and appreciate for its sharpening and focus-recovery tools. The only issue I’m facing in this project is the overcompression mistake, but I believe Video AI has the potential to correct it. I’m sure many other video producers would find this feature invaluable.

I’d appreciate it if you could let me know if this feature is in development or planned for the near future. Many of us would greatly benefit from it. Thank you!

• Video explanation link with examples: Compression Artifact Explanation.mov - Google Drive

Best,
Ben Rowe

2

What else did you try? Proteus is pretty powerful at fixing compression, so are the Artemis models.
And so that you know, Proteus 3 Fix Compression is significantly different than Proteus 4. So it’s worth giving it a try too.

3

Thanks for your reply. I can confirm that I am using Topaz Video AI 5 (v5.3.3), which includes Proteus v4. I’ve tried adjusting the settings with Proteus, as well as Artemis and Gaia, but none of them seem to detect or remove the red compression artifacts in my videos. I set “fix compression” to 100 and “recover detail” to 100, essentially maxing out all relevant settings. However, the artifacts persist, and it seems like there isn’t a solution with the current models and settings, assuming I’m not missing anything more.

Is there anything else you would recommend, or might this be a limitation with the current models? Have you had any luck removing compression artifacts yourself with these models? Also, is there any upcoming update or additional tool that might address this issue, or should I consider this a current limitation?

Any information is greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

4

Compression artifacts are generally things like visible macroblocks, halos around objects, jagged lines, ghosting etc, which Topaz AI does an excellent job of cleaning up

What you point out doesn’t immediately stand out and say to me “yes, that’s because the footage was overcompressed”… What was the footage filmed with? Are you certain this issue wasn’t on the original raw footage? (which I’m guessing you no longer have)

It not to say it’s not an issue with overcompression in the codec you used, and a higher bitrate would have eliminated it… just that it doesn’t look like standard overcompression that you’d typically see and hence could easily be cleaned up by a general AI model, so you might be out of luck I’m afraid.

5

Hello.

When we had TVAi, we have tried every model/setting/hardware tweaking as you have, scripted/CMD at first then just the UI automatic & manual parameters; the results were still the same for any content that’s over 720p, especially 1080 up to 8K upscaled.

Most of these current models… YEARS-OLD… has nothing left in them for today’s (4K, 8K, ect) content, IMO.