Topaz Video AI 5.3.5 - 5.3.6

Topaz Video AI Releases
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but at the cost of diluting your purchased content that cost ~20 to 40
Oh, and not using my TV to its full extent?

Of course it has to be done with care…
Be careful not to chop heads and so on…
Sometimes I decide not to crop and sometimes I crop somewhat to at least minimize the black bars.

It’s not (only) about saving processing time. I also paid a lot for my TV and want it to be used to its full extent.

The 4:3 format wasn’t invented for the best viewing experience.
It was “invented” to make the CRT as square as possible to minimize the chance of implosion.
Also the way the tube illuminizes the phospor is much more dificult with a wider aspect ration.
If technicians had it their way (so to speak) the thing would be square.

When flat panels emerged they agreed to a better Aspect Ratio that conforms to your perception of the real world.
So in itself 16:9 is a much better viewing experience without question.

We can’t however go back in time and tell the directors to reshoot everything to 16:9 or at least tell the cameramen to take care of getting important stuff at bottom and top.

Most of the time everything happens in the centre.

1 Like
83

Told before, when I just export a video - maybe only crop - the info line freezes for the rest of the image. In this case, the info line froze at 8 % but the video gets finished like usual anyway.

image

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The invention of the 4:3 format had nothing to do with CRTs. The format dates back to the 1890s when it was selected by the Edison and Eastman companies for the production of moving pictures on 35mm film stock, and was the global standard for movies until widescreen was developed in the 1950s.

The first CRTs were round. The first squared-off TVs had round tubes and a 4:3 mask that covered parts of the screen to make them look rectangular. And when squared off cameras and screens went into production, they were 4:3 because that was what people were used to seeing at the movies.

Widescreen CRTs were made for a brief period, but they were very heavy, very expensive and very late, coming out within only a few years of LCDs obsoleting CRT TVs entirely. By that time there was nothing still being filmed in 4:3 format anymore, so except for the very earliest models, LCD TVs have all been widescreen.

4 Likes
85

Fact remains that the 4:3 was a trade-off of what was technically possible for CRT’s.
It would have been impossible at the time to make widescreens to react on the movie industry starting to push cinemascope to differentiate.

I do admit that I was under the false impression that widescreen was already established in the 50’s. Probably because a lot of old material was later turned into widescreen.

I now know the movie industry started pushing widescreen in the 50’s to differentiate.

86

It would certainly have been more difficult and expensive to produce a widescreen CRT in the 60s, but the real reason it didn’t happen sooner was that there simply wasn’t a demand for high end TVs, which was what a widescreen color TV would have been. And when that demand did emerge, it was for much larger screens than could ever be made as CRTs. And most of them were made as 4:3. 4:3 remained the predominant CRT format until the LCD obsoleted the CRT and essentially forced universal widescreen onto consumers.

87

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.

1 Like
88

Often people seem to forget that, the way movies are filmed, on-location camera viewers have demarcation lines drawn on them, for 16:9, wider even, and 4:3. That’s just so producers can decide, later, what kind of cut they want. Tl;dr: most movies are shot in a way that already allows for a possible 4:3/16:9 cut; aka, the detrimental effect of cropping off on the sides is often far less dramatic than you might think.

89

During my high school years in the 1970’s, I was fortunate enough to have 27 inch console TV in my bedroom, which was perched atop my chest of drawers. That damn thing weighed almost 200 pounds!

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90

Nothing about film history is clean or especially logical. I’m pretty sure Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was not on 4:3 film and also not what would be categorized as widescreen—and that was made in like 1938.
Between broadcast TV technology and film, video storage has become one of the most convoluted things in existence.

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91

Cinema movies have never been in 4:3, far as I can remember.

92

The original 1937 release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in the 1.37 “Academy” aspect ratio, which is 4:3 modified to add audio. The film was rereleased in the 1980s and 1990s in cropped “pan and scan” versions in which parts of the original screen are cut off and the image jumps from side to side to create a fake “widescreen” view.

All currently available versions are widescreen with the original 4:3 image in the center and black vertical bars on each side.

3 Likes
93

I think it’s a bug not a feature :hugs: no seriously I don’t understand why topaz can do such basic things correctly.

Could it has something to do with this:

720x576 is 5:4 (ratio 1.25)
720x540 is 4:3 (ratio 1.33333)

and I think your 1.942 streched result instead 1.7777 has something to do ratio of source file is 5:4 not 4:3

720x576 is max resolution a DVD can contain. When mastering 16:9 movies they squeeze the movie in the width stored on 720x576 DVD (anamorph) …and then when playing, there is a flag that tells the player it has to be stretched to 16:9 otherwise there are eggheads

94

Yes, it’s the difference between DAR and SAR.

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95

Silent movies were 4:3 in 1.33 ratio. Talking pictures were 4:3 modified to a 1.37 ratio to make room for the audio track. The latter was the cinema standard from the 1930s until the 1950s. Everything you see from those eras on TV that looks “widescreen” is cutting off the tops, bottoms or both from the original frame.

2 Likes
96

Since updating to the latest version upscaling to 4k with Rhea has become unbelievably slow (2 hour render of a 40s zoom video). This process was about 10 mins with 5.3.4.

I’m in the process of rolling my version back to see if the issue is fixed

97

That sounds reasonable. I wasn’t around in 1938. :grin:

98

I’ve now rolled it back and it’s still very slow. Is there something wrong with the Topaz server or something? Where do we go for status updates?

99

Must be your GPU. On my RTX 4090 (see above) my GPU went to as good as 100% load, but ffmpeg’s activity went way down.

I just finished a movie with Rhea XL. Average fps ca. 4.8 (around 0.2 below what Proteus does on a blu-ray). Was it supposed to go faster?

100

Ah okay. I was thinking about how it’s in color, but I thought color film was not invented for several years after. Somehow my memory changed that to aspect ratio. Sorry for the mistake and confusion.

101

Hi there,

Thanks for the feedback! I’m running Topaz Video AI on a MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2021) with an Apple M1 Max chip and 32 GB of memory, currently on macOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Given the specs, I wouldn’t expect such a slowdown compared to previous versions. Do you think this setup could be contributing to the issue, or could it be related to something else, like software compatibility with the M1 Max chip?

Appreciate any insights you can offer!