I just want thank the Topaz Labs team on this product. It’s incredible and, as many others have commented, it’s better than anything else out there.
I am using GTX 1660 Super, and for upscaling 480p to 720p I consider it “fast”… albeit the files sizes are huge. Current workflow:
VE 1.1.1 > HQ or HQ-CG (LQ does not work well for me) > Handrake Nightly > HVEC h265 10 bit. This shrinks it to roughly half the size without seemingly losing visual quality.
Render times:
35 minute footage 480p, to HQ 720p - 8 hrs
35 minute footage 480p, to HQ-CG 720p - 7 hrs 30 mins
35 minute footage 480p, to 100% denoise - 4 hrs 30 mins
The best VISUAL quality I’ve actually achieved has been by first doing the 100% denoise, then dropping it back into VE and up-scaling to 200% but I’ve noticed that anytime you put BACK into VE any clip you’ve rendered, the audio will be out of sync. I’m not sure if frames are being dropped or there’s a bug, but this has been my experience and I can reproduce it every time. Simply render out a clip in VE, then drop it back in and render again and it’s off sync. It only happens with VE render files. For now, I’ll stick to the above workflow unless someone has any suggestions…
I haven’t had any issue with unsyncing audio, but again I haven’t ‘reworked’ with any video with VEAI more than 1 time, so there may be a bug into reading audio streams from VEAI-created files.
But a workaround would be refraining from using VEAI’s own audio pass and switch to MKV merge.
Your workflow should be: VEAI anytimes you would without audio pass > MKV merge (add both original video file and final VEAI encode, then select only VEAI file mp4 stream and the audio stream from original file) > Handbrake. That would eliminate the audio sync problem since the audio stream would be the one untouched from the original file. Then, if such unsyncing problems remains, it shows that VEAI is either dropping OR making new frames on rendered files, which is unlikely, but possible.
That’s an excellent idea, I can try that. The final result may really be worth my while
Is there any particular software you would recommend for wrapping mp4’s into mkv’s? The files I’m currently working with are all mp4s, and from what I can remember, from the last time I used MKV Merge,it only accepts MKV’s. Right?
Edit: nm. I just looked and it does accept mp4’s. Not sure what I was thinking… I’ll try it tonight!
I use Mkvtoolnix (it’s based on Mkv Merge), they have different gui available.
until the option of the audio was available in version 1.1.1 i was using the trick of plissandro.
by the way, small bug here, same for others ?
even if i installed the 1.1.1 (windows 10) the about page in VEAI tell “1.1.0” and so every two days, the software ask me to install the “update”, but it’s 1.1.1 that i installed and use everyday :).
This time, my workflow went like this: VEAI ONCE without audio pass, at 100% > MKV merge (added both original video file and final VEAI encode, then selected only VEAI file mp4 stream and the audio stream from original file) **. The resulting mkv had the audio sync issues. Didn’t even bother running it through Handbrake. I know it’s unlikely, but I am now thinking that VEAI does indeed add or remove frames. I’m thinking adds. If anyone tries it and gets the same result, please let me know!
For the time being I will stick to one encode, with audio. The quality is still far better than the original and that’s good enough for me. Thank you all for your help!
But where ?
my 1.1.0 (who is a 1.1.1 in fact lol but in the info it’s wrriten “1.1.0” , send me notification to download a 1.1.1… (and not 1.2.0 available yet on the site). they are certainly a bit late. Love so much this software !
Playing with the new 1.2.0 release, it looks like there was a regression. Previously, it was possible to enter a custom scale factor that was smaller that 100%, where it would resize the video down. This was valuable in cases where the video clip itself was encoded at the wrong size, so using a size like 50% and then coming back in to resize that clip 200% or greater would often yield better results for particularly bad/old clips, as otherwise, the blur itself would get scaled.
Really though, this is just a workaround for having a proper pre-scaler built in, where we could have VE prescale by 50% and upscale 200% in one step, instead of two. In lieu of that, I’d love to see this old functionality come back.
(Note that it was a little tricky to use in past versions — you’d need to enter “50” as your percentage and then hit Tab for any change to take hold. Just in case anyone is looking to try this themselves!)
1.2.0 is completely broken for me. No matter which settings I try it says that I should either update my GPU driver, restart my computer or reduce the AI resources. Nothing actually makes any difference. The application was working fine before this update.
The 1.2.0 is working ok here for me, but i read on another topic that the 1.2.0 will be available in “one week” and they are already working on a fix… so it seems that the 1.2.0 link we get is maybe not available yet ? on the download page it’s still written 1.1.1.
Can anyone comment on the speed difference between a 1660 ti with this software versus a 2060 SUPER? I’m thinking of building a new machine this week, not just so that I can use this software, but in part. A 2080 or 2070 is probably outside of my price range.
As a follow up to this previous post. I have confirmed that depending on the source, VEAI does actually drop frames. In the screenshots you can see the before and after, with the frames circled. The before picture is the original footage, and the after is the processed VEAI clip. You can see the FPS stays the same but the actual number of frames, as well as the SAR does change. I checked all the files I’ve processed and all the ones from the same source drop about 20-23 frames from a 30 minute clip.
I can’t confirm exactly on how much performance uplift you would get, but I believe the 2060 SUPER would be around 30% faster compared to 1660 ti (based on 32FP TFLOPS). Probably something near the performance I get with my RTX 2070, which is around 1FPS when using HQ (now ‘Gaia-HQ’), upscaling 720p to 1440p. But I would stick wit 1.1 until they release a newer version, as 1.2 gave me horrendous results (timewise, video quality seems the same) compared to 1.1
I have a nvidia GTX 1080 and I’m getting 2.8 seconds per frame when doing a 2x, 1080 30p. Is anyone getting significantly faster speed?
My video card heats up quite a bit. I have to beef up my PC fans before I try this again.
!
