Settings, Presets, Buttons, Codecs, UX UI, Starlight and Gigapixel

Topaz Video AI Ideas
1

As I use Topaz more and more I am growing a little weary of the UI and lack of certain quality of life issues. I will be brief but for starters:

  1. Settings - Every clip nukes your setting. ‘Batch’ mode is impossible without saving and applying a preset. That is not batch mode IMO
  2. Presets - We have over a dozen settings on every one yet you limit us to 20 characters. We have to type very cryptically and later some of those names make no sense.
  3. Buttons - I have the bottom row of buttons often fall of the page. DPI issue or something IDK.
  4. MP4 is restricted to a very narrow set of dimensions and often we get almost a hidden message that your queue did not work because MP4 does not support that size. MP4 does support that size and really AFAIK every size.
  5. ProRes - So we are forced constantly to use ProRes instead of MP4 (see point 4) but ProRes defaults to ProRes Proxy. Why in world would anyone upres or upscale something and use Proxy. That crazy. Almost no one is using anything but HQ in the entire video industry, except for editing proxy movies…
  6. UI and UX - the interface is confusing to new users, non-intuitive, and sorry… just plain ugly. For a premium Flagship product it should be better
  7. Starlight - It seems like you are toying with the idea of making it SaaS. So, we buy the full fancy Suite and when you finally get a creative model for it you want to pull that out and monetize it in the worst way. Remember, people love Adobe products but hate Adobe. Don’t go down that road please.
  8. GigaPixel - we were led to believe by your marketing that it was Legacy, and the future is the Video Suite and future development is going into that. Then you release a great new Gigapixel giving us grief for trusting you.
2

I’m not a Topaz Video AI user but many of these comments about the GUI apply to Gigapixel AI and Photo AI as well.

At the moment all Topaz products seem to be in a bad place with regard to quality control issues, GUI design, ease of use and lack of response to user comments and complaints.

Please get busy and clean house - the current situation is frustrating and not inspiring which is a shame because the innovation and potential of Topaz software is still so good.
But these ragged edges harm the overall experience of using the software.

3

I am taking all of these notes and sharing them with the team.

Can you elaborate on number 4 though? MP4 is not limited in the app, the Codecs are more limited than the container is and this sounds like a codec issue more than the container.

H264 in the app which is the default codec is not able to handle above a 4k resolution, you can swap to H265, ProRes, FFV1 or VP9 to go larger in resolution size.

Project Starlight is currently limited to being run through the cloud due to the needed hardware to run it and process. The research team is working on optimizing the model further to bring it down where it can be run on a local system but that is taking some time to do.

Gigapixel is currently being developed further, only Denoise and Sharpen were discontinued since their tools were merged into Photo AI. There are still improvements and workflows that the team are developing for Gigapixel going forward.