Just curious if anyone’s using Theia (Fine Tune Fidelity choice) for upscaling. I find that it’s noticeably better (not so cartoonish looking) than Artemis as it retains texture making it as good as Gaia. But above all Theia is noticeably faster than Gaia to process. I tested both methods with a 60 minute WW2 newsreel that I needed to upscale from 720P (960 x 720 (4:3 aspect ratio)) to 1440 (1920 x 1440), 200% upscale. On my Mac M1 Max laptop (32GB memory) Gaia will do it in 8 hours but Theia can do it in 5.5.
Just curious to know what others think about Gaia, Theia, Artemis, Proteus. Which one do you favor and why? Does it depend on the source? For example, if you had to upscale old newsreels, which model would you choose for upscaling and why? Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.
How much sharpen and deblock values do you tend to use on Theia? When I’ve tried it out in the past, I kept noticing a lot of vertical lines. Maybe I just had those too high. Over all, it does not produce as clear of an image as Proteus, but does not have the same background face smearing problem either. I need to try it on some trees. Proteus likes to add a small circle pattern to trees. Not always, but quite often.
I think for grainy sources it might be the best. Gaia tends to amplify grain.
Thank you for your feedback. I actually just left all Theia settings at 0. Here are my results after upscaling 200% from 960x720 to 1440x1080 with Proteus:
The original file is 24GB and the upscaled Proteus file is nearly 50GB, roughly 200% like the frame size. Data rate for upscaled clip is also double - 107 Mbps vs 47 Mbps. And it took just over 3 hours with Proteus encoding at 0.13 spf (seconds per frame). I’m now proceeding with Theia which is encoding at 0.21 spf and it says it will take 5 hours (vs 3 hours with Proteus). I’ll add more side by side pics when that’s done and then I’ll do Gaia which seems to be everyone’s favorite in terms of quality.
Theia is really good. Here’s an example of the vertical lines I mentioned.
Considering how small the original is, it’s doing an amazing job. There are some sources though, where those lines can be seen throughout the whole frame.
