Video Upscaling questions?

[bakerboy]

Poking about a bit more into this .....

Anyway, we bought the "whole shebang"Topaz .... and we "uprezed"a 90 min movie from SD to HD , then watching both, side by side on large monitors, we could only see very small and EXTREMELY subjective differences.

The bigger problem was ( and would be for us) is that 1.2 GIG video ended up being 7.2 Gigs,thus completely unacceptable for our VOD streams.

Unfortunately we do not have any real experts within our organization so ... either:

1) We did something wrong or
2) This whole AI is a bit of a false narrative.

any expert is welcomed to comment .

[SilentHunter]

Topaz works very good with Movie and also with pictures.

I enhanced an old VHS Vacation Video to FHD. With an remarkable quality.

Also my first Digital Pictures (640 x 480) gave breathtaking results.

Maybe I find an example wich I can upload here.

[SilentHunter]

Sample Picture from 640 x 480 to 4K

[SilentHunter]

Open the picture to see the difference.

[yyy02]

Open the picture to see the difference.

WOW! If I'm not pressing too hard, what are your hardware specs?


Responding to earlier posts:

Again, thanks for the information.

bakerboy, special thanks for the "experience" info. I applaud your setting up a A/B test. Just off the top of my inexperienced head, I suspect "diminishing returns" the better your source material is. And I was wondering what the finished file size would be, so thank you for providing that as well.

Out of curiosity
1) what resolution was your original file? Was it 1920x1080? 1280x720?
2) What was the target resolution?
3) How long did it take for your hardware to process the file?
4) Also, what are your hardware specs?

[SilentHunter]

Pictures are fast enough on my "old gaming PC":
- i5-6600
- 16 GB RAM
- SSD
- Nvidia Geforce 1070 8 GB (the most important component for that)

Upscaling from pictures like above from 640x480 to 4K takes about 10 - 15 Seconds. But you have first to invest time to find the best settings. If other settings are necessary it can take up to 40 Seconds. (So if you have a large folder and batch process all pictues it may take a while).

A Geforce 3060 16 GB is about 3 - 4 times faster.

With Movies I have made only some "experiments" - it will take much longer than pictures. If it helps I have to search the times from my "experiments" next week. What I can say: this is also much faster with a bigger Graphics Card.

[yyy02]

...
With Movies I have made only some "experiments" - it will take much longer than pictures. If it helps I have to search the times from my "experiments" next week. What I can say: this is also much faster with a bigger Graphics Card.

That would be helpful, when you have the time. Just so I have an idea of what it takes.
Many thanks sir! (with salute emoji)

[BobDarkroom]

Sample Picture from 640 x 480 to 4K

I think you overlooked something
You combined the original small pic and the upscaled pic into a singel pic with very low resolution so all the upscaling effects are gone since both pics are reduced to the same small size.

Click on the pic below to see the power of Topaz Photo AI.
It has the original 480x640 pics on the left and the 4x upscaled version on the right.
You need to click on it to view it in full screen mode.

Now this took around 10 secs on my i7 computer with an Nvidia GTX 760 graphics card (8 years old ...)

Topaz video enhancing uses the same technology to upscale and enhance video frames.

Imagine upscaling and enhancing a 1 hour video (25fps) with 480x640 resolution to 4 times that size :

60 minutes * 60 seconds * 25 frames/second = 90.000 frames
Conversion time at 10 sec/frame : 900.000 seconds or 250 hours...
Unrealistic of course but even at 1 sec/frame it would still take 25 hours.
To do it in a reasonable time, your really need a high end graphics card capable of doing each frame in a fraction of a second.

And... don't forget the file size will be very, very big compared to the source file size
For the pic below, the upscaled file was more than 10 times bigger than the original :
Original pic file size : 78kB
4x upscaled pic file size : 949kB !!!

Now this is the result when starting with an image that is already reasonably sharp and with little or no noise.
With low quality images (and videos) the result might be very disappointing.
Don't expect miracles from AI in its current state

[thx1139a]

If you want a taste of what can be done with a still image, you can try it online free at https://dezgo.com/upscale.

[bakerboy]

Sample Picture from 640 x 480 to 4K

Hence my point above. I do NOT see any difference even after enlarging the picture. Maybe some subjective difference but definitely not noticeable to me ( just like the movie we "Topaz'd" )

I guess I need new glasses