How can TOPAZ be really this careless and/or incompetent? šŸ¤”

Iā€™m kinda fed up with all the Topaz Video issues, and I see many other people feeling the same way.

We are not complaining about issues with the AI models, thatā€™s the HARD and complex part and we all understand that errors will appear and some little texts will be smudged here and some other parts will be flickering there, and some face will not be right and whatever. Again, THAT is the hard part and itā€™s very understandable that errors and issues show up.

Then thereā€™s the easy part. Or at least what should be.

Topaz Video has been in development for more than FOUR YEARS, and after FOUR YEARS we still have to be constantly ā€˜on guardā€™ and FIGHTING THE SOFTWARE at all times to prevent it from stab you in the back doing all sort of stupid things like stubbornly changing your encoding settings or output path to whatever it feels like to; or because it absurdly needs DOUBLE the disk space for making a copy of the temp file to a different final file at the very end and canā€™t do a simple calculation of the space it really needs and only tells you it ā€œfailedā€ AFTER many hours and just DELETES all the work done, even with ā€˜Crash recoveryā€™ enabledā€¦ :person_facepalming:t2:

The User Interface, THAT should be the easy part, but in reality is in an indecent state. There are literally HUNDREDS of free programs with far more complex User Interfaces that arenā€™t so unreliable, buggy and so poorly designed and coded as Topaz Video is. If HandBrake, or MKVToolNix, or LosslessCut or Blender would be constantly changing the settings chose by the users it would be a BIG issue, and it would be fixed in a matter of days or weeks at most.

Meanwhile, in the wonderful Topaz world many of these issues are still present AFTER MONTHS of being reported. We are talking about INTERFACE issues that once known, take LESS THAN A DAY to fix, which shows how much Topaz cares about good support.

These kind of issues would be barely tolerable on free softwareā€¦ how is that a (supposedly) professional company like TOPAZ, which is making money hand over fist charging HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS for (supposedly) professional software can show this level of carelessness and/or incompetence after FOUR YEARS of development? itā€™s just bafflingā€¦

Iā€™ve been using all kinds of complex software for decades (also beta and alpha versions) and dealing with Topaz Video certainly has been one of the MOST INFURIATING and FRUSTRATING experiences ever.

6 Likes

I hear ya!

Most of the bugs could be caught if they had a test and validation plan that was followed before releasing updates.

The first rule of updates should be to ā€œdo no harmā€ to the existing functionality. When something that previously worked stops working because of an update, it tells me that there is NO test and validation plan to check all functionality. Updates get released without even checking if they broke one or multiple things that used to work. To me that is an incredibly sloppy and careless way to go about things.

Take Photo AI for example. The UI got updated and in the process, they introduced a massive memory leak, and broke text restoration, which is still broken.

In Video AI, the UI got refreshed and 2 months later we are still dealing with bugs from it. And their fix for the export list broke the preview list! Unbelievable!

3 Likes

I agree that it should be a no go to release updates that break previously working things at this price tag. Sure, some of the bugs and issues would need quite thorough testing to be found (while others would be found rather quick), but again: the price tag ā€¦

1 Like

Whatā€™s especially galling is that the vast majority of issues I experience seem to have nothing to do with actual enhancement. Almost all of them are the UI not functioning properly or crashing altogether. I feel as if the last 3.x build modded to use the current enhancement models would probably satisfy all my needs.

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