I just want the option to do one batch using all the CPU or GPU power I can throw at it. 
This applies to all the Topaz software I own.
In a sense, yes.
Ironically, my goal from the start was to try to do a one click upscale with acceptable results. As much as it can be great for some people to spend a week (or more) on a say one episode of their favourite DVD to see how good they can get it, 7x seasons of Voyager which I am working on, with 172 episodes at that pace I would be done in 3-4 years.
So my goal has been to try to find a way to get as close to a one click pass, with as little extra work as possible, with the best results. Unfortunately, there was one thing I learned from Voyager - CGI and Live Action are so different that every script that works best for CGI is crap against live action, and vice versa.
So as CGI is always the far less of the content, I now do a single pass with the whole episode (currently 17x hours due to a slow Avisynth script, otherwise would be 12), and then switch models and settings and go back over the specific CGI sections with a different script and model.
On average, if I have enough free time, and the script doesnât crash too often, I can finish an episode a day, which is at least a reasonable time frame to do all episodes. Though I do joke by the time I am done, they will have done an official HD release and my time will have been pointlessâŠ
This is an extract from an episode completed yesterday. It is never going to be perfect, and everyone has their own preferences, but for me this is the best I have been able to achieve in three years of using Topaz on these DVDâs, to that goal of quickest processing achievable with a result that doesnât look artificial, or ruin the backgrounds too much and visually seem strange.
If you watch it, make sure to download it - am told that trying to stream it causes a lot of compression errors and looks terrible.
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Nope, I am a power user and went back to 2.6.4 after about 5 minutes. I need work to get done. Donât care about the new interface, it was good as it was, but I do mostly care about speed and reliability!
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Interesting. The grain stays on the faces. Not in a bad way at all. For sure itâs not perfect, but it looks better than all smoothed-out.
Thanks for sharing. Iâve been wondering just what the older Artemis models look like. This gives me a little better idea.
If you want fast results that you can use in the real world, you need to set up a render farm. I know a few that have several dozen Mac M1s connected â wrote a script that cuts up the video, renders and puts Humpty Dumpty back together again.
You just need a decent budget to get what you want.
This short clip from a dirty MP4 file from YouTube was unconverted to 4k. It looks pretty sweet nowâŠ
Looks good â definitely can tell that Youtube ruins it with artifacts - but that is expected. It was showing it at 1440 x 1080 for me.
Curious if you can de-telecine the DVD to 24p?
Not without making sacrifices. Its the problem with these DVDâs - they contain mixed footage, including in places 30fps progressive (29.97), so whilst you could IVTC it back to 24, anytime those sequences occur you will get jerky motion.
Its usually the CGI sections that have this issue - but not all of them do. A lot of the episodes seem to be 95% or higher telecine, so if you donât mind the occasional issues, yes. I just use this specific method of a way of trying to easily convert the episode whilst trying to avoid that problem.
Makes sense. Iâve been successful with a lot of VHS tapes, but havenât tried with DVDs.
Thereâs definitely better options â but they ainât cheap. This is almost a prosumer application.
I have attached a zip with two files - an extract and a test.
The extract is a very short extract from the first episode that is actually 30fps but has been decimated down to 24 as part of IVTC.
Its not hugely noticeable, so you can get away with it, it just depends on your own preference. Note, no processing at all done on this sequence, straight extract from DVD just with IVTC applied.
The second one labelled test 2 is essentially the same sequence, but run through my pro-processing script I have been using instead.
You can also blend the frames to try and remove the jerkiness and still leave at 24, the problem I found with doing that however, is that you have intentionally blended frames that are distorted going into the upscaler - which makes the upscale worse.
What I would love to do is TVTC it in a way that it extracts all the actual image files regardless of framerate IE, 30fps in the correct sections, 24fps in the other sections, upscale, then reassemble and then blend if needed to keep everything 24p. The only issue with this is that I donât know how to do this effectively and without spending very long times manually trying to assemble everything.
Steel not fixed after all this timeâŠHowever using the CLI the temp file itâs not created.
