So I’ve had the program for a few months now and in combination with Davinci Resolve I’ve got some good results upscaling a few DVDs. But here’s the biggest bugbear for me, I have a reasonably fast pc in my opinion, it’s certainly no snail. Using UserBenchMark my rig comes in as a UFO for gaming and a Nuclear Submarine for desktop work.
Now I’ve tried using Davinci first and VEAI first since there are problems with both to correct. First off VEAI does an excellent job of deinterlacing and upscaling so where possible that would be first in my workflow. Unfortunately even with my pc it really isn’t practical (or under the current energy prices affordable) to run my pc for a day for an 80 minute upscale to just 1080p too often. This is especially true when any artifacts, dust, scratches, halo and ghosting become more apparent in the upscale because of the “enhancements”. Less noticeable halo and ghost just become more apparent and have to be painstakingly removed with Davinci which is extremely time consuming. Ideally in this situation I’d try and remove the problem areas in Davinci so the footage is “cleaner” to begin with but honestly the deinterlace is terrible in comparison so neither option is great.
The processing time becomes even more of a problem if/when I find I have to go through it all again.
So, the thing is, is it really worth all the processing time? Sure generally it gives a nicer upscale than say XmediaRecode but that software doesn’t take a day just to go from 480i to 1080p in fact a test took just 29 minutes for the same film that took around 18 hours for VEAI. Nor is my GPU flat out for the entire time! Out of interest I looked at the processing time to put it to 4K… almost 8 days which is more that a tad excessive no matter what results it gives.
Surely there must be some middle ground here, I can’t imagine just how much processing difference there is to justify such a huge difference in timescale to do the same job even with better output.
Given that I just tried an 8:27 minute clip in high quality 720p upscaling to 1080p using the GAIA model I REALLY wasn’t expecting it to take 4.5 hours!!! I mean come on it’s taking 1.13 second per frame just what is all the processing doing?
Is it just me or is the processing time just ridiculous?
Ridiculous improvements require ridiculous times. 
In all seriousness, though, 8 days is too long. It would also really help if you told us what video card you’re having. Things went considerable faster with my new RTX 3080 Ti (as opposed to my old GTX 1080 Ti). An upscale for a fulllength movie, from 1080p to 4K, will take about a day here (usually a bit less), to give you an indication.
But yeah, list your relevant computer specs first.
N.B. To answer your question, yes, it’s worth it. VEAI lacks a bit in the preprocessing department (shameless plug for my VapourSynth support request), but does the A.I upscaling like nothing I’ve ever seen. Period.
I’m running an i7 7700k @ 4.5 GHz, 32 GB RAM, GTX1080OC and let’s face it even getting a newer graphics card is going to break the bank atm if you can even find one (not to mention the additional power consumption). As I said my pc is no slouch and if it’s only possible to run the program on a very high spec machine then for the majority of people it’s impractical. Honestly I could live with a day to upscale to 4k but atm it takes a day to go to 1080p on something that is 70-80 minutes long. My point is there must be some middle ground if other programs can do it in 30 minutes…
Yes I agree the results generally are good but it really depends to a large degree on the source material. If I was going from 1080p BD to begin with I couldn’t really say there is a vast improvement that would justify the time it would take. I would love to upgrade my entire DVD collection but at the current processing rate I’d be bankrupt and dead before I finished at 50 films in a year!! 
you could take a look at the professional cards, their prices did not change that much.
I’m not sure what professional cards you are talking about but if it’s an Nvidia Quadro with more than 8GB VRAM then that’s even more expensive at 2 grand and only for pre-order in fact anything other than a £5,800 (in stock) card is only pre-order… so let’s live in the actual practical world please 
I use version 2.10 on a Surface Pro 7 with i5-1035G4 which isn’t much. But it does work for my footage. 240P/480P/720P upscaling and denoising to 1080P
I found it works best if I upscale 240P/480P footage to an in between resolution like 720P first in handbrake with no filters. Then use VEAI to upscale and denoise to 1080P. Else the footage will become too smooth and blurry if VEAI does all the upscaling and denoising at once.
Artemis V12 low quality and Medium work the best at 1-8sec/frame. And makes the most dramatic changes. And TBH it’s way too smooth and blurry without any manual adjustments to be made. But it’s better than nothing I guess. 2-4 days processing for 17-25 minutes of video.
Theia Finetune manual adjustments can take up to 30 seconds/frame. And makes the least perceivable changes. And takes forever to finish.
Aren’t there better ways to freshen up video?
At least with Premiere Pro you can outtake a piece of a footage to Color-Deband and put it back. I think. I’m new to this.
Yes I find it does over smooth a lot on lower resolutions with most models giving that plastic skin look and removing detail. You can either go with adding grain to combat some of that but you’ll still get detail loss or go the other way and try GAIA which is a lot more GPU intensive. I tried a 320x240 to SD 768x576 yesterday as the Artemis did exactly as you said. Problem is the original footage is poor so GAIAI has made all the original artifacts/banding worse but seems to have recovered some detail. I’ll try another model on this new one later to see what happens.
