I must be missing something. Before, you could watch the software do its thing in real time (almost). Now I see just “processing” when rendering.
It was always there before – now if I render something for 8 hours – do I have to wait until it has completed the task before I can view any of the frames?
What option have I not checked?
This is probably the biggest feature needed to see if your rendering choices are looking good or failing in areas.
I apologize if this question has been asked before - but I am confused… It does not make sense.
v4 no longer has a live export view. The rationale being you should have already selected the best settings using the 1 and 2 comparison windows before you start exporting, so viewing the export in progress is pointless.
You should be running short previews of all sections of the input that you want to see the output for so there should be no finger crossing required. You have all the tools to see exactly what you will get for any part of the input.
Ok, pointless is too strong of a word. They did mention the live export preview is coming back at some point, but probably not until they can make it smooth and stutter free, with predictable behaviour.
Still this is a severe limitation (also that you only see the preview after it was fully rendered) that costs time. This is and was constantly being critizised by many users since V4.
I don’t get the reasoning for that limitation as it did work (more or less with stuttering on windows systems) with previous versions.
Or is that the new bug solving: If a feature sometimes causes problems then just remove it?
I do believe that this will financially hurt Topaz as quite some users will stay with 3.x and not update their subscription because of that.
You can find the preview file of the running process in the temp folder, configurable in prefs/dirs. After a couple of seconds you can open that file with you default video player without any problems (i have windows 11).
I predict the end of this product if the UI optimizations continue this way.
I was hoping for something like a mathematical word problem:
Problem 1.
A 2 hour movie takes 6 hours to process using one of the AI models that has changeable parameters.
The user picks settings that they think will do well for the whole movie and start processing.
They watch the output. After 1 hour they see an unacceptable artifact that needs parameter adjustments to correct. It takes 30 minutes to find the right parameters. They start the processing again. This time, after 2 hours they find the next unacceptable artifact. This process repeats with more artifacts being found after 3, 4 and 5 hours of processing. How much total time was spent actively working on the movie to get the final enhancement?
Problem 2.
Now we do the same math problem but let the movie process the whole way through with the initial parameters. The user doesn’t watch the output until the next day—because there’s no live view. They spend 2 hours watching the movie and identifying the 5 points with unacceptable artifacts. They spend the same 30 minutes each to find fixes for the artifacts using previews. Then they run the final enhancement and don’t watch because they can’t, but also because they are confident they have accounted for everything.
Problem 1 active time spent interacting with TVAI: 1 + .5 + 2 + .5 + 3 + .5 + 4 + .5 + 5 + .5 + 6.
Problem 2 active time spent interacting with TVAI: 2 + (.5 * 5). (You could add the initial and final processing times if you want, but the user was off doing something else while those happened.)
I’m not saying this is reflection of reality. Consider it a worst case scenario.
That’s what the preview button does—after ~30 seconds. Is that what this is about? Previews don’t take that long to process. If they do, do PNG output. Have the previews folder open. Open the first image as soon as it appears.
It’s not Topaz’ fault that digital video formats are so crazy complicated that it is really hard to get before and after images to match exactly in all cases.
