They could give us free target resolution set with Starlight mini, the model is not limited to fixed upscale factors, but they don’t…instead they remove the CLI where you could choose your output resolution (and also set ammount of Vram usage )
Becoming more absurd: Starlight Sharp is a FHD model. Resolution higher than 1080p happens with NYX. But when you have, let say 480p source, you can’t upscale to 1080p the model is made for, they give you 960p or NYXed up 1440p
Story continues: If you choose NYX-XL, they wrote it’s limited to 1x only, other settings does not use AI. But into the Starlight Sharp model they use same NYX for upscaling to other resolutions. So NYX can do it, but they dont’t give it to us?!
We’ve been waiting for almost half a year for Starlight Mini to be accelerated on PC. I even bought a 5090 because I thought the 4090 was too slow. Will there ever be an acceleration in the foreseeable future, or not?
The point is, if the cloud isn’t interesting enough, then something is wrong with the Cloud offering. There has to be coexistence without deliberately doing something badly just because the other offering wasn’t made lucrative enough.
The cloud is for people who don’t have a powerful system. These are two different types of clients.
You have people who don’t want to buy or build a big expensive PC, and then you have people that do. The people that have a strong computer don’t want to use the cloud, since their computer can run the tasks. Both groups can coexist.
Starlight in the cloud could be a 20x speed up and I still wouldn’t use it. I very much am against the idea that all computing should move to the cloud. I bought my computer, I want to use it.
My solution to the 480p problem is to use ffmpeg to first do an upscale to 540p. Then Starlight Sharp is more than happy to do a straight 1080p upscale. I then go to 2160p with Proteus. The result is quite good.
On my PC (Intel 12900KF CPU, 64GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 5080) the SLS upscale of a 45 minute video takes about 39-40 hours and the Proteus upscale takes about 2:15 hours.
I have a second PC that has an Intel 9900K CPU, 32GB RAM and an NVidia 5070Ti which takes about 50-51 hours to run the SLS upscale and 4:30 hours to run the Proteus stage.
I have simillar flow to avoid NYX, the difference is, combine Starlight mini with Sharp. If it’s 4:3, I do left/right letterbox on the source, gives me 16:9 to force Starlight mini doing 720p instead 920p. After the Starlight mini upscale, I remove letterbox and do Lanczos (or Spline) downscale from 720p to 540p, then I do a Starlight Sharp 2x run on this, this gives me 1080p. For the finish Dehalo (Hybrid “FineDehalo” most with 0.3/0.3 value) and sometimes I apply some blur (avidemux). Then pending on result I apply some grain. This is my workflow doing 1080p, for 4k i use other one
I also encountered the same problem when selecting the AION interpolation model using TV version 1.1.1. The result is also a variable frame rate. To re encode the results using ffmpeg, the - r 60 parameter must be specified, resulting in a fixed frame rate of 60 fps. However, during the encoding process, several frames of dup and drop will be displayed.
When using TVI 5.3.4 version to select the AION model, the final result will be a fixed frame rate, and re encoding with ffmpeg will not display some frames with dup and drop, which is relatively accurate.
I am puzzled as to why this problem has occurred and has not been resolved for a long time. It is very strange. Could it be a problem with the AION interpolation model???
other models/situations had to be tested, but I’m sure not only Aion is affected, the VFR issue startet since they implemented mplayer, the VFR bug was never 100% fixed. V5.3.6 was the last version before mplayer implementation and is VFR free. Versions before, including V5.3.4 also have no VFR problems.
Why do I suddenly have to enter my email and password every time I open Topaz Video? Also, after I’ve been processing for an hour with the app hidden, I take a look and I have to enter email and password again and the video has a Topaz watermark.
Yeah, that is really annoying. It was more than enough of checking the licensing before, even that was too much… I like to run my Workstation-PC offline when processing and rendering and stuff and not using it for other online stuff. It is a PERSONAL COMPUTER, so I have zero need for anyone to have unnecessary access to it. Neither hackers nor corporations, nor paranoid governments…
Now I have to plug in the WIFI dongle and enter both e-mail and password manually to continue using Topaz Video. Checking the license once a month should be enough.
This is just unacceptable. What if our Internet connection breaks ? Where I live my I often have Internet interruption because of my ISP. Once stayed 6 weeks without Internet, This means you are paying for something you can’t eventually use now ?
Agree this is total user unfriendly and can destroy your renderings. Also the periodic version update pop up window is annoying, especially since topaz certainly knows that many people do not use the latest version because it often has too many bugs
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