![]() ![]() For the stuff I've tried here, I simply don't think there is enough training material, and (probably as important) enough of a market for it. Yeah, I think that in computer games this will be the norm pretty 's significantly easier to generate data sets of high-res and low-res footage to train models on.I can seven see if where a game ships with the relevant upscaling AI model embedded in the code (rather than as part of the "game-ready" driver, which seems to be the current model). There is another Topaz product specifically for pictures, and it could be that using that on indidivudal frames may return better results.though whether I currently have the hardware to do that sort of thing is less lightly. That said, this is a rapidly evolving area, and I can well believe that in a year or two there will be models out there that can work with this ultra-low quality footage much better. A close-up of a single individual shows that there simply was not enough information for the AI to infer any detail, and so faces/hair etc looks smoothed and sand-blasted. It immediately looks over-sharpened, and (to me) quite reminiscent of A Scanner Darkly, with a cell-shaded effect, or very bad green-screening. Given the starting quality, I'm pretty impressed. This is a side-by-side with the original 360p footage on the left, and the 720p on the right.both scaled in the video player to 720. ![]() So how did it go? I've picked similar clips from both programs (and one that is probably recognisable to anyone who watched TV in the early 90's)įor the 360p footage from Newman and Baddiel In Pieces, actually pretty good. For The Mary Whitehouse Experience, thats 310%. So, for In Pieces, that's a 200% upscale. The entire process took about 3 days of constant processing, with just shy of 1,000,000 frames re-scaled. I eventually settled on the Artemis model with LQ training, and with a target resolution of 720p.preserving the 4:3 ratio (so black bars), as zoom-to-fit was chopping off heads and lower-thirds text. I did some test runs of 10-frame clips (a feature provided in the software), and quickly came to the conclusion that the Gaia model could not handle the extremely low quality of the footage.exceptionally bad artifacts around spectacles and mouthes (and in a stand-up show where at least half the performers are in glasses, that was an issue). The marketing speil on their website clearly indicates that the primary use case is to upscale 1080p footage to 4k and beyond, so I was almost certainly working outside the training data. Each of these have then been trained on differing qualities of video (referred to as LQ, MQ and HQ, though exact resolutions etc were not provided). The Topaz AI Enhance product has a 30 day trial, and currently offers 2 Upscaling AI models.Gaia and Artemis. My knowledge of AI processes is limited, based on a Udacity Intro to Tensorflow.which taught me enough to understand that half the challenge of building a Machine-Learning AI is structuring it, the other half is providing suitable training data (and with my work hat on, I think most people have no idea that the training data is so important). I had a suitable machine sitting round (a rather middle-ground i3 processor with a GTX1660, with the required CUDA cores). There have been some examples of it being used to restore old footage, and in combination with DAIN (something co-developed with Google) to produce 4K60 footage of very old video.however looking at the source material those projects used, it was cleaner than the 240p VHS rips that I had.nevertheless, I thought I'd give it a go. I used one of the myriad Youtube downloaders to pull out video files of them.I could just chuck them on the server as-is, however I wondered with the recent advances in AI Upscaling, was there any way of improving the footage?Ī small amount of research leg me to Topaz AI Labs, and specifically their AI Enhance video product. The In Pieces footage was 360p and slightly better. ![]() The Mary Whitehouse Experience footage was 240p, and fairly badly compressed. ![]() Neither have been repeated, released on DVD etc, and in all probability never will be. One of the rareties that I found on Youtube was someone had uploaded some really low quality VHS rips of The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces. A part of my mini-project to fill up my in-house media server, I've been hunting down some older stuff I liked. ![]()
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