I was especially looking forward to more! I didn’t even know that there were such problems in the program. Never encountered the bugs that have been in the updates of the last months…
And the update of the models to improve videos… perhaps for some year in the next… five-year period? It’s almost boring to go in knowing for sure that you won’t see anything
Nope. It still creates hundreds and thousands of those. The preferences are set properly. I tried running the app as administrator and still the same. What I don’t understand is if it creates those for some unknown reason, why it doesn’t delete them after the queue is completed?
By the way this happens only on Windows, AFAIK. I don’t see anything obvious under macOS.
This version still has a playback bug, but this time I only dropped a video file and pressed Play. And VEAI hangs the playback. It’s also holding the video file ‘hostage’, probably. Frame-by-frame view does seem to be working though.
…
Aha.
The program didn’t shut down properly, still holding onto the video file.
I use ‘old’ type of previewing.
I’ll try full installation repair (this happens after in-app update routine).
No go. Playback seems totally broken, and in current all three versions (alpha, beta and stable) of VEAI. And, indeed, the activation doesn’t stick, reverts to the unregistered after app restart (clean or not).
I have to fall back to 5.0.4.
The video in the ZIP file shows, that processing works, frame-by-frame works, but playback is broken. The same happens when I just try to play the freshly dropped video (literally, by drag’n’drop). Then I have to kill the app manually, because it won’t end gracefully by itself. It will do that however, if I don’t try to play the video file.
Second attempt to play the preview (this time) and here’s what I’m getting. This time I could stop the playback and be able to scrub the video or it’s preview. GPU set as Auto (previously as RTX 3090):
Activation is now broken on Windows 11 24H2 after update to 5.3.4.
On further investigation:
Problem can be partially resolved by uninstalling, deleting all Video AI settings folders (in %AppData%, %LocalAppData%, %ProgramData%) and reinstalling.
However, the product will become deactivated as soon as any custom settings are saved/applied and further attempts to reactivate will not persist.
As I want to be able to define custom settings (such as: output format, output folder, disable data collection, etc) I have reverted to v5.3.3 until this is fixed (using the full uninstallation method described above).
Is it me, or does every new release get worse? We’re at 5.3.4 now, and the best version that ever existed was 2.64 (iirc). Each time something new breaks! Mosy notably the Preview. In 2.6.4, it was flawless: neatly side-by-side, and working smoothly. Now, in 5.3.4 it’s horrendeously broken again: flickering all over the place, and causimg veai to hang on a 2nd preview attempt.
And what’s with the convoluted new Preview anyway? Like I said, in 2.6.4, it was flawless: neatly side-by-side, and working smoothly. Nowadays you’re doing this weird ‘preview in external viewer’, which A) won’t let you restart the clip, and B) is extremely inconvenient for comparison to the original. Bring back the 2.6.4 Preview, pretty please!
Then there’s starting in ‘Trial Mode’ each time. Does anyone even test this software?
Then there’s the removal of a separate temp- and output folder. It literally takes hours (Sic!) on a high-speed SATA3 hard disk to copy a nearly 1T file (.mov) to the same location (only with rewritten headers and renamed to prob3 at the end). In the 3. versions at least you could set a temp folder to another disk.
Honestly, it looks like this company is constantly sabotaging their own product. I know I said this before, but this time I really may not renew any more – especially with the huge price-increase.
For those curious like me… I’ve written a simple Python script for batch video upscaling using Topaz Photo AI. Since it uses autopilot settings, you need to disable all filters except the upscaling one. You’ll need a “previous” version of Photo AI where the command-line interface isn’t a paid feature (meaning the classic, non-Pro version), as well as having the Photo AI directory, ffmpeg, and ffprobe added to your environment variables. I recommend enabling the “longest size” option to your desired resolution, for example, 3840 pixels. You can modify the codecs in the script to your liking. It’s currently configured for the best output quality. Python is required, and the script is run simply from the folder containing your video files. If anyone’s interested… Remember, the precursor to video upscaling was Gigapixel, those were the days slow graphics cards and lengthy processing times Topaz Photo AI - batch video upscaling script
slow graphics cards and lengthy processing times 