Video Roadmap Update (March 2023)

Topaz Video AI Roadmap
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You folks are seriously kicking butt with the updates and enhancements. And I’m no fanboy. I come to Topaz like others here with a critical eye. I use your software for professional purposes as an editor/film maker and I won’t use anything that’s not ready to please my clients. Thank you for all your hard and intelligent work. Keep up the good fight!

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While I’m very happy with all the progress lately, I would like to see scene change detection implemented before we call the interpolation models done and dusted. Generating interpolated frames between scene changes is leading to obvious visual quality degradation and really needs to be addressed before moving on.

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Hopefully they are working on it (it would be nice to know either way) because duplicate frames removal must involve making frame to frame comparisons, with action when a certain level of frame difference is detected. So detecting scene changes (without removing a frame) should hopefully be a fairly simple process as the level of frame difference would be much greater,

Then, work the detected scene change into the interpolation process. Or am I missing something obvious?

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I don’t think it should be difficult to implement, and would also like official confirmation it’s being worked on or at least considered. As it stands the interpolation models are generating blurred mess frames in between scene changes.

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Thank you for your efforts!
I hope the variable frame rate videos with repetitive frames (2 or more consecutives), which have choppy playback, are also going to be in your scope later on. :slight_smile:
One example would be, when there’s a recording of a game, mostly 60fps, but at some points it gets choppy, because of a CPU/GPU hiccup, some sudden slowdown or disk I/O congestion. Then, the recording would usually show repetitive frozen frames with irregular fps.

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Depending on the implementation, the difficulty will also be different. If you just average the difference in the color values ​​of two frames, it is indeed very simple, but the corresponding effect is also very shallow. The ideal implementation should also rely on a small model or directly embed it into the frame interpolation model. When it is “realized that the frame interpolation effect is considered unsatisfactory”, the result is discarded and the original frame is retained, so as to fully express the advantages of the model.

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For those who want to add scene detection, you can vote here.
Chronos - Scene change detection - Topaz Video AI / Ideas - Topaz Community (topazlabs.com)

2 Likes
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As much as I hate adobe premiere having this plugin would be awesome. I’m a sucker for puncishment. I hope adobe gets good one of these days.

1 Like
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Don’t be a hater, PP is not trash, I have been using it for over 20 years, yes, it’s not perfect but it’s great. I also waiting for the Premiere Plugin. But also it could be the Davinci Resolve plugin.

1 Like
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I’m not sure if this new Apollo model is Channel Attention but it looks like a real one! Leaving behind Optical Flow for video interpolation is the best choice for Topaz Video AI. Good work. :wink:

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You guys have made a lot of impressive progress with the models, but I’d like to suggest that maybe the fundamentals need some attention now. By fundamentals, I mean things like stability and source inputs. I’m still experiencing weird hangs and crashes with the 3.x series that haven’t been addressed yet, and the lack of frame server input is an absolute killer for me. I’m aware of the licensing issues with ffmpeg, but there are other ways to feed an avs script to ffmpeg. I know it can be piped in with avs2yuv because I do it on my Linux boxes with an ffmpeg that isn’t compiled with avs support. As I said, the model work is great, but it feels like you’re putting the icing on the cake before it’s fully baked.

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Please add the ability to import avisynth (.AVS) files
Thanks

29

Any chance we can put a goal on the roadmap to include the ability to run all the functions on a video with an alpha channel and get a final result that maintains that alpha channel?

1 Like
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@eric Eric the GUI for JPEG TIFF PNG The smallest number of files you can get is 360 this makes a large load for using in the Topaz Photo products.Trim needs to adjusted so can handle 10 frames or less with in the video.

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+1 for the pause/resume please. quality improvement and bug fixes are great, but not being able to play a video game for 2 days while Topaz is working is not ideal. Thanks.

3 Likes
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Depending on your hardware, you may be able to pause TVAI, play a game, then un-pause it.

On Windows, this can be done by:

  1. Opening Resource Monitor.
  2. Scrolling down until you find ffmpeg.exe (TVAI uses FFmpeg for it’s processing, hence why it’s named that).
  3. Right click on ffmpeg.exe and select Suspend Process. Now the processing will be paused.
  4. If you want to start processing again (E.G. You’ve stopped playing a game), you can right click on ffmpeg.exe in Resource Monitor and select Resume Process.

macOS probably has similar functionaliy.

Now, I note that it kind of depends on your hardware. What this does is it pauses TVAI/ffmpeg processing, allowing your CPU and GPU to be used for other things like gaming. But it does keep a bunch of information around in RAM and VRAM, which could lead to performance issues in other applications if you don’t have enough RAM or VRAM and the operating system doesn’t handle memory management in this specific case in a graceful way.

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Thank you Alaska, I’ll give it a try.

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@eric

Why the April 2023 roadmap update is still missing?
Thanks

5 Likes
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It’s up now: Video Roadmap Update (April 2023)

We aim to update the Photo AI Roadmap after the first Thursday release of the month, and then the Video AI roadmap update two Tuesdays later.

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