Upscaling your porn collection

[tvstrip]

https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai

I've heard about this software before, and see that it's on sale. I'm salivating at the idea of upscaling by old 640/720 videos into HD. The software isn't cheap, but they have been around for a while, so I know it's legit. The question is, will it work on these older videos?

Has anyone here tried this?

 

[Pornfan99]

Uh .. 720 was / is considered high def. I think anything over 480 is, actually.

 

[tvstrip]

Uh .. 720 was / is considered high def. I think anything over 480 is, actually.

Those too. I have some 480p vids that could use some upscaling love.
In fact, the older vids are my focus.

Today's 4K videos at 2-4GB a pop are great, but I'm happy with even the 800MB HD vids.
But there are just some absolute classics, and being able to upscale those vids that you used back in your teen days - that's the dream, isn't it?

 

[FreeOnes_Adam]

I've seen some things upscaled that look rather good, but I'm not convinced it can do miracles. If you get it, let us know how it goes.

 

[tvstrip]

I've seen some things upscaled that look rather good, but I'm not convinced it can do miracles. If you get it, let us know how it goes.

For sure. Much of the kink.com upscaled stuff is a good example. But I noticed that they don't go too far back, and those are ones that I'd really like to see refreshed. Like pre-enhancement Isis Love-era. For content providers, it's probably worth the investment. For a personal collection - it's questionable.

Hopefully some of the content creators on FreeOnes can chime in. I'd love to hear what type of "miracles" it can pull on the lower-res material.

Also, one complaint I'm seeing on the process takes a toll on your PC. Which makes sense, as it's literally analyzing every pixel in every frame, one at a time. I'm hearing that even a clip <minute, it can take hours. And a full 4K upscale can take over a day, with your CPU & fan running full steam. I'm not planning on the full 4K stuff, as I don't think my PC can handle that kind of processing (not to mention being unable to use the computer for the day), but I'm concerned how onerous it will be for even the 480-720p stuff.

 

[Pornfan99]

"I'm not planning on the full 4K stuff, as I don't think my PC can handle that kind of processing (not to mention being unable to use the computer for the day), but I'm concerned how onerous it will be for even the 480-720p stuff." So .. what new / 2ndary PC are you looking to buy??

 

[tvstrip]

"I'm not planning on the full 4K stuff, as I don't think my PC can handle that kind of processing (not to mention being unable to use the computer for the day), but I'm concerned how onerous it will be for even the 480-720p stuff." So .. what new / 2ndary PC are you looking to buy??

If I win the lottery, the first thing I will buy is this AI program and a multimedia processing beast computer which will be dedicated to upscaling my porn collection into full 8K

 

[Jay87]

Did you do the free trial at all? I tried it on a short clip and there were lots of artifacts, though maybe just need to learn to use it better.

 

[tvstrip]

No, I wanted to hear the experiences of others first. Especially to see if my system can even handle it.
Speaking of, did you run it on a top-of-the-line system, or just one that the average user would have?
I don't have a media-creation beast, so I'm wondering if my system can even handle a basic clip.

 

[Tyrion Lannister]

The photo upscale software is definitely worth the price (gigapixel AI) . If you have a lot of photos that are sub HD it will turn a bunch of pics into 4k within minutes with the click of a button. It will turn HD pics into 8K. Very user friendly. After purchase they allow you to have free upgrades for like a couple of years but then after that if you want the latest version you have to pay again. Ive done the trial version of the video upscaler but I havent purchased it yet but I do plan on getting it. The results on the video upscaler are pretty good though maybe not as jaw dropping as the photo upscaler results. Hopefully on the video upscaler they give you free upgrades for a longer period of time since it is more expensive than the photo upscaler. I recommend getting the trial version and see if you like it. Id recommend both GIGAPIXEL AI and VIDEO ENHANCE AI. Dont bother with SHARPEN AI or DENOISE AI. I have a lot of older sub HD photos from the mid 2000s that look pixelized on my 50 inch tv and upscaling them to 4k and 6k has been great.

 

[Tyrion Lannister]

I have a ton of 1 minute or 2 minute fitness videos, so those were definitely doable on the video upscaler. Not sure how it would work with 30 minute scenes. Maybe you could get a video editor from tmpge, cut the video into smaller fragments, and then run each fragment into the VIDEO ENHANCE AI and then recombine the enhanced fragments with the tmpge editor. The quality would be slightly less than if you just ran the whole thing at once into VIDEO ENHANCE, but hopefully still much better than the original video.

 

[tvstrip]

The quality would be slightly less than if you just ran the whole thing at once into VIDEO ENHANCE, but hopefully still much better than the original video.

That's what I'm unsure about. There's probably going to be some improvement, but whether it would be "much better" than the original is what seems shaky...

True, splitting the video might help so that it's not going to set the computer on fire. There are good lossless cutter/joiners out there, so that would be an option.

 

[Jay87]

No, I wanted to hear the experiences of others first. Especially to see if my system can even handle it.
Speaking of, did you run it on a top-of-the-line system, or just one that the average user would have?
I don't have a media-creation beast, so I'm wondering if my system can even handle a basic clip.

Don't even have a graphics card lol, just graphics chip on old intel CPU

 

[Torre82]

Well, finally something I'm reasonably comfortable with.

Firstly, yes. It can and will work very nicely. But you have to understand the source, the output and what to use.
If you have a decent system, I'd recommend finding your limits. Find a YouTube video you like. A movie trailer works. (Plenty of resolution options and such)

If you have no idea what you're doing, this would be the trial and error part. Download the 4k and 8k (if they have it). Does your system run those without stutter? Good.


Now try re-encoding to hevc .265 high motion 4k\8k and try to play it again. Find what your limits are, find out what you want.


If you get the frameskips and stutters, You Might want to rethink upgrading your collection. Upscaling will 100% your system for hours if you have a "meh" setup on just one full movie. (Rule of thumb would be double the time it runs. One hour if movie is 2 hours encoding, 3 times the disk space it takes up, etc)

What you're looking for is NOT the resolution.. That's just a tiny part of it. You can find a 720p60 video at 20 mbps that'll blow you away compared to a 4k 23 fps "web streaming quality" 15 mbps trash vid.

(A 5 liter engine puts out horses, but if you're pushing 10 tons of metal as opposed to 5... Get my drift?)

You can absolutely get a reasonable output from the old ntsc tapes and DVDs you have.
------

Pay attention to your bitrates.
Are we converting from an interlaced or progressive source? Do you want ntsc standard 23.976, 48 or 60? What's your bitrate ceiling? How many passes are we using? What's motion compensation set to? Cbr or vbr? Are you putting it back onto a dvd, a bluray, pc, mobile, set-top media center? What is supported?

If you don't know what to do, then you'll get terrible output that doesn't fit your goal.

\takes a kid off the street and commands him to paint a building

You wouldn't go into that situation blindly, right? Apply the same logic to encoding and learn every step.

 

[Torre82]

I once had a psp.
As i recall, it topped out at 480 x 272?
And a hard limit of 768 kbps on the stream.
Lets run with 20 fps just cuz. It's in-between the average film and a choppy mess from turn of the century 2000s porn videos st 15 fps

480 x 272 = 130,560 pixels
Using a standard rgb8 (8 bits of color per channel - red green blue)
130,560 x 3 = 391,680
Brings us an input of 391.68 kbps and let's say the audio takes up a tiny 24 kbps more, so 415.68 kbps now.

Let's say overhead like subtitles or chapter info is in play, so round to 420 kbps.

That isn't bad. One doesn't wanna max out the system just to watch a movie, right?

Now 420,000 x 20 frames every second = 8,400,000 so 8.4 mbps output after all is said and done.

Then you get to decide how to approach that. If you have a monster system there's no reason not to use the latest codec and processor intensive decoding.

Motion compensation is achieved by brute forcing data, power, or both. Think of it like a CRC (cyclical redundancy check) - pushing data results in the same picture (generally) at the expense of file size. Or.. "8x8=64" is read from the sd card, hard drive or the network. Millions upon millions of times as obnoxiously large data.

Pushing the newer stuff like hevc just says "64" but your computer now has to write out the whole question just from the answer. Millions upon millions of times as maths. MATHS!

 

[Little Red Wagon Repairman]

Time to upscale all that 3rd generation VHS filth into Crystal Clear 4K resolution.

 

[tvstrip]

Time to upscale all that 3rd generation VHS filth into Crystal Clear 4K resolution.

You saw what they could do by bumping the original Star wars trilogy to freaking 4K. Imagine what that tech could do with 80's & 90's porn.

 

[Jay87]

I once had a psp.
As i recall, it topped out at 480 x 272?
And a hard limit of 768 kbps on the stream.
Lets run with 20 fps just cuz. It's in-between the average film and a choppy mess from turn of the century 2000s porn videos st 15 fps

480 x 272 = 130,560 pixels
Using a standard rgb8 (8 bits of color per channel - red green blue)
130,560 x 3 = 391,680
Brings us an input of 391.68 kbps and let's say the audio takes up a tiny 24 kbps more, so 415.68 kbps now.

Let's say overhead like subtitles or chapter info is in play, so round to 420 kbps.

That isn't bad. One doesn't wanna max out the system just to watch a movie, right?

Now 420,000 x 20 frames every second = 8,400,000 so 8.4 mbps output after all is said and done.

Then you get to decide how to approach that. If you have a monster system there's no reason not to use the latest codec and processor intensive decoding.

Motion compensation is achieved by brute forcing data, power, or both. Think of it like a CRC (cyclical redundancy check) - pushing data results in the same picture (generally) at the expense of file size. Or.. "8x8=64" is read from the sd card, hard drive or the network. Millions upon millions of times as obnoxiously large data.

Pushing the newer stuff like hevc just says "64" but your computer now has to write out the whole question just from the answer. Millions upon millions of times as maths. MATHS!

How come you did x3 instead of x8 if each pixel is 8 bits? Not sure what a channel is in terms of data, sorry.
How does each factor mentioned above to arrive at the birate affect how the topaz program is used? Aren't there other settings? Though it's been a fair while since tried it that one time.

 

[Torre82]

How come you did x3 instead of x8 if each pixel is 8 bits? Not sure what a channel is in terms of data, sorry.
How does each factor mentioned above to arrive at the birate affect how the topaz program is used? Aren't there other settings? Though it's been a fair while since tried it that one time.

Knowing what your platforms can pull and where you want to go with the video output is the difference between "this looks the same but has artifacts. This tech isn't ready, yet"
and "this is amazing"

If you use an upscale and don't click any parameters or tell it what to do, you're gonna end up with an average result.

Topaz itself totes itself as a.i. enhancement, which isn't altogether untrue. But.
From the website:
Topaz Video AI focuses solely on completing a few video enhancement tasks really well: deinterlacing, upscaling, and motion interpolation. We've taken five years to craft AI models robust enough for natural results on real-world footage.

That sounds fine, but the reality is :

a 300$ tv you can get at walmart has been doing those 3 things well since 2016.
The lightning-fast IQ Active™ processor combines superior picture processing with an intelligent 4K upscaling engine to make all your entertainment look incredibly crisp.
https://www.vizio.com/en/tv/v-series/V705-H13

Topaz runs off the local machine, has a 300$ price tag, and does something that's already done well.
It's cheaper to go with a cloud based service and just buy a month, get it all done at once with more than just a few features and use their machines to do it in minute instead of hours. I believe avc labs still has a 30ish per month plan.

Everyone mentioned topaz so i went "but all that's on your local computer. You guys tell it what to do. It isn't pain free. Hrm" but if you're looking for something people - oriented (faces, body motion) then avc is kind of a one and done, let their machines solve it kinda thing.
https://www.avclabs.com/purchase-video-enhancer-ai.html
Ah, its 40$ with a 5 day money back guarantee.

Doesnt hurt to try, right?

 

[Tyrion Lannister]

Gigapixel AI from Topaz got even better and now Im getting even more detail than before in my older photos from the 2000s and early 2010s. It has gotten so much better that I have decided to re-upscale photos that I had already done on the previous version of Gigapixel AI. Its very user friendly but let me know if you guys want some tips on how to use it because the only trick is knowing when to use the auto function and when not to use it.