Really interesting guide. Have you tried 3+ version of Topaz by any chance? It has build in conversion to 60 fps so I’m curious if it works better than Flowframes.
Yes, I have.
Didn’t see a big jump in speed/quality. They changed around the output options making exporting lossless mp4 MUCH more difficult to do.
Went back to older version of Topaz - just works much better for my workflow (handing off to flowframes). And Flowframes does a better job with framedoubling.
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Do anything special for VR stuff? It’d be interesting to try re-projecting the video from fisheye/equirectangular to flat, upscaling the flat video, then projecting it back to fisheye or equirectangular. I imagine we’d get better upscaling on truly “square” pixels rather than the squashed objects coming out of the crazy 200FOV lenses used to shoot VR?
I’ve thought about that, but waaay too much work 
The only VR that I’ve really come across that I’ve wanted to upscale is very few old western videos, and JAV. Pretty much everything is 6-8k now, and the poor quality videos are poor quality due to bad shooting techniques or cameras, so no fixing those.
Considering wether or not I need a better computer; do you think this rig will do ok with 1/2 hour videos in 8 hours or less? Ryzen 5 5600g, RTX 5500 4 gb. 16GB ram (have 32 to drop in, just havent decided to save it for a new build or not). Im rather new to computer building, fyi. But this one went ok so Im just kindof window shopping. If this rig works ok I will wait longer to build the next one. Thanks for all that you do!
sorry, not familiar with Ryzen CPUs, and I think you may have a RX 5500 XT card, not a RTX 5500.
Avisynth is free, and VEAI and Flowframes have free trial version. You can try for yourself and calculate out the time.
Ah, absolutely right about the card. I keep mixing up the acronyms/letter codes. Well, I will try it out and see! Thanks again
Hey man; I downloaded Avisynth but after the install wizard is done, nothing happens and I cant find anything but the setup file which just runs the wizard again. Do you know what might be wrong or what I am missing? Thank you so much for any insight.
Check out some tutorials on how to use it. It isn’t a typical app that opens a pretty GUI and stuff. It’s script based so you gotta learn how to write some Avisynth scripts
Hey are you able to share any an example script or your most used Avisynth functions? Some boilerplate stuff you grab for could be helpful to get others running more quickly.
Traveling for work at the moment but can post an example next week.
For the meantime as for the functions I use
Smoothtweak - for color and levels adjustment
Spline16resize - for downscaling 4k video before feeding it into Topaz
Qtgmc - for de interlacing and/or noise reduction
Rmlogo - for removing static logos
Histogram - for viewing levels as baseline for adjustment
Hi! Question regarding AVISynth - going to give it a go when I get off work today, so my apologies if this question is ignorant, but are there typical values you start with for the aforementioned functions and then move up/down based on the video’s quality and what you’re trying to achieve?
Yes, I start with the default values and adjust up/down from there. All avisynth functions should have a default value that is “no processing” applied.
Gotcha, thanks! I’ll give that a shot then. Been trying to upscale a grainy video for practice, but without pre-processing it, there’s only so much an upscaler can do in this case, I guess. One last question that I didn’t know to ask, what order do you go when applying the functions?
How important would you say Tensor cores are for this process? (I notice you said a 1080ti would be acceptable, which doesnt have them as far as I know) While on the subject, would AMD cards be out of the question? Thanks!
QTGMC’s ez-denoise function works well at removing grain. Just make sure to turn the deinterlacing function off if you’re using progressive video input.
It all depends on the length of video you’re trying to process and how patient you are.
CPU matters too. AVIsynth uses CPU heavily. Topaz VEAI does as well. I recently upgraded my CPU from a 9th gen to a 14th gen (same GPU), and VEAI processing speed improved by 50%. Flowframes as well.
In other words, the faster your GPU and CPU are, the better.
Based on your info/advice, Ive started learning about Avisynth and WOW i cannot believe it is free! I had one more specific inquiry of you, if you’d be so kind: correct me if Im wrong, but would all the preprocessing steps and upscaling be somewhat moot/impossible on a compilation video since it is from various sources? Have you upscaled anything PMV/CH style and if so, what were your results?
100% correct. It is SUPER hard to come up with a pre-processing scheme to address all the clips that go into a compilation video. I generally will just upscale, HFR, and hope for the best. It won’t be as good as using optimized clips as input into the compilation. I did that with a couple of videos with HeroicHMV and they came out fantastic.
https://discuss.eroscripts.com/t/heroicshmvs-the-harem/66685
https://discuss.eroscripts.com/t/heroicshmvs-bad-bitches/45680
I cant seem to find SmoothTweak, Smoothlevels, QTGMC, AutoLevels, or Spline plugins. Any help would be appreciated!
I tried Topaz because my favorite JAV is old and I want it to be 4k.
It took a whole day to get it clean, but the file size exceeded 200GB, which made me laugh.
I despaired that Topaz alone could not reduce the file size.
It was impossible for me to understand technology better than this.
I would like to try again if technology advances make it easier to do.