So I’ve been using the program for around 18 months now generally I use one of the 2 profiles mentioned but I’m increasing in favour of GAIA’s output for one simple reason… it doesn’t overly denoise and crush textures/detail. The biggest bugbear though is that it takes twice as long to process when compared to Proteus. Both models now make better use of my CPU and GPU and while Proteus has the benefit of being able to tweak it still does far too much denoising even when set to zero and the greater the upscale the more noticeable it is.
I usually use the Neat plugin in Resolve to denoise and sharpen footage after GAIA as it allow more control. Skin textures are particularly affected by the Proteus denoise going on in the background and starts to give that “plastic” look. It works for some surfaces; shiny metal for example, but flattening whole areas doesn’t’ work on everything. It’s a shame because being able to tweak between detail and sharpness can help a lot of upscales but it’s ruined by the over compensation of denoise which I have no control over. Can you please actually make the slider in Proteus equate to the amount of denoising it does instead of it doing background denoise and just allowing users to denoise more because that’s exactly how it appears right now. Also considering GAIA CG seems to be the closest thing to a pure upscale without too much else why does it take double the processing time? Surely this should be the quickest option of them all.
As a side note this idea of doubling up 2 models sounds great in theory as I could combine both GAIA and Proteus but my concern would still be that Proteus would cancel out the benefit of GAIA’s lack of denoising by then denoising it anyway… and just how long is running 2 models likely to take???
Hi I’m working on a clip from 2005 in sd at the moment, I noticed that proteus has better sharpness than iris, but iris with the “recover original detail” slider loses less detail and removes artifacts better, in using gaia cg in first pass in sd then iris in fhd, it looks pretty good because gaia improves some details and removes a lot of artifacts without removing details. gaia is on top but to use without upscale I think.
I can only agree, Gaia makes for a lot better Texture especially with skin. With pretty much all other models, when zoomed too far out, every person in the video gets a free face-lift, because wrinkles completely get smoothed out.
Sadly I never gotten a good result when doing a second pass, with neither of the models. The only model that I still have some hopes for in that regard is Themis, since it makes things really pop. That said in the current version it still produces to much artifacts.
However, I got quite good results when I overlay different models in Premiere with different opacity values. To be honest, workflow wise this methods sucks. Not only do I have to render a whole lot more, but since I use Prores HQ I have to use up a lot of my SSD-storage just to keep the outputs, until I can actually combine them.
Still the result is actually quite good, so I guess I will have to keep doing this until the ONE model to rule them all gets released. But I would argue the proposed idea could get us there. I also would like to use Gaia specifically for skin and have other models do the rest.
Yes I’ve had the same results, I’ve tried running GAIA and Proteus and overlaying them changing opacity in Resolve but as you say workflow wise it’s time consuming and an SSD filler which rarely produces better results than me just using GIAI and tweaking the sharpness in Resolve instead. I’ve stopped removing dirt, scratches and dead pixels before upscaling since I have to do it again after now with all models because of the additional artefacts they create that weren’t noticeable in the original.
I tried running a GAIA and then an IRIS yesterday but IRIS still smooths everything the same as Proteus with denoise and dehalo off so again doesn’t really work as intended. Face improvement shouldn’t be sharpening features but smoothing skin. Skin isn’t flat it has texture and removing natural skin blemishes and texture just gives very, very bad results.
For now I’ll be sticking with GAIA but I would like to see some processing speed improvement. Alternatively provide a pure Upscale model with no tweaking for footage that is already fine that people just want to go from SD to HD …
I’ve found that Proteus works much better in all ways if the source has it’s noise cleaned beforehand.
Same with Gaia, it tends to bake noise into dots on what should be solid colored objects.
I feel like if Topaz could make a pure denoise model to ‘rule them all’, that could benefit all the other models most.
for some reason Gaia is advised for HQ video input, but when I first use proth v4 and NXFv1 with 2 sliders and then 2 X Gaia HQv5 or Gaia CG the results look ok, using art HQ, LQ, MQ or Iris in third round breaks it up
But I would argue the proposed idea could get us there. I also would like to use Gaia specifically for skin and have other models do the rest.