To be very clear, I am satisfied with TVAI.
This topic is to address some of the common complaints I have seen, almost weekly, for the past two years.
Complaint number one:
I have a computer, TVAI should run on it, but it doesn’t.
Come with me to the world of the past. It’s the year nineteen ninety six. Your computer cost you two thousand US dollars. It has—I’ll be super generous—two gigabytes of storage in it’s hard drive. Images are stored in bit map files. One frame from a not-yet-released-to-the-public-DVD takes over one megabyte of storage. Audio is stored in wave files. One minute of DVD quality stereo audio takes over ten megabytes of storage. Let us do some math. I’ll stop spelling out numbers. Rounding images to 1MB per frame, and audio to 10MB per minute. 24 frames a second for one minute = 1440MB + your audio = 1450MB total. You now have one minute of pure uncompressed video and audio on your 2GB hard drive—and you cannot fit another.
The point in this history lesson is that no matter the compression used to make digital videos smaller and take up less storage, when they are being processed, they must be uncompressed to do any pixel manipulation. It has been many years now since 1996. Images are in bigger resolutions and can have more different colors per pixel. Both make them bigger than my example when uncompressed. Videos can have higher framerates. Audio can have more channels and higher frequencies. In computers today, when you view a video, it’s been compressed. There are pieces of hardware in the computer that are made to uncompress those videos just for viewing. Since no permanent pixel manipulation is needed, after the image has been rendered to the screen, it’s essentially gone from the computer. It is one thing to view a digital video and a complete other thing to modify the pixels of a video and save those modifications.
A.I., or more accurately, Machine Learning, is the aggregation of creating hundreds of random logic bits and weeding them based on desired outcomes. Keep the bits that seem to be closer to the target goal and delete the ones that are farther. Randomly generate more logic bits to fill what just got deleted and repeat the process until you are happy with the result. The final trained set of logic bits can be quite large and difficult for modern computers to obey. Hence large companies saying their new hardware now has dedicated AI ‘cores’ and the like. The reality is that there are several ways to implement an AI model, and those ‘AI cores’ are probably only good at computing one specific implementation. (TVAI has been around longer than dedicated AI cores. I would not be surprised if their models are not compatible.)
TL;DR:
TVAI must be ran on a powerful computer, and claims of ‘AI computation power’ are specific to the products of the brands that made the claim.
Complaint number two:
I shouldn’t have to pay to beta test TVAI.
Short answer: You are not beta testing TVAI. You are just another victim of the now-needless complexities that arose from how old storage mediums and broadcast technologies needed to be digitized. Oh, and everything I said before about computers and digital videos, except imagine all the different combinations of computer hardware that exist.
Back to the history lesson. Everyone wanted to solve the giant storage problem of digital video. All the money would go to the one that did it first, and if not first, then best. I don’t know any of the technical details, but I do know the results. There are so many digital video storage formats, you cannot count them on your finger. Most of them are good at most of those before-mentioned complexities, but none of them are perfect at all. It is very possible that you can spend hundreds of [insert currency type here] on a video editing program that does most everything you need. Oh but you cannot open certain types of video in it. In fact, you can only create a few select types of video formats with it. The reason for this is to reduce the amount of incompatibilities. (Or they created the video format and think it’s the best. Forcing people to use it, is their way of making all their hard work worth it.) Along comes a new video technology. Let’s say high frame rates as an example. You want to get in on the action. That program you have been using does not support the new technology and their video format cannot handle it anyway. You can either wait to see if they ever support it, or spend loads of money again to change video editors to one that can. What you don’t know is that the new format is incompatible with some feature of the old one. Like variable frame rate. Something you’ve used on all of your videos to save a bit of space. The more I describe this hypothetical situation, the worse and more complicated it gets. I’m getting more annoyed the more I think about it.
Can one program account for all of the features that have been integrated into digital video formats over the years? Remember, some of those features are probably proprietary. FFMPEG has been worked on and refined for years. Specifically it probably has had the most work done in trying to cross compatibility barriers between digital video formats. Even still, they are not all accounted for.
Should anyone blame Topaz for the history of digital video formats?
TL;DR: Topaz did the best they can to be compatible with all the non-sense video formats that exist. It’s not their fault. I think we’re all glad they didn’t try to reinvent digital video.
It is unrealistic for anyone to expect no issues out of the mess that is digital video.
Disclaimer: This is not meant to be a source of correct history and facts. I did not check any of my sources nor my math. This is just me trying to compile the things I’ve learned over the years into one place. Would I have ever written all of this if TVAI did not work for me. No. No I would not have. Is all of this biased on the perspective of some extreme computer nerd. Yes. Yes it is.
just FYI…