After using Video AI for a couple of months, I need to share my thoughts. It has been a fully frustrating experience, and the developers need to take some serious feedback from the community. I’m not only speaking for myself, I’ve seen numerous comments on the forums sharing the same thoughts.
The Good
Proteus is the best video restoration and upscaling solution I’ve found. I’ve found it to be superior to any open source option, AI or traditional, and I even prefer it over Starlight Mini. I find it wins in most quality aspects over Starlight Mini, is up to 50x faster in my testing, and works on AMD cards. It blows open-source upscalers such as Real-ESRGAN out of the water. (Note that I have not tested the full Starlight model, as I want to keep my rendering fully local.)
The Bad
The UI has a significant number of bugs, including ones that impact significant features such as pause/resume and retry failures from checkpoint. The Chronos models also fail randomly on longer videos (30 min+), which combined with retry from checkpoint being broken, makes them near unusable. I’ve reported all the bugs I’ve found via the forums. Unfortunately, none of the reports I’ve filed has received a response from a Topaz team member. I have noticed there are other issues on the forums being marked as “Investigating” status, so perhaps there’s something I’m missing, but I’ve tried to include as complete reproduction steps as possible on each issue.
I think a lot of users are confused as well by the release of the new UI, as it doesn’t feel different from the old one in a meaningful way, it still has all the bugs that the old UI had, but it also has several new bugs. So from our point of view, we feel like the dev team is not taking enough care to ship a fully functioning and properly tested product.
The Ugly
Linux support. As I’m sure the devs know, there was a Linux beta in the works as of a year ago. The beta was quietly cancelled, a piece of information that I only found in the comments of the latest beta release thread, from a user who had emailed support, not even from Topaz staff. Despite the large number of users who have requested that Linux support be added, instead of addressing our concerns, the staff recently locked that thread, with no comment, to prevent further discussion. To me, that feels like a big middle finger to us as users of the software. Topaz is the last single piece of software that requires me to keep Windows on my system, as Microsoft pushes harder on forcing users to have an online account, adds more spyware integrated into their operating system, and continues to break various features with every major update. This is really the biggest issue, combined with how the staff have responded (or rather, not responded, as we’ve gotten no direct communication other than the locked thread signaling the staff wants us to shut up about the issue), that would move me away from Topaz. Every other piece of software that I use either works on Linux or has an open-source alternative which does and is of similar quality. Unfortunately, Topaz lacks that, and its Proteus model lacks an equivalent, which is strong praise for Proteus, but frustrating as a user.
