Any judgment of a product’s value is completely subjective.
Like in a democracy, we will vote with our money on these products, and Topaz will have to make appropriate adjustments if it wants to survive and grow.
For me, it’s ok for now. This is a complex area, and I’m willing to be patient and forgiving for a little while. I’m pretty curious to see how things develop since I use these tools almost daily.
Of course, I will also try some competing products, and if the value is better there, then I’ll make a change.
Yeah, I meant like that. I’ve bought every single Topaz app over the years, and sure, they were fine in the beginning. But then Topaz just ditched multiple apps altogether which was a massive red flag that I honestly regret ignoring. And the ones they did keep “updating”? Every update has made them buggier and worse. They slap a new UI on the same engine, call it an update, and somehow expect us to applaud. Meanwhile, the apps have never come close to delivering what they constantly hype in their marketing.
So after years of paying, supporting, and trusting this company, what am I left with? Three crappy AI apps that they’ve once again decided won’t be updated, and who knows how long they’ll even bother to support them. And the cherry on top? I’m forced to crawl back to outdated early versions just to get something functional.
Before I cancelled everything, I even tried their cloud rendering and surprise, it failed repeatedly after long waiting times. They’re simply not ready. They push out unfinished garbage, ignore what users actually need, and just chase whatever idea pops into their heads next.
I’m totally against subscriptions but I’d still consider paying yearly if I could at least keep the latest version at the moment I quit, and then return later whenever I wanted. But no. They want full control while giving us half-baked products and expect us to ride with them all along…
Pause and resume functions on this program is just broken. Pausing a long 4K upscale results in hours of lost progress each time it is paused or resumed according to the UI progress bar, and crash recovery is also broken, tossing out the entire project and starting from scratch again when the project attempts to resume when Topaz Video is started back up.
Please fix this issue. Pause/resume functionality is very important for my workflow.
With software companies increasingly moving towards the subscription model, so has the rate of piracy increased. That alone should send a message that renting software is not a popular option with potential customers.
I also got VEAI with the goal of improving my DVD collection and some digitized VHS family videos.
VEAI was unusable for me. I never got it to produce anything without deal-breaking artifacts in it, at least, once everyone that I showed the results to made me take off my proverbial rose-colored glasses.
TVAI 3 is when it started to become better and I started getting acceptable results. For DVDs, that’s all it is though: acceptable. A little bit better than the original, but easily worse than 720p if such a source exists. Not what the marketing claimed and still claims. For any 720p source I have tried though, it does give great results going to 1080p. I would call it perfect. (Proteus 3, I think I did auto settings. It’s been a few years, but watching them today, I still think they look just as good as a Blu-ray would.)
One aspect I feel like they kept a blind eye to, is that DVD compression is mostly the same. Undoing it would be a major step into real enhancement. Mostly I’m talking about the ghost lines that appear near edges of building or poles or basically any straight line that has a high contrast in color. None of the AI models get rid of them, they mostly enhance them and make them more obvious. How hard is it to make thousands of FHD videos and convert them to MPEG2 at various compression levels, to make training data? (Sorry if that’s what was done and it just doesn’t work.)
But yeah, for my VHS stuff, nothing even close to what the marketing suggests. I can get it to be cleaned up a tiny bit, or I can have overtly distracting artifacts—and that’s even with the new Starlight models.
Summary:
Stable software, intuitive UI:
DVD enhancement: (Kind of)
HD enhancement: (but it was already good)
VHS enhancement:
I got poor results with SeedVR2. I had to tile the frames in, then it would process, then I think it would untile them out, so it wasn’t faster than Topaz which was disappointing.
Also, the image was very noisy.
Maybe my workflow is wrong?
Maybe I have to denoise first?
I was upscaling a deinterlaced 480p to 1920p , 4x.
Agreed. When this program first launched there were a ton of models. I’d rather have one or two that are the best and then just use those. One for SD footage and one for HD footage.
strange, they released a new version, i got almost 3fps into a low quality video (ok i got a 4090 but the speed is faster and amazing).
(open a isue on the github, they will help you out there, here i cant talk that much or they can ban my account)
Getting ComfyUI up and running takes time, but it’s possible to use it fully within a week, and as you said, it’s not difficult. Running SeedVR2 is as simple as loading your video, adjusting the settings, and pressing “Run.” My PC runs videos with SeedVR2 almost 24/7. You can see the difference in quality at the link below.
I tried to get SeedVr2 to work for 2 days….got nothing but headaches errors and disappointment.
I am not particularly stupid….and I think if I would have spent a frustrating week…I might have gotten something usable.
A week!
SLM is slow as hell but it took me 15 minutes to learn and gives me eye popping results on old VHS conversions. I do run a quick second pass on them using Proteus..
Moral of the story. While seedvr2 may be considered “easy” I found the exact opposite to be the case and I would guess that most people will too unless they are willing to be frustrated for an entire week….maybe longer.
It also requires a much higher root knowledge base than SLM.
I don’t use the new starlight in Studio….at least not yet. Because SLM in 7.4/5 is dependable and easy and gives me a superb product in comparison to what I started with.
But is IS slow…very slow….no escaping that on a 5070 Ti
I’m glad there are guys that like and use Seedvr2. Competition spurs improvement.
I use Topaz Video for starlight sharp and I use Topaz Video Ai for starlight. I hope that they get everything working better in Topaz Video so I can just use one program. I’d like to see speed improvements to the model without having quality loss.
One thing Topaz have got right is the complete separation of the v7 app and the v1 app and they co-exist without interference. I’m almost exclusively a Mac user and I have both v7 and v1 TV(AI) apps installed. The CLI is working for both versions fine. I can only assume that would be the same on Windows.
(Kind of)
(but it was already good)