New to video.. Is it normal to see a 100x size increase in videos?

I just recently purchased the full Topaz Photo suite and really like it –
I tried the video AI tool (even though I don’t use too much video)… and found that it massively increased the filesize of my test video!

It looks better, yes, but the size was very unexpected. Am I missing something?

A 1 minute video went from 12MB to 1.21GB in size. I did change resolution to 2x upscale (720p to 1440p), and otherwise using the default settings. I didn’t see anything to really compress the video? so maybe this is normal?

I was thinking of converting larger collections of video clips (30 minutes+) and don’t know if that means a 1GB video would now be 100GB?


Settings being used -

It’s because you are using ProRes as your export encoder (in the output settings). It’s designed to retain very high quality and be easy to work with inside video editing software, but it’s not a consumer format for playback due to it’s large file sizes. You can change it to something else that compresses the output more like h.264 or h.265.

I don’t like the Nvidia encoders for final output, so I stick with ProRes and use a program called HandBrake to transcode the ProRes using the x.264 or x.265 encoder.

2 Likes

there are two solutions to this. the first one is to choose a bitrate for compression yourself. instead of using prores try h.264 or h.265 encoding in the application. the other one is to get a very large file at first to loose as few details as possible and then convert it with a tool of your choice with either constant quality rate factor or a bitrate of your choice to match your needs.

Thank you!

One other question then… Is it normal to take 6-7 hours to convert a 20 minute video?

I have a 21 minute video, 640x480 being upscaled to 1920x1080 (as a test case, before purchasing). I have the Proteus - Fine Tune/Enhance turned on, h265 NVIDIA, and everything else (like stabilization, 60FPS, etc…) all disabled. Basically upscaling 480p to 1080p with default Proteus enhancements… and it’s hovering between 6 and 7 hours to finish?

I’m not sure if that’s normal? This is a newer PC with 64GB Ram, an nvidia 3060 RTX, and an i5-12xxx processor, so I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong?

In general I would say yes, it it normal. The older 2.x versions were a bit faster, but Topaz is busy working on improving the speed of version 3.x too.

The original file size hardly matters; it’s the amount of frames that does (and output size is only in a minimal way affected by the complexity of the video/noise, as ProRes is visually lossless). For example, doing a Firefly upscale now. A ~45 minutes episode (1080p) will yield a ca. 600G output file. That’s a lot. I then convert said file to 10-bit, 4:2:0, prior to compressing the lot with x265.

For some reason Topaz software is very timid when it comes to using modern multi-core/thread hardware.

Welcome to the world of 30% utilisation. :slightly_smiling_face: