I’m just wondering whether Starlight Mini is generally agreed to be far enough along in its development cycle to be trusted with a project.
Specifically, I’ve been delaying my long-anticipated “remaster” of Star Trek: Voyager while waiting for a better option than just Iris, Proteus, or the other models, which produce improvement — but not satisfactory results.
I’m on an M4 Pro Mac mini with 64GB unified memory, so it should be up to the task! Looking forward to finally getting going with this.
Definitely not unfortunately. After reading other comments, it seems like the latest iterations of SL that’s compatible with Apple silicon has dipped in quality with slow speeds compared to an earlier NVIDIA version
Hi there, my long-term project is also Star Trek Voyager maybe we can talk about it.
I would say SLM it’s partial ready for most scenes but not for everything. MAC PC is not ideal, however doing this you need a standalone PC working nonstop on it.
When we are talking about SLM, the biggest issue is Alien-Fonts, second problematic is disorted faces can happen in some scenes and this scenes must be replaced. You can’t completely avoid replacing some scenes with other model at the moment with this state of Starlight. So from the workflow you can do everything with Starlight but then you must manually check for this “artefacts” and cut/replace scene based into video editor ..a lot of work.
However I try to avoid this, and I’m waiting with the project until fonts/faces problematic is fixed, or at least one of them, alternatively we can use SeedVR2 for this purpose, as this problem there should not exist
Here is some test stuff → click but I do different workflow now, without downscaling and IrisMQ instead LQ and with Gaia, final step is dehalo into Hybrid, my current flow is described here
Interesting what happens, Janeway gets a glossy face, one cheek is glossy and sure there are actually more details, but it looks a bit exaggerated while the other cheek remains “normal”. The eyes sparkle. The hands look much better and the jacket, a lot is gone the pattern becomes completely different and the jacket of Chakotay also looks like replaced. So the diffusion models interprets a lot
but i like what it does to faces, I think it looks to extreme because footage is already enhanced.
I added two different comparisons. This site doesn’t offer three at the same time, but it would be clearer if it did. But Topaz completely eliminates details and adds new, artificial details. So, instead of repairing a car with a broken part, it adds details from another brand. But what it really wanted to do was repair the original. Looking at the eyes, you can see a huge gap between SLM and SeedVR2.
I did a full Star Trek: Voyager (and DS9 for that matter) upscale several years ago after I purchased Topaz, although it was called Video Enhance AI way back then. Got mostly okay results, but since the introduction of the Iris models it got significantly better.
My current project is the old BBC sci-fi show Blake’s 7, and started using Starlight Mini to do the initial enhancement… then Starlight Sharp dropped! Had to completely restart the work after completing the first two episodes and most of episode three!
So far, all of the work is being performed on a Windows 11 PC running an RTX 4070 Ti Super, and it’s still taking me upwards of FOUR seconds per frame! Have two Mac systems setup for less demanding upscaling work (M2 Pro Mac Mini and M3 Pro Macbook Pro), and much like yourself I wished Starlight worked on Apple Silicon, but considering my lack of unified RAM (16GB and 18GB respectively), I suspect I’ll need to move up to a M4 Max Mac Studio to make Starlight a viable option.
I have a secondary PC running an AMD graphics card (RX 7900 XTX), and that at least runs Starlight (although it’s currently in Beta, and Starlight Sharp is not available yet), but it’s way too slow to be practical.
Yes, the frustrating thing is that you spend countless hours on it and then realize: Okay, there’s a better way, I have to start all over again
From what I see with Starlight, it is not yet suitable for full movies, the main problem being alien fonts. Worth a try would be SeedVR2 which doesn’t have this problem or has it much less.
With Blake’s 7, I’ve broken each episode into five chunks (split at the chapter break point) and enhace them separately. With the old Starlight Mini it would literally take over half a day per segment, but the new Starlight Sharp it’s nearly twice as fast, yet produces significantly better results. Working from home tomorrow, so hope to get a chapter or two completed. Have already done The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy with this technique, but the SDR to HDR conversion didn’t look great. Might go back to it once Blake’s 7 is finished.
Is your Blake’s upscale better than the BBC Blu-ray release? I believe they were able to go back and rescan the film sections from the original film prints so how does that compare to AI upscaled versions?
I am using the Bluray footage as the upscaling source, but much of it looks like it was still sourced from the broadcast tapes as there’s lots of halo artifacts. Doing the initial Starlight Sharp run does significantly improve the visuals, and once I’ve done the second pass to 4K with SDR to HDR, it’s looking way better than the Bluray episodes. Unfortunately, it’s taking me over a WEEK per episode, but the effort is definitely worth it!
Very interesting. I have done some Dr Who episodes from the DVD versions which I thought worked out better than the BBC upscaling - but then AI upscaling has come a long way since they started doing their Dr Who discs but the B7 ones are recent and better than the earlier Dr Who discs. I am also only going to HD.
To be honest, both the livingroom and bedroom TVs are 4K OLEDs, and the addition of HDR makes a big difference to the visual quality. About a year ago a friend that happens to be a huge Battlestar Galactica fan paid a visit. She only ever seen all of the episodes on Blu-ray, but I showed her my 4K HDR upscales of the Ronald D. Moore sci-fi masterpiece she was totally blown away! Pity there isn’t a proper 4K boxset, but my own effort will suffice until then.
I’ve also started doing Blake’s 7! I’ve found the best results for the video sequences to be deinterlacing to 50fps, cropping the 240 pixel borders, resizing to 720x540 and then doing a x2 upscale with Starlight Mini Sharp. It’s doing an absolutely incredible job of removing the halos, reducing the chroma abboration and removing the noise without removing detail.
Original film sequences I’m using Starlight Mini on the original bluray files, then stablising, softening the edges and adding 35mm grain with avisynth filters Stabplus, Edgelevel and FilmGrainPlus. The new film transfer sequences I’m using NYX at original resolution, and then adding 35mm grain again with avisynth.
This was all by trial-and-error, but would love to hear if there’s a better methodology before I get too far down the line (doing S01E04 at the moment)
I finished the initial work on Cygnus Alpha earlier today, and currently running a second pass using Proteus with HDR which should be finished in a couple of hours. Going to be too busy to work on the next episode until the weekend.
maybe we can talk about it.
