What Video Upscalers Can and Can’t Do and How to Make Them Do it Better
Excellent read! The parts about how low-quality SD sources might perform better in TVAI or TVEAI if preprocessed with other software first is something to take note of.
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Some of that is private so please see here:
My issue is that it seems like Apollo/Chronos work best when each individual frame is sharp already (like for Anime content, typically, unless they applied artificial blur). But for real world video shot at 24 or 30 fps - but contain fast motion, the frames will contain motion blur.
Also please see:
Thank you for this link. It is very much recommended to read it carefully
Oh - Hello G’Kar ;o) Artemis didn’t give me satisfying results in upscaling B5. Some unsharp or small details as faces or eyes got blurred up / looked like painted by picasse. Artemis makes Glasses, costumes and static elemets looking quite bright and super smooth, but people looks often unnatural - little bit like Botox misuse in it’s extremest form ;o). Since 3.0.3 proteus seems to do a good job on upscaling and enhancing my DVD RIP of B5 series by keeping even small or unsharp details quite well. Only thing is for example a 3day beard in face, which gets flated out to a baby like skin. But I can live with that, otherwise the enhanced vids looks great.
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I’ve been having a similar problem. to the one quoted above. While I have seen TVAI just vanish a few times, but I’ve wondered what was so wrong it caused a system reboot. (Also on my PC, a crash usually logs an error after a BSOD which leaves a record of what happened. But these left no record.).
I finally found the cause, which may be related to yours. - It appears that the battery in my UPS, (a.k.a. uninterruptible power supply,) It reads 100% charge, which should keep my machine running for several minutes and then do a ‘graceful’ power down. I’ve discovered it has a defective battery or circuit board. When the power dips for even a second, it allows the power to my system ‘hiccup’ resulting in a reboot.
The easiest way to test this is to boot your system, play a video in a video player or something that makes it active, and then pull the UPS power cord out of the wall socket. It may die instantly or take several minutes. If it crashes instantly or in a very short time, the UPS may need batteries or need to be replaced.
Several of the Export AS files from this version of TVAI are completing with the dates for the original input files on them.
Funny you should say that, I’m finding that while processing the time created shows as correct, but on completion it changes to match the time modified. Using Export, not Export As.
Tom,
Artemis isn’t all that useful to begin with. If your input is excellent. it may be a good resizing shortcut. But if you select anything but excellent quality, it will also take out detail along with (some of the) noise. And if you resize using it, the results not be nearly as good as you can get with several of the other models.
Theia Fine Tune Detail is great for decompressing and denoising at 100% scale. Just make sure your Export bitrate is high or use a lossless codec. Crank up the Revert Compression until most of the noise goes away and then turn on a bit of the Reduce Noise. Export. - Afterwards, load the denoised video and run it through Proteus - Relative to auto to upscale it as you may want to crank the detail and sharpness a bit. If done carefully, the results will far better than you can ever get with Artemis.
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The fastest i’ve seen in the forum was a 4090 + 7950X
CPU is more important than GPU.
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Thanks, I will give Proteus a try then!
Thanks, on 2.6.4 it was the best when comparing all approaches. Of course 2.6.4 has the very convenient 4 window view so it would show the top 3 recommended ones. Alas not in 3.0.3, so since previewing is a bit more of a pain, I mistakenly decided to use the one that worked best on the older version for me. Excellent advise, will take to heart 
i just posted this to tell that 3.0.3 was working.
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Really?
Then hardware acceleration with TensorRTs is useless? 
I wouldn’t say that, but for the resolutions and bit depths we’re dealing with here, it’s not really taxing on the GPU, which spends most of its time waiting to be put to work.
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BUG REPORT FOR TVAI 3.0.3:
Exported videos that have been trimmed have 3 to 5 seconds of blank frames at the beginning. This is in Quicktime player on iMac i7 / RX6800XT. Previews, on the other hand, play fine from beginning to end. I have tested several different source videos with the same error.
Apologies, if this has been reported already.
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For anyone interested, I tested the speed of Proteus 720p to 1080p upscale, exporting 3 different videos simultaneously. Getting a combined 6.3 frames/second. Exporting a single video, I get 3.5 frames/second.
Mac OS Big Sur on Intel i7, RX6800XT eGPU, 48GB RAM
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Tom,
To update my reply to you, I should report the performance on my system. I am running a RTX 3090 and outputting to ProRes 422HQ, (lossless) which uses my i7 and not the video card, 1080p renders at approximately 4.8-5.1 FPS. FYI:The input file is 926x280, ProRes 422HQ and a bit over 42GB in size. When encoding to Nvidia H265 Main,which runs on my RTX 3090 the same image and settings renders at almost exactly the same speed. - (I am more than a little surprised by this. I would expect the 3090 would be doing it faster; it was faster in previous versions of 3.x)
Interesting Factoid: Looking at the Corsair iCue dashboard while doing the encoding mentioned above, It appears that the 3090 is scarcely running at all. However, what this snapshot doesn’t show is that there are long pauses in the activity of the GPU where the temps go down so far that the fans stop.
I may reboot and retry after this job is done.
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Yes, it is definitely running slower than I would have expected. (I have a RTX 4090). It seems this version doesn’t do much to take advantage of that card. I know NVIDIA has mentioned working with Topaz on utilizing it better in the future but maybe that is not on the table yet.
I have that blank frames issue with either Artemis or Apollo (can’t recall which) - and there was also a video glitch a few seconds into the clips I was doing. Both problems disappeared when I exported with no audio, and added it back later in Vegas Pro. h.264 Nvidia high (3060ti), mp4, Windows 10.
But yeah, it looks like a(nother) bug.
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Looks like I’m still able to use some form of frame interpolation with Apollo on these 50fps videos, so I’m just going to do them as is.
