This release represents a major revamp of preview comparisons, with a tab-based interface that allows for workspace customization. Using tabs makes comparing different model settings much simpler, and brings more screen real estate back to the playback windows.
Here’s a video overview of what’s new in v6!
Highlights
Tabs
We’ve heard your feedback and we want to make comparison, easier, better, and more intuitive. Tabs are self contained groups of settings. You can create them from scratch or use presets. They replace for our previous preview queue and A/B comparison mode. Now rendered previews are contained in each tab, and it’s easy to compare two sets of previews, or the original. Just drag the tabs to create the view you want.
Video player
Our upgraded video player has been available in Windows and is now coming to Mac. The video player supports HDR, audio, and smooth 8K playback. Getting high quality previews in app, has never been better. Note: HDR support on Mac is still in progress
Exports
We’ve revised the export queue to take up less space, offer more information about your exports, and make it easier to track exactly what you’re rendering.
Sources
We’ve moved the sources panel to create more work area. You’ll find it right below the timeline on the right.
Presets
The preset system has been refreshed to make it easier to find your favorite settings and quickly apply them across projects. You can select a preset directly when starting a new project. Presets are tightly integrated with tabs, you can create a tab from a preset, or save a tab to a preset.
Timeline
We gave the timeline a lot of love in this update. The upgraded timeline is faster, more responsive and has thumbnails to help you find what you’re looking for.
Live render
We’re making huge improvements to the live render system. You can render specific length chunks using the render button, and now it’s easier than ever to compare two sets of settings. Just switch into Side by Side or Split View, and press the play button to start rendering.
Other updates:
A new Preferences toggle is now available to enable/disable Cloud processing in Video AI:
Allow playing outside of trim range by placing playhead outside of trim range.
Show loading icon at play button location during Live Render when waiting for more sections of the video to process.
Modify stabilization prompt for live render.
Improve precision of the thumbnail timeline.
Show remaining time and processing speed for exports.
Fix bug where canceling button-generated previews with Live Render does not show the loading icon.
Fix bug where “Processing” message is not shown for button-generated Previews.
Fix wrong name in custom filters flow for Motion deblur.
Fix export result not opening on macOS.
Fix opening location of the preset dialog.
Fix copy settings from export items.
Fix add tab button coloring with custom background color.
Fix previews crashing for preset tabs.
Fix intermittent right panel and preview errors.
Fix invisible input options icon.
Known issues:
Stabilization is currently not supported as a Live Render filter in previews. Stabilization previews can be rendered using the Render button.
The team is continuing to investigate certain examples of exports encoding with a variable frame rate (VFR). This build may resolve some of these cases.
The team is eager to hear your thoughts on the new design, and as always, thanks for being part of the Topaz Video AI Community.
Initial findings after five minutes:
1). The timeline zoom is extreme. I have my scroll wheel set to Windows default, and it goes from super zoomed in to all the way out in like three clicks. Pretty useless like that. It works more like expected if I click the + and - buttons.
2). Missing arrow buttons on the scroll bar under the images in the timeline.
3). Missing any way to use the scroll wheel to scroll the timeline. It can only zoom. Standard expectation here is that holding ctrl and turning the scroll wheel will zoom. Otherwise it should scroll.
4). After clicking in on the tab ellipsis menu button, clicking it again doesn’t close the menu. In fact clicking in this whole outlined area does not dismiss it.
5). The option to open preview folder is gone. I want that back, since the main thing I use the UI for is making batches images. I need to open the folder once they are made.
Where are the progress bar, elapsed/remaining time counter and the switch to turn preview looping on and off? Are they hidden somewhere that I’m not seeing, or just missing?
We will make some adjustments to the timeline zoom range and the steps on the zoom slider, and look into adding more keyboard shortcuts that change scrollwheel function.
For #5, we recommend using the In/Out buttons or keyboard shortcuts to export a trimmed range.
Using live previews to select filter settings and then clicking ‘Export As’ allows you to save image sequences to a custom directory.
This is something we plan to release, along with automatic scene splitting. One of the reasons for the expanded timeline with thumbnails is to make that area more functional in future updates.
I don’t know if I’m simply overlooking the feature or if it’s missing, but I can’t find a display for my preview render anywhere. I just can’t see the speed at which I’m rendering.
For me, this is an extremely important display, if only to get an overview of the total render duration
if there can be support for this also using a config file of sorts instead of the UI (maybe an option to export UI settings to config file) to allow easier verification? So that the command line version can run with an easy config file input.
TVAI 6.0 seems to remove the ability to queue up multiple previews.
Steps to reproduce:
Start a project and go into a split view
Create multiple tabs on each side of the split view, each with their own settings.
Select a tab combination and select the Render Xs button in the bottom right.
While that’s processing select another tab combination and select the Render Xs button in the bottom right.
Go back to the previous tab combination and notice that the preview renders have been cancelled.
This removes the ability to quickly queue up a bunch of previews, take a small break, then come back and actually compare the previews.
This change also impacts when you’re generating previews for multiple videos.
Import two videos
Select the first video
Adjust some enhancement settings and select Render Xs button in bottom right
As that’s processing switch to the other video, adjust some enhancemetn settings and select Render Xs button in bottom right
Not the preview for the first video will be canceled.
While testing this, I noticed that in some situations TVAI will ignore the video produced by the Render Xs button and just re-render the video using the Live preview mode
This behavior is intentional, but we’d love to know more about your workflow.
Our approach has been to align Video AI to other tools like AE where you can queue up lots of exports, but previews just live within the tabs.
You can queue multiple sections of whatever tabs you are viewing, but we stop rendering background tabs when you start rendering in a new tab. Like moving from one composition to another.
The emphasis right now is on rendering whatever preview you ask for most recent, to make comparison more intuitive but we’d love feedback on how this change would benefit/hinder your workflow.
For most people with a typical workflow, the new system works just fine, and is probably an improvement over older versions of TVAI. But my workflow is probably a bit atypical:
I’ll have a few clips for a video.
I will import a clip into TVAI, then schedule up a preview for the “main” models I use.
Then I repeat the previous step for every clip I want to process.
I’ll go take a break, or do something else on my computer while the sometimes 20+ previews all render
Then I come back and compare the models in each clip side by side until I find the one I like the most.
Then I take the model I like the most, tune the settings a little bit, and export the clip.
I never had a blanc screen and can’t test it, but other ones wrote they have it in V5.4 and V5.5. How it’s in V6 I don’t know, it’s the big question and I hope for feedbacks. Someone who has the problem actually should test it with V6, this would be perfect.
i Like how the Presets are now in a fixed height flyout dropdown for 50+ presets list .
But is there a way to add or make the scrollbar visible so you can grab the scrollbar to force scroll all the way down the preset list.
Reason being is the presets scroll really slow and if you have 50 plus presets you will be waiting a on time just to scroll through all your presets. Making browsing your 50+ presets tedious and slow.
So having a way to scroll through presets fast will be beneficial with users how have 50+ or even 100+ presets to scroll through.
Thank you and hopefully look forward to see a better way to browse presets faster since current v6 presets scrolls slow.
This beta always opens up under the taskbar in Windows. Does not remember and open where it was when it was last closed. It’s only under by about 50 pixels, but it’s enough that in needs to be moved up, every time it’s opened.
The compare bar view on a simple FHD output makes the preview wobble something nasty—and this is with the video paused too. The right side view gets dragged then corrects its position. You have to move the slider bar very slowly to not have this happen. It makes this view near useless.
The numbers 1 through 4 and 6 are not suggestions. I want to make that clear. They are things that if I released to my quality assurance team, they would send back to me as failing to pass. They would have to be addressed before my changes could be considered a candidate for production release.
For number 5, I suppose your business team has the right to decide to have that removed. I want to persuade them to not remove it.
