I have a custom preset that’s been working nicely with upscaling DVDs 2x but with one title I’ve run into the issue of the image being brightened about 25%. I’ve tried adjusting various settings but nothing seems to make a difference. The only issue I can see as the cause is that the file I’m having this issue with was sourced from a PAL DVD whereas the others are all NTSC.
Any thoughts on what’s going on and how I can fix it?
I’m running Topaz Video 1.2.1.
Do you know what color profile the PAL DVD was recorded in? It is possible it was a different color profile and the models are seeing it differently when processing. Is the change in exposure happening in the preview and the export, or just in the preview in the app?
In the top right corner, there is the input settings option and you can override the color profile there if you want to see if that helps.
SD content is often BT.601 color space, but BT.601 is not supported for HD content, so Topaz does no color space conversion or does it wrong, this can lead to strange changes also. What I do as first step is converting my SD (DVD) source videos into BT.709.
for NTSC
D:\TEMP\FFMPEG\ffmpeg.exe -i "D:\TEMP\Test_BT601.mkv" -vf colorspace=all=bt709:iall=bt601-6-525 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 -colorspace bt709 -c:v ffv1 "D:\TEMP\Test_BT709.mkv"for PAL
D:\TEMP\FFMPEG\ffmpeg.exe -i "D:\TEMP\Test_BT601.mkv" -vf colorspace=all=bt709:iall=bt601-6-625 -color_primaries bt709 -color_trc bt709 -colorspace bt709 -c:v ffv1 "D:\TEMP\Test_BT709.mkv"download ffmpeg
I’m not a script fan, but it’s simple here, download and unpack ffmpeg anywhere (in my sample “D:\TEMP\FFMPEG”, open CMD with “run as admin” and enter corrects paths for the ffmpeg.exe and in/output files. Notes this is for lossless FFV1, when you use h264 or something else, ask ChatGPT for the encoder command.
Thanks for the great suggestions!
I’d done a previous upscale on this DVD with Topaz Video AI 7 and didn’t have any issues but I’m redoing the project because we have better models now.
I had the issue with the preview and so I didn’t run the full file.
I have ffmpeg already on my system so running the script shouldn’t be an issue. I’ll try the ideas in order and we’ll see if we can fix this. Thanks again!!
Yes I can recommend, solved my color shifts, that sometimes happens, anyway it’s good because video is then really BT.709 and if Topaz doesn’t automatically detect the color space, you can enable input override in Topaz and set everything to BT.709, because it is.
The only thing is then last line, “full” or “limited.” This controls the black level; “limited” is used to brightens up, it start at 16–235 instead 0 - 255 brightness levels, I believe.
Huzzah! Success! I tried the suggestions in order of posting and I didn’t have any success with selecting the Override and changing the color space to BT709 but the conversion script in ffmpeg solved the problem. The upscale is still slightly brighter in very dark areas (maybe on the order of 5% to 10%) but it’s quite subtle and is only noticeable with a direct comparison.
I’d love to figure out why I had this issue now when older versions of Topaz didn’t because I’d like to avoid the steps of converting the files with ffmpeg when theoretically, Topaz should be able to handle it. But I’m just very happy that the problem has a resolution.
Thanks again to everyone!!
Heureka! 
You can also encrease contrast and/or brightness with a ffmpeg command. The power of lossless codec (ffv1) is, you can do things like this as often you want
Example: Increases contrast by 3% (1.03) this does darken a little bit (gamma) and combined with decreases of brightness by 5% (-1.05)
ffmpeg -i "input.mkv" -vf "eq=contrast=1.03:brightness=-0.05" -c:v ffv1 -level 3 -g 1 -c:a copy "output.mkv" 