I’ve been in contact with support regarding these things, but thought I’d post them here as well to see if i’m just dumb or if Topaz just aren’t able to create an interface with options that arent’ completely whack, misleading and confusing.
My main issue. Crash recovery and it’s options.
All three options here are either explained illogically, wrong or dont work as intended.
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Enable externally previewable exports
An export is a video you’ve started to process - it’s lterally the only placewher the word export is used. This would make one assume you can view the first 30% of a video that’s 30% processed.
But alas, this refers to the preview render you can run (min 5 frames upt to 30s and if you want to, render everything between the “Mark in and Mark out” area. I got told by support that one shouldnt be able to open a video currently processing to view what’s been processed so far. But, that’s a lie. Sure it’s not possible to do via the “Open in external player” in the app itself. However, manually opening the folder where the file being processed is, you can open it, and watch everything that’s bneen processed so far even if the video shows no info other than it’s extension and size. -
Clean-up preview headers.
I dont even understand the purpose of this option. -
Use temporary directory
For decades, when talking about a temporary directory, and the way the option is explained if hovering over the toggle button would have you assume that a temporary file is being created in the temp folder within the project. This is not the case. That temp folder is only used for frames extracted when doing a live render preview for a short moment.
According to tooltip of the fuction. Disabling it causes you to be unable to use the start/stop function of a process, as well as crash recovery. This is also a lie. In fact, toggling this option off, makes stopping a process, shutting down the comptuter and then starting the process again exactly where you left off. About crash recovery - i dont even know what to say. I’ve had video crash both due to the issue with the video being interpolated first, which by now is a known fact that it’s broken, as well as user error(gpu clock and undervolting is a completely different story when it comes to AI rendering - i’ve probaly had over 20 micro gpu crashes causing the file to become corrupt - but i’ve since found a clock and voltage that’s stable). None have been recoverable.
I found a workaround to this, which ensures a possability to crash recovery. By disabling temp directory, then stopping a process, will have however far TVAi has processed a file to be exported to the preview folder out of all places. This video is clean and has all data a finished video would have. Rendering a 30min clip and stop it when it’s processed 10min? Perfect, TVAi will copy the video as far as it’s been render and it’ll get all the data the finished video would have except for the full length. You’re free to shut down the computer, reboot, whatever. When you start the software again, open up the project and hit the batch export button, the file copied to the preview folder when you stopped the process will be coped back to where it originally was gettng processed and start exactly where it left off. Even better. It’ll keep the file copied when stopping the process, which essentually means, you can start off from that point again, in case of a crash. It does require some manual work, which is only top stop/start the process every now and again. It will always be able to pick up where you last stopped it.
I’ve got a great amount of other things i’d like to change regarding the interface. Just please, let me disable the video preview window, and dont have a min width of the software that’s wider than 1080p. I render while i work from home at times, and i do that on my 3d display whick is a vertical 1920x1080p. The smallest possible width of TVAi is i’m guessing around 13-1400p, forcing me to move it back and forth to select input and export settings. It’s so simple to just reduce the width of the application, it’s beyond me why it hasn’t been done.
