Not to hijack your point, but I can’t even upscale a video like this to 4k. See Topaz Video AI 5.3.5 - 5.3.6 - #46 by meimeiriver
What happens is, that TVAI internally first upscales the image to such a ridiculous size, that blotting starts to occur again. See Proteus 3 black splotche blotting
This issue never seems to get resolved, no matter how many times it’s getting brought up. (And not just by me) It’s getting rather frustrating, tbh. At least support VapourSynth then, so I can properly pre-crop myself.
EDIT: Haha, I’m such a moron! I had completely forgotten my own makeshift solution to this issue: VapourSynth Preprocessing with AVFS
Now I can setup a mounted VapourSynth script, like this
import vapoursynth as vs
core = vs.core
core.max_cache_size = 65535
vid = core.dgdecodenv.DGSource (r'c:\jobs\alien.dgi')
vid = core.std.CropRel (clip=vid, left=234, right=234, top=132, bottom=132)
vid.set_output ()
To be upscaled by TVAI, pre-cropped, without first getting blown up beyond 4k.