I totally agree with that !
It’s interesting but irrelevant for me what people request TOPAZ to do. I appreciate very much what they achieved in photo AI imaging. That was the reason why I spent money for VEAI also.
Might be that my expectations are too ambitious for AI enhancement for video edition, but I see no real progress in those AI models I need for my purposes (Artemis, Proteus).
When I upscale a 90 minutes video downloaded from Mediathek with a traditional video editor (like Magix, or Pinnacle) it takes about 2 hours processing, while VEAI takes 1.5 days, and the output result is different but not remarkable better.
TOPAZ has proven in photo imaging that they are competent in AI. That’s what I want to see also in video AI enhancement: ongoing effort to improve video quality by well trained AI models (especially face refinement).
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you are right topaz is not better
You are right about that:
I have purchased all products from Topaz Labs, and for upscaling photos and especially noise reduction at high ISOs in RAWs, I find the software truly outstanding, better certainly than almost all the competition.
On the other hand, on the video upscaling side, I have noticed that there is a lot of potential, but to date the results are not commensurate with the time it takes to encode video: on my 4K OLED TV on which I am using my mini desktop PC, I have installed as a video player the fantastic MPC-HC version 1.9. 23, together with the MadVR video renderer, with internal upscaling set to “NGU Standard”, the results are incredible, considering then that this process is done in real time, without any encoding (and comparing on the fly the result with the MPC-HC + madVR player of the original SD video, with the upscaled video from TVAI, both full screen in 4K, the final result is not so different, but on one side I have the real time rendering of the player, on the other side I have hours encoding to get a not too much better result).
Let’s say Topaz definitely needs to work on improving upscaling quality and especially encoding speed, which does not take full advantage of the power of modern GPUs!
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Just tried 3.0.1 on my M1 Max Macbook. The performance is still awful. 0.5fps per second for upscaling a 1 min video to HD. Are you really aware of this issue?
I even suggest you should drop M1/M2 Macbook support for now, because the experience is so terrible NOBODY won’t buy a license.
“…Topaz definitely needs to work on improving upscaling quality and especially encoding speed,…”
That’s exactly why I bought VEAI and what I want TOPAZ to deliver timely. That’s what I want to see on top of their Roadmap.
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i’m curious , can you post screenshots comparaison ? (Same Frame MPC/MadVr Vs Veai) ?
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I really invite all of you who think that VEAI is not good and “irevelant” to read the article written by Joel, he’s really ONE of the guy who know what he’s talking about here.
there’s a lot of confusion about when AI upscaling is useful, how much improvement can be achieved, and whether paid products like AVCLabs Video Enhancer, DVDFab Video Enhancer AI, or Topaz Video Enhance AI are worth the money.
There are a variety of AI upscaling applications you can download, both paid and free. Out of all of them, there are two clear leaders: Topaz Video Enhance AI and Cupscale. Topaz Video Enhance AI is easily the best paid product you can purchase, but at $200, it’s not cheap. Cupscale is a free alternative worth investigating if you don’t have the cash, though there are some tradeoffs
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As soon as I can, I will post the screen or a video with this comparison!
I invite you to read the article above I posted, it answers all the questions you all have about what to expect about Video upscalling and what can’t.
Why Is Upscaling Controversial?
Upscaling is not well-loved in certain corners of the video editing community. The reasons vary depending on the individual. Some people dislike Topaz Video Enhance AI specifically, some dislike the entire concept of AI upscaling, and some people are fine with the concept but unhappy with the way current products are marketed and/or what they can achieve.
I read about the real time upscaling abilities of my 48 inch LG C1 OLED TV. Some testers said it is the best upscaling they have seen so far. This is interesting because in my eyes the upscaling by the TV is terrible. “quick and dirty” might be a valid description. Using topaz video ai for hours to improve a movie delivers completely different results and they are always worth the time and effort spent on improving the source material. 
My results on a Mac Mini M1 16GB were posted on speed, but one was deleted as a double post and now the other one is buried in this awkward forum.
People talk about different versions of FFMPEG. I am clueless.
But if you look at the chart – use of CPU and GPU are different from version 2.6.4 to 3.0.0.
This was a very controlled experiment. Same everything.
Does anyone have a clue what has happened?
I have AMD Ryzen 5700G, NVidia 3060TI, 32GB RAM. VAI 3.01 keeps eating up all NVidia’s resources for some reason, after 1 round of exports on 2 instances, I cannot get it to save files using NVidia .265 anymore. Also preview does not work while it is encoding, it is frustrated as you don’t know how far the video is going, you can only see a percentage at the bottom. Trimming is worst then before and it is not accurate. Even if I switch back to VEAI 2.64, the encoding will be very slow ( 3 days for 120min) until I reboot. With VEAI 2.64, at least I can continue encoding for many more times before I have to reboot… I have switched back to VEAI 2.64 for now, seems like VAI 3.x still have a long way to go…
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Wow, for the first time in many, many years an application brought down my system - hard lock, only physical reset was possible. This happened after a little over an hour of video processing on an 3080 Ti and Windows 11…
Can you tell us what exactly your settings were and be as precise as possible. Also were scaling from say 1080 to 2160. I have a 3060Ti with a 3900x. I also have a rx6600 with a 5700g. You might need to check and make sure the AI Processor has the 3060Ti selected and not the IGPU or the just the processor. I have my IGPU currently disabled in the bios just reduce confusion in different software I use that will default to it even though I have a DGPU(RX6600).
Also the 3060Ti can report 100 percent utilization if you are just using the NVenc encoder of the card but in reality that does not effect the Cuda cores or GPU memory usage. They can still be used with no slowdown.
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The Best: Being able to upscale and frame interpolate simultaneously.
The auto parameter isn’t bad, but I prefer to do things manually and 2.6.4 was such a program.
The not so good: The new interface? Basically a new program. Also gone are all my favorite presets from previous program. Perhaps you might consider including a legacy format to import older presets.( Sony Vegas Pro editor allows this with every new update.
The worst: I have a powerful system and its flat out when using 3.0.1. Up to date NVidea driver but still freezing and crashing too much. So not sure what’s going on there.
CONCLUSION: I’ll probably go back to 2.6.4
One suggestion, not sure if it would make a difference. Using studio drivers vs. game drivers, or vice versa. I know there have been issues with drivers in the past. Also, I wonder if people with AMD gpu or Apple M1 have similar issues. I have AMD RX6800XT, but I have not tested this TVAI release yet.
Version 3.0x so far is not ready for release nor should it have been. I have been using VEAI for over a year and have been amazed at its capabilities. I was initially excited to try this new version based on the release comments. However, after a few days of terrible performance and crashes, I have decided to go back to 2.6.4 and hope support continues for it. I will try 3.x when users on this forum seem more or less satisfied with the product.
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I have also used Mocha Pro too.
After Efects has a Version of Mocha.
