I tried a DVD with interlaced PAL. VOB files were processed (not re-encoded) into the mkv container using mkvmerge. Checked with mediainfo, the video stream in the mkv is definitely interlaced. The mkv opens and deinterlaces in Video Enhance AI. So I think you should clarify what you mean by “Cannot handle “interlaced” video directly, footage needs to be to de-interlaced first,” because what you’re saying doesn’t appear to be true. Edit - I was wrong; the DVD I used was only flagged as interlaced, but was encoded as progressive, so Video Edit AI handled it. It would have been nice if someone from Topaz had communicated here.
terryleemartin13, as a workaround you could save / export as png in Video Enhance AI, if you have the disk space. That way, if it crashes, you should be able to restart the program and pick it back up at the exact frame where it crashed.
To encode the individual png frames into video:
ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -f image2 -i filename%06d.png -r 25 -profile:v high -level 4.0 -preset veryslow -crf 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p filename.mp4
Notes:
%06d is the number of numbers at the end of the file name (filename_000001.png, filename_000002.png, etc.).
“-r 25” is very important, this needs to be changed to the exact frame rate of the original video (29.97, 30, 24, etc.).
Finally, “-crf 10” is the quantization factor, you can change this as you please. 23 is default, 17 or 18 is considered “visually lossless,” so 10 would be a very high quality that is suitable for further processing until you get your final result. If the output from Video Enhance AI is the final result, you might change this to 18 or 23.
Alternatively, you could split your source video up into say 15 minute segments, process those separately in Video Enhance AI, then join them back when finished.
For source video:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -map 0 -segment_time 900 -f segment output%03d.mp4
“-segment_time 900” is the size of your segments in seconds, 15 minutes in this case.
Process output000.mp4, output001.mp4, etc. in Video Enhance AI. When finished, to join the results:
ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i "concat:output000.mp4|output001.mp4|output002.mp4|output003.mp4|output004.mp4|output005.mp4" -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4
Note that the above ffmpeg commands for splitting and joining do NOT re-encode anything; the streams are bit for bit the same, just split / combined.