Hello all,
I have found the solution for weird faces when upscaling. I had been looking this for a while, finally found it. Here is the sequence I took to get great quality without distorting faces:
A. Deinterlace video with Hybrid ( a free Windows program, but you can use on Mac with use of virtual machine like Parallel desktop etc). or you can use TVAI Dione DV3 to Deinterlace (Hybrid better > Dione DV3).
Hybrid settings:
use video = FFV, container = Avi , audio = passthrough for output:
Bring unmodified video ( do not use Handbrake at this time), and use it in step B.
B. Use Progressive, Iris V1 with recover details 100, and all settings O and Denoise to 100. you can upscale to x 4 or 4K or 8K.
The faces look weird because you forgot to choose Squre Pixels when upscaling dvd/mpeg2 video in Topaz (models were trained on Square Pixels videos).
Try upscaling your deinterlaced/detelecined dvd in Squre Pixels mode to 720p with Proteus v4 Auto with 3% Original Details and then run the result (ffv1 lossless) through 1x(no upscale) Artemis v10 High Quality with 100% Original Details for extra sharpness. To my eyes this produces the least amount of distortion on a full hd screen.
Then you can encode ffv1 to x264 profile High 4.1 CRF 12, very slow, tuning None if you wish to save space.
You have to accept that it is impossible to upscale a dvd to a native 1080p video, there is simply not enough details in the source. The higher you go, the higher is the distortion/visible upscaling errors, thatâs why I settled on 720p for dvds.
So I tried to use the Hybrid and now it is rendering for more than 3 hours now and I donât even understand what is going on why the process is going over 100% now
It is also extremely tedious to use this program and the UI is horrible, not user friendly at all.
I choose this container because my source file was mp4.
I donât think it could serve as a servicable solution.
I have seen this too on my videos as well, it takes longer as the settings of speed is very low, but ultimately done with good quality lossless video. unfortunately , it takes longer time, may be they have issues with the UI.
Thank you for the suggestion. I will try the square pixels as well. My DVD with Topaz 8K shows amazing result with the settings mentioned above . I never had that experience with topaz and even 1080p was giving distortion but I am really happy with upscaling to 8K after Hybrid settings and just using the denoise only option with Iris V1.
I might experiment more, with sharpening after downscaling with handbrake.
Iâll try your settings but I think itâs a lost cause. Iris makes you lose too much detail. In QTGMC on your screen you activate âsource matching: x2 refinedâ but it is linked to âmatch enhanceâ and you left it at 0 so this setting doesnât change anything. So basically you use these settings with hybrid exported in ffv1 and you import this sequence into VAI to use Iris? And in my SD videos (720 x 576), putting it in square pixel or not doesnât make any difference in quality
yes, exported from Hybrid with x2 upscale FFV1 file, import that to TVAI with Iris1 just deniose to 100 and recover detail 100. (I checked all with Denoise 100 and recover details with other models but I found Iris 1 the best out of all). My DVD videos look great with above settings. Before same faces were distorted even with upscaling to 1080p with other TVAI settings. I still have to do work on my 8K videos to downscale and run other settings to see how the final product.
ok, i think that even if it works well for your dvds, for me itâs another quality, my sd videos are digitized 8mm tapes, so there is no compression but a lot of noise with artifacts, and in a case like mine iris does less well than proteus. On the other hand, using âvery slowâ with qtgmc makes you lose a lot of details. even from âfastâ the loss is visible.
why not already convert your video to Square Pixel while you at Hybrid doing the resize (screenshot 2.)?
that is what I do, I convert to square pixel in Hybrid as part of the deinterlacing
Thank you for the tip. I was trying to retain as much original details without messing many options. same video anything can be done later on. Not sure, how much difference square pixel vs original pixel would make though.
you do resize from 720x576 to 736x576 to bring 5:4 to 4:3
you do again 720 to to 736, but we have already 736?
But you can do this also by saying output âsquare pixelsâ in the deinterlace register. Or do you 2x upscale with Hybrid? But Screenshots does not show that.
I know âspline64â is optimal doing a scale without halo. But in general Iâm not sure if it really generates better results when you scale in Hybrid compared to import deinterlaced orig 720x576 into TVAI and set there âsquare pixelsâ which gives you also native 4:3
QTGMC deinterlacing in Hybrid: When you set the âBOBâ flag, this does double framerate. I did it and compared 50fps and 25fps deinterlaced results.
I noted the additional BOB generated images does often not looks good, so then I decided not doubling framerate while deinterlacing. I recommend take a frame by frame look on the result and then decide BOB makes sense or not. In my case I did not, later I would decide using Topaz AION model for frame interpolation or not.
Unfortunately screen shots do not show actual process being done, as they were taken after the process was done. I did scale x2 (720 x 576 to 1440 x 1152) and also did original resolution as well. I have found Scale x2 imported to TVAI and use Iris V1 with mentioned setting had better result. With recommended settings the process in Hybrid took long time though.
You âfound the solution for weird faces when upscaling.â? Really? Thatâs a wee presumptuous, donât ya think?
Also, âDeinterlace video with Hybridâ? Why do you assume everyone has to deinterlace?
I appreciate youâre trying to be helpful, but finding âthe solution for weird faces when upscalingâ is, frankly, as good as totally out of our hands. Topaz can improve the models, and we can wait for that to happen, thatâs it. Of course, we can tinker a bit with sliders, to maybe offset weird effects from occurring, on an individual basis, but thereâs no panacea, aka, no overall âsolution for weird faces when upscaling,â other than Topaz continuing to do their thang.
I agree with you , technology has to evolve and it is case by case. I used to get very weird faces, and struggled for many months to get better results and with above settings at least my videos got much better, reasonable and thought it might help others to try similar settings. Of course, whoever has interlaced videos, like mine or home videos or older videos are interlaced, and only those needs to be deinterlaced.
And sorry if I sounded a bit harsh there, as I really wish you actually had found âthe solution for weird faces when upscaling.â But every bit helps, I suppose.
This is what I do (albeit it not in Hybrid, but just directly via my own VapourSynth pre-processing script) . QTGMC is still the best, IMHO, but yeah, doubling the frame-rate, especially for 4k end-result movies, can become quite taxing on your media player.
And yeah, always use lossless (or ânear losslessâ, like 422 HQ .mov) formats for your intermediate files.
qtgmc renders cleaner footage with less artifacts compared to others, but I noticed that it still renders less detail compared to yadif or muksun with virtualdub
But every bit helps, I suppose. 
