Hello, I have a doubt, why videos that have already been compressed don’t have a good result in VEAI? like youtube videos, i usually only get a good result when the video is taken from a dvd or the original video, interlaced etc… is there any way around this?
Thanks
I’ve been doing a bunch of mp4 upscales to 1080p and very happy with the results. I’ve also done some mkv files and a couple of YouTube downloads. The YouTubes are not the best, but not bad. Are you tweaking the model settings? Which model have you tried? I am using Proteus Fine for most projects.
I have found that on it’s own no algorithm does really shine when it comes to heavily degraded video.
The Artemis low quality one is supposed to be suited for this but it turns out to over sharpen high contrast areas and leaves low contrast areas too smooth. It’s also not as resilient to artifacts as you might think and often turns shadows into additional edges giving quite an unnatural dream like look.
While I was able to get somewhat better results with the proteus algorithm where you can tune it so edges look alright it suffers from a similar problem when it comes to texture.
That out of the way I am able to get very decent result with a two pass process.
First restore the video using gaia-hq or gaia-cg without scaling. (100% deblock) then upscale using artemis-lq.
Gaia is quite resilient to all kinds of noise, grain and compression artifacts and it really does a good job with enhancing degraded textures.
The choice between hq and cg is a matter of preference. Gaia hq is slower but dreams up more details while cg is faster has even better resilience to artifacts but it doesn’t enhance the textures as much.
The output of gaia is then fed back into VEAI using the artemis-lq algorithm with scaling. This works great because artemis-lq will enhance edge sharpness when scaling and the lq algorithm also does a great job discarding the additional artifacts gaia introduces while preserving the texture gaia “dreamt up”
That’s almost a best of both worlds for me.
Oh ok, I’ll try these steps, thank you so much for trying to help me, I try to avoid these youtube videos etc… but there are a lot of videos that I can’t find the source…
My latest approach is kind of extreme, but seems to get the best results.
For super grainy sources, Gaia adds too much grain. Makes it more solid and part of the scene.
In that case, I use Theia with Reduce Noise turned up just enough to reduce it in most spots. Theia tends to add subtle vertical lines.
When using Gaia or Theia, I set it to upscale to 1080, then use an external program to resize it back to DVD resolution. Then I use Proteus or Artemis to scale it back to 1080.
I got the idea when someone on this forum mentioned that once a bad quality source is upscaled to 720p or greater, and it still looks bad, upscaling it more will just keep it looking bad but at a bigger resolution. By downscaling it to 480, the models actually make improvements again.
It’s not perfect, it’s just the best I’ve produced so far. Also my goal is only ever 1080. I have no idea if this would work trying to go higher.
