To go from 1080p 15fps to 4K 60fps, should I upscale to 4K first? Or should I interpolate to 30 and then to 60 first?
I tried interpolate first, and now it’s taking a very long time to upscale to 4K. My old Mac Pro only gets 1 frame every 4 seconds.
Thanks for any help.
Since you can convert small sections, longer than a preview but short enough not to take ages, why not run some tests on a 100 frame sequence and then see how they compare on playback?
I will as soon as my 3-day render finishes in Topaz. I was just sitting here watching it wondering if I should have done it the other way around. The interpolate process took less than 30 minutes on a 24-core xeon.
Time to invest in a pc and a decent GPU.
Is a maxed-out Alienware i9 64GB ram, GTX6090 24GB the best thing I can order for this task?
I found that with GPU rendering, the CPU is rarely all that important to the process, nor is the RAM (for VEAI anyway - which is very handy cause I have a separate AI upscale for the audio tracks that will run the CPU pretty hot)>.
Also Alienware primarily makes laptops and small form factor desktops, don’t they? I’ve had very bad luck with any OEM vendors making those with Windows on them. Some colleagues reported extra thermal throttling for both form factors. When we went head to head against my Surface Book 3, which has an underclocked 10th gen i7 and a GTX 1060 Ti Max-Q, basally the surface book was doing pretty well keeping up with the allegedly full clock CPU and the GPU performance was toasting cards it was never meant to. So be careful. 
I think I saw multi-GPU render options, so if you just want to order something primarily for rendering but not a full-size desktop (cause you could stick 4+ maxed out GTXs in there), since you have a Mac already: the M1 Mac mini + 4 Thunderbolt3 eGPUs (one per TB3 lane) might genuinely be better. Worst case you could just run both of your test scenarios in separate instances on separate cards head-to-head to determine The Who’s faster by way of racing them. 
EDIT: sorry I’m still a bit loopy - I’m not actually sure the apps work on an M1 - and the M1 only has 2 40Mbit/s Thunderbolt 3 sockets, whereas the 2020 Intel Mac minis have 4 - and assuming the GPU works at all, I doubt that daisy chaining them and cutting their bandwidth in half would be worth the extra GPU cores.
Thanks. I am not trying to only build something for Topaz, but for the entire process. Interpolation uses both the CPU and the GPU.
I currently have a 24-core Xeon Mac Pro with 64GB ram and dual AMD FirePro 3GB cards. It runs fine, but every current Mac sold except for a $12,000 Mac Pro is slower than what I have now.
Alienware makes full-size towers with exclusive 24GB GTX 3090. I do not and will not play games. But the card in that machine is $2500 alone, and they’re asking $4100 for whole machine. So it’s a good deal; with a warranty. Running linux or Windows on a Mac is a major pain in the ass. I have several, I know.
Would never get a Mac mini or an M1. This Mac Pro will probably be my last Mac.
The Alienware is well-supported under Linux, which I will need to run de-oldify on a custom training set.
Hi! I’m running Topaz Enhancer on a system I just built. It’s a Gigabyte Z490 with an intel i9 10900k, 32 Gigs, NVMe drives and a GTX 3090 on it. I can denoise, sharpen and upscale a typical DVD 720x480 video up to 1920x1080 in 3-5 hours. My rig is fairly elaborate. All told, it cost me over $5K to build. I have no idea what hardware Alienware actually uses in their boxes, but typically, commercial machines tend to build machines featuring all the latest buzzwords and skimp unmercifully where the y can get away with it.
I recommend building from scratch. Make sure the case has room for liquid cooling. You’ll need it…
Hi tonybarnhill,
I don’t have experience with interpolation combined with upscaling using VEAI yet, but I do have a little experience with interpolation combined with upscaling using much earlier Topaz upscaling software - Topaz Enhance, which yielded good results on the DV video I fed it. What I found in that case was that upscaling first caused the interpolation to produce more and weirder artifacts, but when I interpolated first there were basically the usual amount of artifacts. Strangely I have always had more artifacts when I interpolate HD video (using AviSynth) than when I’ve interpolated SD video. Maybe there’s an obvious solution to that but I haven’t really spent much time looking for one in the last several years as I rarely do interpolation.
Thanks. The Alienware comes with a warranty which I can’t get it if I build it myself. I’ve built around 100 systems in my time, but none in the last 10 years.
Their system is liquid-cooled.
Thanks. I’m using Rife running under Vulkan on my Mac Pro. I was able to configure the cpu threads and gpu threads very specifically. I was able to get to around 90 frames/second interpolating 15fps 1080p to 30fps, then again from 30fps to 60fps. The machine was really cooking but got it done!
Thanks for your input, sounds like I did it in the best order.
Good to hear.
Ive no idea, there is always something else better around the corner. That Alienware system will be blazing fast for sure. Certainly lightyears ahead of 99.99 of anything else. I’d love to know how much of that 64 gig of ram Topaz video Ai would actually use. Ive got an old Alienware laptop with the Graphics AMP, a humble RTX2060 Super. Ive got 32 gig of ram and ive never ran anything which goes anywhere near eating all my ram apart from DCS World.
From where have you been able to buy a RTX3090? Currently it is almost impossible to get one here in the EU. Or any other graphics card…
I have bought 128 GB ram a few months ago (in anticipation of increasing prices) but have not been able to put it into any system as neither GPUs nor latest gen AMD CPUs are available.
