Ok, after owning this program for almost a year, I finally figured it out. The amount of time I wasted is insane.
This guide is for non slo mo motion smoothing for movies to give you amazingly clear motion that looks actually natural. 24fps is horrible on modern lcd tvs, but this solves it.
This method with topaz is way better than any tv could ever do right now.
These models only work at 2x/4x frame gen. Don’t even think of uneven frame insertion, so unfortunately we can’t interpolate 24 fps to 60fps or 120fps. Set your tv to 100hz so you need a 120hz tv.
Here’s the guide
Uncheck scene detection/duplicate frames
1)shutter encoder 24 fps to 25fps. This doesn’t interpolate frames, Just speeds it up, but not noticeable
2)Apollo 25fps to 50fps
3)Chronos 50 to 100fps
4)Set tv in custom windows resolution to 100hz and enjoy!
Apollo is used first to avoid square blur artifacts and chronos is then used to give the motion a natural look. There will be no stutters with this method and almost no artifacts.
You can downscale movies to 720p in handbrake if you want to do encodes faster and you have a ton of blu rays, but I wouldn’t go lower than that.
I don’t use any of the enhancement models on my blu rays. That’s just my personal preference. Some scenes can look great, but then you see loss of detail in faces and other oddities.
But using this method, this is by far the best motion interpolation program on the market. It makes movies look actually HFR, which I love. Movies finally look the way I want them to. Blur and stutter free.
Yes 100fps this works…but maybe you regret later that you overdid it, 2x interpolation, going from 24fps to 48fps or speed up 50fps, then file size is half of it. it’s a compromise between preserve some of the cinematic film look and going to smoother motion soap-opera effect — TV frame interpolation is also getting better and better.
When I switched from my older LCD TV to OLED, the motion really bothered me at first. OLED panels are extremely responsive and basically have no motion blur / pixels no afterglow. In the beginning, I set the motion interpolation on my G4 to a high level because I couldn’t watch without it.
…but over time, I gradually reduced it more and more, and now I either don’t use interpolation on the TV or only the lowest “Cinema like” setting.
No. I don’t regret anything. They shouldn’t even be filming in 24fps. It’s absurd. I love so called soap opera effect. I have zero interest in preserving an outdated cinematic film look. I’d buy an old crt or plasma if I wanted that. An lcd or oled are a hold and sample tech and can’t even show 24fps properly without a ton of stutter.
Rtings explanation of motion smoothing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKn0oi7CG_Y
Check this out clip linked below on your tv: The motion is horrific without motion smoothing. Put motion smoothing on and off on your tv playing this clip. Also, its’ actually stutter. The motion is absolutely disgusting without motion smoothing and this is just a basic pan. I could never watch a 24fps movie without motion smoothing. I bought topaz to get even better motion interpolation than my tv could provide for movies I own. It finally delivered once I took all those steps. I wish they’d provide a guide for it. That’s why I made this post. To help out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SSU-s0AUH0
Also, the reason I don’t just go to 50fps, which would save 1/2 the time is because apollo is not natural motion like chronos and if I just use chronos to go to 50fps then I get bad artifacts. Chronos needs a high starting fps to avoid blur patches on fences/wallpaper background/window shades ect. It’s a mess. You need to combine them in order for it work and chronos always needs to go second.
Yes i know, I never use Chronos as first step, and combine both works good. If everything works for you that way, then all good, stick with 100fps. I’ll wait a bit longer because it’s a huge amount of work, and most of my movies are still in their original fps. Maybe I’ll do it later at some point.
sometimes yes, sometimes I do not. I had a example of a Nightwish live concert, when i do something like 100fps with it, everything is smooth, but too smoth for me, when the drummer hits it looks like Cotton swabs hitting the drums, the aggressive, hard edge gets lost and when Floor Jansen moves, it looks like rubber is moving.
Let’s put it this way: it’s very subjective. Some people think it looks great, others don’t. What bothers me is the jittering - I want that gone - this is the reason for me doing Interpolation to lower it, but i want push it to hard I becomes too soft.
The problem is as more interpolated frames you have in a stream, the more motion blur gets amplified during movement, and interpolations can end up looking streaky or smeared. If every fast-moving interpolated frame didn’t have that issue, it would probably look much better, but the models can’t achieve that (yet).
It’s a ton of work for your for sure unfortunately. Very time consuming. Best to just leave it on overnight. If you have a really good gpu, it will take around 8 or 9 hours total per movie. If you downscale to 720p then it will take 4 hours. You can go even further to 540p and it will take a very reasonable 2 hours, but that starts looking really rough on a 65 inch plus tv. That’s basically near standard dvd quality and nowhere near blu ray.
One more remark: my goal is not to downplay this thread. If I gave that impression because I expressed some criticism of 100 fps, that wasn’t my intention. There is no right or wrong here; it’s simply not what I would personally choose for films.
If the objective is to achieve smooth motions, then in my experience it is best to upscale to an even-numbered frame rate using Apollo (Aion also works) and then use Chronos to upscale to an odd-numbered frame rate. So you wrote, the workflow is good.
That said, I’m still trying to figure out whether Aion or Apollo is better for the first step. Even ChatGPT doesn’t provide a clear answer on that.
As for TVs, that’s a different but still interesting question, and of course the way the signal is delivered also matters. In any case, I think it’s fair to say that anyone staying within the officially supported frame rate ranges of modern TVs is generally not doing anything wrong, this are
