u/oom1999

While some may see it as a thick-headed tactic based on "Just tell us what the monster looks like already, Howard!", I honestly think a truly creative director who says "'Unspeakable horrors', you say? Is that a challenge?" would be able to make a far more engaging and even a more horrific film if given the budget to make it.

The most "Lovecraftian" experience I've ever had in a movie wasn't even in a horror/suspense film. It was in the Marvel film Doctor Strange. The shifting landscapes and perspectives created by the dueling magic-users was disorienting to me. I could see everything on-screen in perfect clarity, but even so I struggled to comprehend it. I've never felt like that before: No blurry backgrounds or shadows to hide anything, and yet visual understanding eluded me. Now transpose that mental response onto a "monster" design, and I think you might have cracked a code.

Title covers it. If you had to upscale a video, sight-unseen, and wanted to ensure as much new detail as possible was present in the output, which two non-Starlight models would you pick for the job, and which would come first?

Like the title says, I have some digitized home movies that are old and in fairly rough shape. I want to make them look a bit better, so I came up with the following pipeline. The FFmpeg steps are there because the supposed ideal input for Topaz Video is a progressive, CFR video with square pixels. The intermediate files will all be 10-bit 4:4:4 FFV1 to retain lossless video quality (except for the Hyperion 2 pass, where I'll be forced to output ProRes 422 HQ).

• FFmpeg Pass 1: deinterlace and ensure CFR
• FFmpeg Pass 2: crop black bars and remove black frames from beginning and end
• FFmpeg Pass 3: minor ewa_lanczossharp upscale to ensure square pixels
• Topaz Video Pass 1: Stabilize
• Topaz Video Pass 2: Motion Deblur
• Topaz Video Pass 3: major upscale with a Starlight model
• Topaz Video Pass 4: SDR-to-HDR via Hyperion 2
• Topaz Video Pass 5: Frame Interpolation to higher frame rate

Will this ordering of enhancements give me the best picture quality at the end, or do I need to rearrange some of them? Also, should I expand the pixel format to 10-bit 4:4:4 during the FFmpeg steps, or wait until the first pass in Topaz Video?

https://pastebin.com/PYf4JEhc

This worked a couple days ago, but now it simply says that the filters won't initialize. Yes, the path to the nnedi weights hasn't changed, nor has my syntax for its path. I run an up-to-date Windows 11, I updated my NVIDIA drivers to v610.47 yesterday, and right now I'm using the absolute latest build of master win64_gpl FFmpeg from BtbN.

EDIT: No solution yet, but I've narrowed down the culprit to libplacebo. This may or may not be related to the most recent NVIDIA driver update, but I haven't seen anyone else make this specific complaint since it was released on May 26th.

Topaz's website says stabilization should go before motion deblur, but I can't find any suggestions on whether denoise should go before, after, or in-between those two. To reiterate, this is keeping the video file at its original resolution, no upscaling or anything fancy.

To clarify, I mean like a modular checklist to the effect of

1. If your video is X, do Y
2. If your video is W, do Z
3. So on and so forth...

covering the broad priority of all the different operations you can do. For example (I'm not actually asking these questions), should you deinterlace before everything else? Should you upsample to HDR before or after frame interpolation? Should you change the output chroma subsampling at any point before upsampling to HDR? Should any enhancements be used on the original video before using a Starlight model? Stuff like that.

So I used split to create two video streams: a raw input and a denoised version. The two streams need to be identified [a][b] right before the fieldmatch command in order for it to use the denoised stream as pre-processed data, but which is which? Is [a] the raw input or the denoised version?