I have noticed since I upgraded to the latest version of Topaz Video Ai several crashes have occurred. I had 10 videos (480p and 720p upscaling to 1080p in the queue), and only 4 completed, the other 6 had ended due to a crash. The crash seems to happen when I click to review a previous preview of that particular video. One video took me 20 minutes adjusting the settings attempting to achieve the exact quality settings I needed. That video along with several others were gone in a blink of an eye.
Lastly, I had to setup the other 6 videos again for encoding to 1080p H.265. This time I didn’t mess with the software at all and they finished with no issues. Makes you want to pull out your hair, I would have if I had any. LMAO!
My specs are as follows:
M1 MacBook Pro
1 tb
32gb
maOS Sonoma 14.3.1
I believe I’ve stated this before on the suggestions page that this software needs the ability to save your video setups in case of system crashes. That to me has been the most frustrating issue with this product. I love the performance and quality of the video output. However, I hesitate to touch the software when multiple encodes are in progress. SMH!
I tend to save my settings to a preset before starting the export even though the list of presets gets longer and longer because there is no comfortable option to get rid of old presets yet.
I am unlucky enough to have upgraded to 4.2.0 as well; I was even dumb enough to pay for it.
Now Topaz crashes on every attempt of interpolating with Chronos or Alon. I have not tried Alon before, but Chronos always worked in the past.
The software is rather useless if I cannot actually complete the processing. The files generated up until the crash are corrupt and not fixable with any free software.
Will they usually stabilize the software after a few versions?
It’s unfortunate that we have to deal with a crashing issue especially when updating our software. I crashed 3 more times after writing my findings yesterday on this thread.
What Imo stated in his response saved me from having to repeat setting up the videos again for encoding. I located the preset folder on my Mac and deleted the presets I used for each individual video.
I hope they fix this issue soon. The quality of the videos once finished is absolutely phenomenal…if you can finish.
So far they are good at updating the software when issues arise, I hope they fix this crash bug soon.
I actually conscripted the machine I use for flight simulation in order to do a 6 month long project of upscaling (and sometimes interpolating) 576 line PAL source material to 1080p. The setup I had for flight simming was actually a small CPU undervolt since the way the flight simulator uses the CPU, not all cores needed to be at 100% the whole time. I also had a couple of other small performance tweaks in the BIOS that slightly improved the performance and the machine has worked flawlessly with zero issues for four years.
When I acquired Topaz, it worked perfectly fine with those same settings but only so long as I kept the processes to a maximum of 1 (so basically if I had a whole batch of input files, it could only process one at a time). But given the modest specs of this machine (Ryzen 2700+ and Nvidia RTX2060 Super), there was no real benefit in allowing multiple processes anyway, because it cut the speed of the processing down by around 40% - 45%, yielding only a very modest overall speed increase versus just processing one file at a time (and much faster). So the time saving was small. But what I did find is the CPU hit was enormous - 100% all cores all of the time, a lot of heat generated and ultimately - instability. It simply drove the CPU too hard. The only way I could get it to run flawlessly with multiple processes was to remove the undervolting. And of course that meant the CPU worked even harder yet again and for no real benefit in terms of getting through the project. So it then ran stable but generating enormous temperatures.
The reason I mention this is because I wonder whether most of the crashes are actually caused by hardware that might run benchmarks and stress tests flawlessly, but Topaz seems to hit hardware in a way I have never, ever seen before - basically making everything run at 100%, 100% of the time except for the hard drive, wifi, etc.
Of course there may be actual issues that cause blue screens or reboots but if it were me struggling with crashes I would firstly remove any and all overclocking and overvolting of both the CPU and GPU. And if nothing is overclocked or over-volted then actually reduce their power consumption where possible (for example, GPU Tweak allows me to set a maximum power consumption as a percentage. I found that reducing that percentage from 100% to 85% only lost about 7% in overall performance, but dropped the GPU temperature down to a maximum of 51 degrees.
Doing this may not help but it should help determine if there is a hardware issue versus a platform issue.
