u/wakigatameth

I just gotta say. I had our family tapes ripped in 2010 to DVD PAL format (they're from Eastern Europe), and enhanced pieces of them thru every generation of Topaz technology.

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There was a leap from typical Topaz Artemis/Proteus with Rhea, but it still did monster faces.

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There was a leap from Rhea to SL Mini, which eliminated monster faces, but faces at medium distance looked like they've been thru an Instagram beauty filter.

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SL Precise is a vast improvement on SL Mini, I can see the difference. My grandma sitting some distance from the camera, no longer looks 20 years old, she looks age-appropriate while accurately reconstructing her facial features.

This is literally the most amount of detail that's ever been squeezed out of these VHS tapes, and I think we've now ran into a wall because there's really no way to squeeze any more information!

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In short, Starlight Precise is absolute PEAK of VHS restoration technology, assuming you didn't do something stupid like restore them into low resolution like VideoCD (352x240).

This bug renders Topaz 1.5 (UPDATE: and 1.6, and 1.4!) basically useless. One would think something this big wouldn't get past QA?

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And yes, "prefer NO sysmem fallback" setting is active in Nvidia control panel.

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And yes, I heard the workaround is to extract the partial clip beforehand, which is a PITA to do without reencoding or being imprecise. That's not really a solution.

My mother, my sister: "oh let us sign you up for our memberships, you can save so much money in CostCo, didn't you say you had budget problems, we don't understand why you won't go to CostCo, it has things you like!!!"

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This keeps coming up regularly and it affects me more because these are my blood family - they should give me the benefit of the doubt, but NO - they can't process it, they think I am irrational, I should just get over it, so this will keep coming up.

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WHY DON'T I LIKE COSTCO?

• it's not a store, it's a small town; what street is the meat at?
• if I adopt it, I'll have to visit this small town regularly
• the town is a giant brightly lit liminal space with overwhelming crowds of people scurrying around on collision paths with their carts and unruly children, it's an ant hive
• with the noise... the noise
• I am inside the hydraulic press powered by the existential reminders that people are animals who need to constantly consume to survive, that they're locked in these consume cycles where they only utilize the automatic, tiny part of their brains aimed at consuming and navigating carts, and I run into them in this mode, they're just subsets of themselves, their consumer masks are all around me
• I am among people but they're all asleep, blank faces, searching, navigating carts, consuming... it's a zombie town and I feel more alone than when I am by myself

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I did make a lot of progress on having shields and boundaries and navigating crowds. I go to crowds when it matters.

But to spend time in this giant soulless crowd space, where there's no real hiding geometry, no tiny corridors like in Walgreens where I can breathe... ON REGULAR BASIS...

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Yes, it would save me money. But it would cost me.

I was unable to upload a tiny 100mb game build to Steam, constantly getting "incomplete file", until I blocked incoming and outgoing UDP traffic on ports 443 and 80 in my router.

Voila. No more problems uploading my game builds.