Video Enhance AI v.1.3.8 - Theia models, MAC GPU support and stability improvement

Download: Windows, Mac. Released July 10th, 2020.

Major features

  • Theia models in. Theia-Detail + Theia-Fidelity.
  • MAC GPU support. GPU support for all Macs running Mac OS 10.15(Catalina) or above for Theia and Artemis.
  • Overall stability improvement. Should be nearly no crashes now.

Improvements

  • Overall engine processing speed improvement.
  • Cancelling preview or video batch processing is immediate.
  • Support for high bitrate, HDR, 10bit and 12bit video sources.
  • Add JPEG (lossy) and PNG(lossless) output sequences to reduce the output disk space needed.
  • Preview pan & zoom freely.
  • Now Output will not be overwritten.

Fixes

  • Fixed a few issues causing crashes.
  • Fixed issues with mp4 video output getting corrupted.
  • Estimated time calculation has been fixed to report more accurate finish times.
4 Likes

What sources/upscaling do you recommend for the Theia Models?

for the first time i’ll comment a new update. i’m speaking only about myself and my low computer specs.

  • Theia = love the speed of it. But Result is still far from the overall quality of Gaia-CG from the few test i could do, my sources are mainly for now TV source (Pal or NTSC) from 640x360 to 720p for 16/9 or 4/3 (640x480 or DVD). Digital camera as well.

  • don’t know why, but Theia make my CPU going crazy. T°C is around 96°C, and i get an alert.
    running Gaia is ok, never going above 80°C.
    only way to drop the T°C when using Theia is to stop the rendering or underclocking the CPU (if i do this, I go from 6 f/s to 20 for 720p->1080p so not an option.)

  • speed improvement : i appreciate it a lot, i’m running iGpu (i7-7700 / HD630 intel Graphics) and the speed dropped on that one too , not that much but any improvement speed is always good ! thank you !

  • cancelling preview and batch immediatly is great ! thanks !

  • Love the pan & Zoom

Improvement suggestion :

  • Mp4 cand have sometimes missing frames at the beginning and end of the video under certain circonstances
  • Audio passtrough or highter audio bitrate on the AAC please
  • H264 & H65 support for video output. H263 as of today is pretty unbeleaivable. the jpeg lossy feature is great. but it’s a VEAI (video in the title), not gigapixel. At least it would be good to tell to the customers the REAL reason of why h264 is not there. licence issue ? something else.
  • the possibility to pause the rendering and save the progress for some big projects.
  • Manual cropping with mouse please ! after cropping 30 or more videos by guessing the numbers of W and H and %… it can be a bit… annoying :slight_smile:
4 Likes

I tried it out and did comparisons… this version no longer has a gamma / lightening effect (as compared to version 1.2.3), but it does appear to do some kind of color regrading to the source. And once again, I am unable to find any model and/or setting that can equal the quality of Artemis-MQ from version 1.2.0 on SD DVD upscales (which also doesn’t affect source color & gamma).

Can you recommend how to achieve results like the below in version 1.3.8?

https://imgur.com/a/WxXHmKb
https://postimg.cc/gallery/Sz8vDKk (Alternate link)

1 Like

Team topaz; why on earth do you need to use these model names, it’s so incredibly counter intuitive and user unfriendly.

Why do I need to be taught and have to learn what EU,P,CG stand for. Why can’t it just have profiles like “High fidelity upscale and enhance” ?

Related to this, why can’t I save my own profiles now that I can edit values of the models ?

Also can you please please please add control over the bitrate, framerate etc of the output video. This is a really basic thing I’m still surprised wasn’t in the first ever release.

4 Likes

GAIA-HQ is still by far the best model. I don’t see the point for the JPEG output, you don’t want to to introduce an already lossy first step. Uncompressed RGB 8/16 bits output video in a MOV wrapper (for the best compatibility with professionals NLE softwares) would still be the best answer to avoid the thousands of still images saved in the hard drive that in a long term can deteriorate the hard drive performances by increasing the MFT.

About speed improvements: On my system (Win7, X3470, GTX 970) it’s now slower by 30% with the new version.

Gaia-HQ Upscale by 400% (612x1080 => 2448x4320)

VEIA 1.2.3 ~ 3.02 sec./frame
VEIA 1.3.8 ~ 3.92 sec./frame

Gaia-CG Upscale by 400% (320x240 => 1280x960)

VEIA 1.2.3 ~ 0.31 sec./frame
VEIA 1.3.8 ~ 0.39 sec./frame

1 Like

I cannot elaborate enough how thankful I am for the new Theia models. I’ve been wanting to improve the Resident Evil 3: Nemesis cutscenes for a long time.

Before:

After (using Theia-Detail):

The reason it’s been difficult until now is because this is the only game where these cutscenes lack heavily in detail and have a lot of pixels surrounding the characters on screen (first two screenshots for instance). But now that doesn’t happen anymore.

I’ll keep messing around with the parameters. For now this is a huge improvement!

1 Like

Congratulations on the first Mac GPU update!

Two things are still missing, though:

  1. My eGPU is not supported (though it is officially supported by Apple/macOS: Radeon 5700 XT on Catalina, via Razer Core X Chrome eGPU case). Setting the checkmark in the information window in the Finder (prefer eGPU with this application) does not work. VEAI continues using my internal Radeon…

  2. The Gaia model is still only CPU and kinda 6x slower -.-

2 Likes

The new Theia models are impressive, so far I’ve had great results upscaling digital 8 footage, however, I still have to give the best quality to Gaia CG, although anything more than a few frames will cause the Gaia models to leave lines almost like a grid pattern, which sort of ruins the output unfortunately.

There is still a bug of missing frames at the beginning of the video while encoding very short file frames.
example :
720p to 1080p : 27 frames in 23.976. H264 Profile 3.1, Dolby AC3 5.1.
result : 13 frames are not encoded, the 13 frames is freezed during 13 frames, frames 14 to 27 are ok.
result give mpeg4 / H263 + AAC 5.1 319kbs. wtih 13 frames which diseapered. same for many other clips. Didn’t tried yet to do the the same with Png / Jpg output to see if the issue is the same.

my second video processed with the new version ended up with no audio layer.

2 Likes

i noticed that after the update the “keep audio” was unselected did this mistake on some videos before noticing it. you checked that already certainly ? (we never know).

2 Likes

I tried 1.3.8 on a Mac 2012 MacPro laptop running 10.15. It works very, very slow but it works.

Any chance this will be ported to 10.14 and MacPro 2010 (12 processor). I can get 1.2.3 to start but then it crashes. The logs show something odd “VRAM not enough or invalid Nvidia GPU chosen, AIEngBase::setup() GPU VRAM: 16 16 “-1” !!!” program is set for CPU.

As a side question it would seem for Macs Metal would be the way to go. It looks like 1.3.8 now does AMD as well as Nvidia.

I noticed this when too when importing certain videos. Glad I’m not the only one.

The 8KUHD preset seems to be broken. I rendered a 4K video last night just fine. I can’t seem to open the file when it’s finished.


First time posting here. I’m really impressed with this program’s capabilities. Here are a couple of features that would help my workflow:

  1. Custom dimensions don’t seem to work for a scale percentage that isn’t an exact integer. I need to be able to upscale 1024x768 to 2880x2160 (281.25%). The program won’t let me do that at the moment so I have to upscale to 3840x2160 and then crop the image sequence using FFmpeg or another program.

  2. Image sequence filenames seem to be restricted to 6 digits. The ability to add a prefix to each sequential image file would be helpful.

  3. Once I’ve added a batch of videos to convert I don’t have a way to change their processing order. The ability to drag sources in the batch list to change their priority after the fact would be useful.

  4. Reduce or remove the “grid” pattern in the Gaia-CG model.

Looking forward to the next update!

Have you manually timed your upscales? The time estimation has been altered between versions. Though I do agree it does seem a bit slower now using Gaia-HQ on a GTX1060 (also about 30% performance loss based on the internal metrics).

Edit: A 300 frame upscale (720p to 1080p) took 11m10s which is 2.23 sec/frame and matches what the internal frame time was showing. The previous version was about 1.75 sec/frame.

1 Like

The new ai models just “meehhh”… for me
and
Sometimes i get “Unable to write output file” message.

I think we don’t need more AI models the regular users who buy this software just totally get lost in ton of settings.

1 Like

Yeah, I did manually time it as well. Can’t remember the exact numbers but it mirrored the 30%.