Topaz Video AI & Starlight Discussion thread

UberTiger

UberTiger

UberTiger

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I thought I'd make a dedicated thread so as not to keep polluting some of the others, such as the 5xxx series graphics thread.

Topaz Video AI is video enhancement software from Topaz Labs. There's some existing built in tools for enhancing video, but recently they released the ability to use Starlight, a diffusion model in the cloud, or Starlight mini, a local version you can download and run if you have a very powerful graphics card.


It's currently really only great for smaller clips, but hopefully as time goes on, with optimisation longer clips will be more achievable.

Currently experimenting with some video from about 40 years ago that was recorded on a reel to reel. I had it digitised to DVD maybe 15 years ago, and now have it ripped.

This is a sample from the top of the head of someone in the video, the upscaling of the whispy part of the hair seems incredible to me, and this is only the basic 2x upscaling.

lfbV10b.png


STaGyNA.png
 
Yeah, you can download and register for free and play with it as much as you like, it just puts a big Topaz logo in the middle. Fine for evaluating if it's worth paying for a licence to run it again without the logo though.
 
Been playing around with Astra today enhancing veo3 made content as well as old football content ripped from youtube with some hit and miss results.

Sports seems to be a struggle for all forms of ai to reproduce and upscale, due to amount of information overload per frame I guess and fast motion required on poor quality footage.

But I've also got some decent results from it, once again shame it's likely going to be cloud based from them, but they did give me 500 credits on top of the free 100 to play with so it is a real world $40 value beta test which is decent.

I guess we need to find a service that lets us run topaz (when it can be ran locally) powered by top tier gpus for a few £ an hour... will work out nicely when used just for rendering workloads.
 
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I tried it but the results are pretty underwhelming to be honest.
The claims they are making are that its some kind of game changing tech when in reality its in incremental improvement in some scenario's.

The short 46 second clip I edited took an age to spit out a result and in one scene totally mullered some text and numbers in the background into unreadable spaghetti so its a nope from me.
 
I’ve been using the AI up scaling in Da Vinci Resolve for a while. It’s pretty good, but not some kind of revolution.

Yes it does a good job of making footage look a bit higher resolution, if you’re prepared to rag your GPU for hours. But honestly when you’re viewing footage at full speed it’s not really worth the rendering time vs some cheaper sharpening techniques
 
I have a lot of family footage, originally shot on VHS, later transferred to DVD. I've been upscaling them using Topaz. It's good, but quite quickly starts to sort of recreate faces in what it thinks is right. If you know the faces, you know they're not quite right.
 
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