This is it! Since I published that Gigapixel video everybody has been asking the same question "Why not just use Video Enhance" Well here you go, a fair comparison between 3 different upscaling methods using different Topazlabs software, I'll let you be the judge :)
Did Video enhance slightly desaturate the base image or did the other two over-saturate it ? They all look heaps better than what you start out with though. Curiously I think Deepspace Nine footage just seems ideal for testing this sort of stuff as it has just the right mix of content to really tell you if you are getting a good result - such as large areas of shadow, lots of close ups of skin and clothing - and fast moving images with the ships or weapon's fire. I think all of them do pretty good at stuff like fur and feathers on a bright image though - but I have seen some murky looking shadow detail on some results on various Genre experiments - so perhaps they give a good basis, as Like I said I think with an evenly lit starting image they all look pretty good - I think the thing you want to upscale might need to be "problematic" to give you a better idea how well it's doing. That is why I often think 1990's CGI cartoons are also a very good test for this sort of software too - things like Reboot, Or Beast Wars. Though I'd fall of my chair in shock if anything can make Mainframe's 1990's Action Man Cartoon look less messy than it does.
as a videographer and video editor, upscaling video to 4k, video enhance ai for me is the best. it has the least "processing" look and gives what i want for the size and quality. the other 2 add weird details+sharpening and color processing. i think gigapixel and sharpen are really good when it comes to a single photo, but for a video, especially when you tried an old footage of a person talking, it's video enhance ai. maybe it's all just depends on personal preferences.
This stuff is pretty groundbreaking. I never would have believed something like this could be done and I always thought whatever resolution you filmed with was all you could ever get. I gotta believe hollywood is going to jump on this. It'd be interesting to see old shows that were shot on SD tape upgraded to at least 1080.
I had a small 2 minute videos the TopazLabs said 21 hrs to upscale from 720P to 4K and the fans on my mac were running in full speed. I had no choice but to cancel the process after 4 hrs.
Video Enhance Ai: Looks faded and dull compared to the other two options but much faster. Sharpen Ai: Most Natural & the Best of both words for processing time & sharpness. Looks perfect. Gigapixel Ai: LONG waiting time almost 10x of Sharpen Ai with similar quality output. Some other SW option's I've been looking at are: Davinci Resolve 16 Premiere Pro - After Effects
Something to keep in mind is speed of Gigapixel will depend on compression speed of images, there should be a setting for that somewhere. Another thing is, you can turn off maximum ai quality, which will also speed it up. Difference between fastest and slowest Gigapixel can operate is something like 6-8x.
Please make sure gigapixel uses 2060 GPU. And also make sure in video enhance to make AI resource demand to full i.e. 500 in preference, at default it's values are 200%.Make sure everything is running on GPU, AI is GPU favourite parallel computing. Love from Kerala India❤️
Many people complain about the process time but they have to understand,that 1.the soiftware has to add pixels of a picture in video frame,row by row and it's not a quick process when you have a several minute long vid,with 60 frame per sec with who knows how many pixels in each.2,cpu power and memory or the lack of both can also add to the process time.
MDMZ, since you posted this useful tutorial Topaz Labs’ Video AI (for both platforms) does run faster, and it has a range of features that include upscaling, de-noising, sharpening, slow motion, stabilisation and interpolating.
Good tutorial. One note though. Don't use MP4 output with VEAI yet (they are working on it). It creates artifacts. For better quality use PNG or TIFF sequence output. Then add them to Media Encoder or whichever software you prefer and then use that to encode the video. You will see better results. Trust me.
It was great to find your video and see this comparison. I had heard of Video Enhance A.I. and ended up getting all three of their main products (for different uses -- I'm a photographer as well). I find the Video Enhance A.I. quality to vary greatly by the codec used to upscale. Although Artemis seems faster, and on a frame by frame analysis looks better, it adds artefacts that make some videos look like plastic, where Gaia doesn't seem to do that so much, but isn't as sharp. I have not found any low quality video (e.g. SD video) that any of the codecs can upscale to decent quality HD or 4K (no shocker there!). But the most troubling upscaling is of interlaced DVD videos--there are only a couple deinterlace codecs (I think Dione TV and Robust?) and they have limited effectiveness, but do a credible job--not excellent, but ok. I noticed 2 issues with VE A.I.: 1) The MP4s it makes for upscaled videos have extremely high bit rates (impractically high), and I usually have to compress to make them manageable (= playable over my gigabit home network without significant rebuffering). I usually reencode them to H.265 to get a video a fraction of the size of the MP4 VE produces with no loss in quality. Often the reencoded video is an order of magnitude smaller (GB -> MB). 2) Though there is no indication of it in the interface, VE A.I. downsamples 5.1 mc & stereo audio to stereo 96kbps regardless of the original audio bit rate. This forces me to separate the video/audio streams and use VE to upscale the video, then rejoin the video and audio streams. This is impractical for the 100s of DVD videos I would upscale. Thanks for doing this comparison--I had planned to do something similar to determine best approach for a long list of videos I want to upscale (mostly DVD), but this has saved me much time. Great work! One enhancement I'd suggest: for any future comparisons, it's useful to use videos with different content, like faces or fast moving vehicles or sports events or dark scenes with lots of shadows. I suspect that some codecs will perform better on some video types, with no overall 'best' codec. That would make it easier to pick a codec based on the type of video content. But that's a lot of work. Wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to take on that much. Seems like Topaz Labs ought to do it as a marketing tactic to sell their products!
Hi David, great insights seriously, I had no idea about #2, I hope Topaz Labs notices comments like yours and fixes those issues, am pretty sure they are constantly collecting feedback since they regularly release new updates, VEAI has improved a lot since its first version.
Excellent video bravo MDMZ! 1 - Gigapixel AI best quality! But for a long time 2 - Sharpen AI is very good! Time is acceptable 3 - Video Enhance AI is better than the source, but average quality, a lot of soap. It looks like the MP4 codec is not configured correctly in the program itself! We must wait for fixes in the program version update. For now, it's better to save as PNG or TIFF sequence output and then merge it into video in a good program! And the cookies are all good, all three! )))
@@MDMZ Sure! good work should be appreciated! I wrote them a letter to improve the encoding in MP4, in Video Enhance AI, to remove the soap! You can also write, so they will fix it faster! )))
This comparison was exactly what I was after. Thank you and great work! How do these compare with much faster motion in video with high motion blur? Since the clip was slo-mo anyway it was hard to tell if Gigapixel might handle motion blurred areas 'too sharply' or such.
Hey! I'm glad you find this helpful, and yep you make a good point, I can imagine Gigapixel struggling with motion blur and perhaps producing weird effects, for that kind of clips I'd stick to Video Enhance.
All 3 appear to have pros and cons. I Noticed in the video that all 3 add noticeable artifacts too. I guess to me 720P still isn't bad. I have seen higher res streaming video look worse. What I can say though is I really love what AI upscaling does to even lower res video, as well as what they are doing to old video games.
Of course at the end the videos all have artefacts because he takes his sharpened, artefact free picture sequence from Topaz and scales it up with Premiere Pro to 4k in lossy h264 with lossy standard frame interpolation. Besides that noone of the viewers of this video can really judge over artefacts in his final videos because we watch the hard compressed youtube version of it. We get use to it while watching this shit quality the whole day but when you upload e.g. normal h264 compressed full hd footage to youtube and you compare your original footage with the youtube video you really can't believe it how the low datarate corrupts colors, sharpness (contrast) and fills parts of the image with more artefacts as you can find in a egypt museum.
Thanks for the great test! My opinion is that for video it is better to use Video Enhance A.I. This program gives the most optimal result in terms of time-quality ratio.
Very important to always export as a png or tga instead of a video file! That way you can can resume from desired frame if pc crashes or anything goes wrong!
🤯🤯 Mannnn If there was a PLUS 46K SUBS button, I'd click it for you! 😀😀😀 This was extremely thorough and niche to put your pc through. Suggestion - Part 2: Use different kinds of video besides just slow mo! Event and commercial videos are much more common for us pros.😻😻
So 10 sec video takes 9hrs to encode in Gigapixel, 17mins in Video Enhance and 40mins in Sharpen AI. How much time would take to upscale my video of 49mins and 30secs?
Test all three of these methods on VHS footage. I can provide you with some VHS footage if you require some that I can shoot myself. I have a working camera that I can use for you to try to scale it up to 4K but I also want to see it in 8K zoomed in if you can.
Great video comparisons, I followed your first method which saw great results but as you said, a very long process to covert all the frames, but after I tried the second method I haven't gone back to the first. If I only watched this before purchasing software for the first method, oh well.
I think, to test the SharpenAI, you should have upscaled the footage to 4k first then applied SharpenAI. Would that give better result ? It would take longer time, of course.
@@adrianobecherucci35359 Yeah but the more you have to tweak the colors the more you degrade the image and plus it's more work. Fortunately video enhance looks great. Hope they optimize it for the new M1 chips from Apple.
I think that you made a mistake when using video enhance. You exported the video to mp4 and then re encoded it again, which will undoubtably affect the quality of the final video. For it to actually be fair you should have exported the video to .jpeg sequence and then encode as you did with the other ones. Great video BTW! I couldnt help but notice that mistake though 😅
Gigapixel がしっかりした絵になっている。いっぽうで不自然にきれいすぎて人工物のように見える。 Video Enhance は自然にアップスケールされている。 ただ Gigapixel に比べるとぼけた絵になっている。 Sharpen は用途としては比較対象にするには不利な立場になってしまっているが、健闘している。 時間があるのなら Gigapixel を選択する。 短時間に処理したいなら Video Enhance を選択する。 DeepL Gigapixel is well pictured. On the other hand, it's unnaturally clean and looks too artificial. Video Enhance is naturally upscaled. But compared to Gigapixel, the picture is blurred. Sharpen is at a disadvantage in terms of applications, but it's doing well. If you have time, Gigapixel is chosen. If you want to process in short time, select Video Enhance.
You're right that the image looks slightly blurred, I think it's cause video enhance preserves motion blur, while gigapixel sharpens the image fully hence reducing a bit of motion blur.
Gigapixel is not meant for videos. Unlike VEAI it gives you control to fine-tune the upscaling. Also, you set the sharpening and de-blur to 50 instead of using the auto-detect feature. You over-sharpened it. Otherwise, it would produce much more natural results for the video.
Thanks 1st for all your efforts in testing out the 3 different software. My opinion are the 3 are almost the same in quality so next of course is the time for the encoding which you have provided. BUT for most home user given the same quality more or less, the one we most concern about is the size of each video so... I really hope you can supply them since you already encode them for I have a bunch of old videos I wanted to convert but don't know it worth the effort due to the size of the video. Have subscribe and like for all your efforts.
So what about if we go with; Sharpen>Gigapixel>Video Enhance or Sharpen>Video Enhance I think to this way we will have better quality video. I got the idea why you choosed 720p from start. But the thing is you should have chosen 240p from start so we could understand how good the program could be!
Would you do an upscaling comparison using just YOUR editing software (Premier Pro, Final Cut, Magix Vegas, etc.) with these 3? Because ... should it look as good as either of these there that you show (which do look great, btw) there would be no need to spend yet more money on achieving similar results. And ... some of us are kinda spent out on buying more and more software. Thanks again, Chuck : +)
Hey Chuck, Great suggestion! Not sure about making any other comparison similar to this at the moment as I'm focusing on other projects. I will definitely keep it in mind tho.
Love your videos man! Question...Can you do this for an old video or dvd? I would love to restore some old family videos I have on VHS and DVD. Thanks so much.
I've been getting lots of positive feedback from people trying similar things, It seems to work pretty well, I suggest you try it out now that Video Enhance got a lot faster.
I enhanced some old video footage of family videos I had on VHS from the 90's, came out great other than the tell tale wear and tear damage of the tape degradation.
The future of film making is going to be crazy. I wonder if we will get to the point where its far more efficient to film in 720p and then jist post process your images??? Also can ai do a good job at stuff like going from interlaced to progressive?
hmm nothing defeats the natural look cameras give you, but perhaps this will become a great solution for low budget productions, especially if it turns into real-time solutions,
Thanks for the information given in this great video, I don't think I would have chosen a gigapixel because it was too heavy to process on my computer, hahaha.
Video Enhance looks like it's really good now! However, the Sharpen AI is my favorite personally. The Video Enhance is definitely faster and looks very natural, but the Sharpen AI produces a finished product almost as good as doing every individual frame with image upscaling... How is that not the best? lol. To be honest, I highly doubt it's worth anyone's effort, but I wonder what it would look like to have a video enhanced with Video Enhance, and Sharpen AI, then have the Sharpen AI video playing overtop of the Video Enhance clip, but with transparency. Would probably takes years to render everything lol.
@@MDMZWell exactly, that is why the SharpenAI would be transparent above the Video Enhance one, so you could pick a level that isn't over-sharpening. As a game developer, looking at the Video Enhance version seems equivalent to not having any AO on a mesh to me, lol.
THX, Your video was very impressive, I saved it to my bookmarks. But: I don't see a very important information: Which SW versions (GpAI, ShAI, VEAI) did you use? E.g.: The older versions of VEAI used H.263, codec to encode video, the newer (1.7.x+) are using h.264.
hey there, good point and this has been mentioned in so many comments before, so again.. this video is mainly about the method which is clear enough for everyone(I hope), although u can still see the difference here, you can always try it yourself and check, second of all my hardware doesn't support recording in 4k but I didn't want that to stop me from making the video, I could definitely upscale the tutorial but that would mess up the comparison part, I hope that clear things up, I'll let this be the last time I respond to this question. peace!
Why didn't you just use Video Enhance to break up each frame and save them as lossless pictures and then stitch them together? That's how I've been using it. The MP4 encoder from Video Enhance sucks.
@@david_allen1 No fine tuning options for the MP4 encoder in Video Enhance. So if you directly reconstruct the images of your video to an MP4 file, the quality will be lower then if you reconstruct the images of your file into images and use a separate encoding application to reconstruct the video.
I tried to use Video Enhance but I got some weird cuts to the sound and noises that weren't before in the video. So I would probably need to merge the original sound back in the video after the process is done which is a bit of a hassle. Overall it's a nice tool to upscale old footage.
Gigapixel is not good at upscaling 480p videos, though.. looks like paint blobs up close from tests that I've done. At 9:01 If you want want to upscale a 720p video video to 4k and make it look as clear as Gigapixel, you can manually sharpen it after after you upscale a video using Video Enhance AI. I took took a frame from the original video and ran it through Gigapixel and used it as a reference to sharpen the upscaled video I ran in Video Enhance AI.
Sir really nice explanation 👏 i just wanted to know that at 0.44 which template you have used and from where can i have it. I am talking about background and in which RU-vid is opened is shown that's really really good. I also want that for me if you can tell me please .. ... Please sir
@@MDMZ thanks for replying but i think you don't get it what I am saying. Leme explain again I am not asking about how is this process done. My question is out of context as look you are an creator right I am also the same. So I want to know which template you used again not about application. Look at time 0.44 sec in video there is white background and over it RU-vid▶page is open and is having shadow in it. I am talking about that. I am talking about that template. Thanks for replying 😊 again thankyou so much. Like some creators don't even reply to comments.
@Jeff Behosh oops that was meant for another comment. You cam google "youtube layout animation template" there's plenty of free snd paid ones that you can find, i can't remember the exact one i used here.
From what I understand, the better the graphics card, the faster things render and export in a program like Premiere. But would a better graphics card speed things up in a program such as Sharpen Ai? Sorry if this is an obvious question. I'm quite new to this kind of thing.
Hey, that's not necesarily true,the GPU usage depends a lot on whether the plugin/effect is optimized to run on GPU, in regards to Premiere pro and AE etc. GPU usage will vary. However, I believe topazlabs software are constantly being optimized for GPU so i guess your theory applies here.
@@MDMZ yea but topaz still takes awhile which is sad Using proteus with a resolution of 840x480 going to 1080 can take 3hrs and 20-30 Going to 1440 which i use over 4k i never use 4k it takes 8hr same settings as going to 1080 thats a long time
hello, i have a problem with this software it doesn't output my videos that i trying to upscale, the prosses ends but the video doesn't saved in the location that i pick
I used Topaz Video Enhance AI to upscale a 480p video to 720p w/ Artemis Med Quality and it only took 2 hours... granted I had it use both my GPU's 2070 + 1050ti, when it was the 1050ti it was sitting around 9 hours so a newer GPU helps quite a bit.
I used video enhance ai on a laptop i3 5th gen 8gb ram 1600mhz ddr3 no gpu and i did some maths to find the actually 100% accurate time and it was 33.33333
I`ve got lots of old footage taken with pre-1080 equipment; got to give this a try to see if it upscales AND removes those Zaggies! Edit: Yep, DV 720i with "Stairways", almost eliminated; upscaled to 4K. Now wondering if I can afford £200 in 32 days time.
Ok so this sucks a 10 second clip takes 17 minutes to enhance or 9hr for the best over all quality. You will need a dedicated computer just to enhance old video or movie because everything people will want to enhance will be way longer than 10 second . Also 720p is hd why not do a old video clip that 240p or 480p that looks pixilated and let's see how good you can make it look
I don't think it works as good with 240p and 480p footage, although I haven't tested so I can't tell for sure, rest assured this kind of software will always be improving, and will only get faster
Wow, it's amazing but i don't know What was Your Gigapixel run as ? if it's run as GPU, it's really so slow for 9 hours and because I was tested with RTX 3070, it was just completed about a hour
