Gigapixel AI and Visual Kei Music Videos

[colorful人生 2777]

So, Topaz Labs has had an artificial-intelligence (AI) image software suite for a while now, including Gigapixel AI which is meant for upscaling photos. Well, videos are comprised of still frames, so it was only natural that users would try and apply this AI upscaling to video. In the past, this process had to be done manually using FFMPEG to extract all the frame images. You then had to upscale in batch with a limit of ~2000 images per session which would take forever. After all that, you had to put the whole thing back together.

 

Within the past month Topaz Labs has now automated this process with Topaz Gigapixel AI for Video and it's a free beta at the moment. While the hardware requirements are 32 GB RAM + an Nvidia Graphics Card with at least 6 GB VRAM, for the time being, you can have them render a 60 second comparison test for free or pay for a full video up to 10 GB (the longer the length, the pricier it is.)

 

 

You can see here I shelled out $7 for ユナイト - 約束 [MV] since I wanted to see how the upscale treated the variety of camera shots, effects, and CG (also it's ultra-fucking slow on my PC.) I also used SVP to transcode the upscaled product (by 200%) w/ 60fps frame interpolation for the last video. I assume Dailymotion hasn't fully processed these b/c they're stuck at 1440p, so for that and compression-sake I included the original files in MEGA.

 

I find this particularly interesting for Visual Kei music videos b/c unless they're on YT, we're kind of stuck with DVD rips @ 480p. While you can't magically conjure up quality from thin-air, I find this process really promising for older media.

 

ユナイト - 約束 [Original YouTube Rip at 720p] | https://mega.nz/#!ySwymCbK!2qXUGErT4oeTfsNlU4tSIzJifAE3iuS-9yTLPtx_vKg

Spoiler

 

 

ユナイト - 約束 [FFmpeg Upscale to 4K using LANCZOS filtering] | https://mega.nz/#!KTpiDaxD!bVww7YeTW94ue8_dg5ISm6BkP7m0qwsQh5eqyny2w2k

Spoiler

 

 

ユナイト - 約束 [Gigapixel AI Upscale to 4K] | https://mega.nz/#!OahCWCwD!DOxcV4hEC-HESVFdd2Rgn_Ftw7nYCCkfsXs6osVQog8

Spoiler

 

 

ユナイト - 約束 [Gigapixel AI Upscale to 4K + SVP 60fps Frame Interpolation] | https://mega.nz/#!6LghhDQL!Z6e52yGO5hML1ZryUKqc1uXu6LIFV3HDzP2qY5H4nWc

Spoiler

 

 

 

Programs:

https://videoai.topazlabs.com/beta

https://www.svp-team.com/wiki/Main_Page

 

Edited November 4, 2019 by colorful人生

[Zeus 7997]

so the question is how long will it take for zeus to re-engineer this for free? answer is idk

[Zeus 7997]

2 hours ago, Zeus said:

so the question is how long will it take for zeus to re-engineer this for free? answer is idk

but in all seriousness this isn't that difficult to reconstruct if you have a few hours and are skilled with some code. If anything, you'll do a better job manually specifying said parameters because you can tune whatever you write yourself to have the desired outputs needed.

 

But basically if the whole pipeline is just breaking down a video into it's image components, upscaling the image components, and then putting them back together while preserving the audio track then that really isn't too difficult to reconstruct. I tend to disregard "AI" as buzzwords in anything that tries to describe a complex task as vaguely as possible, but I have a good inkling about what their AI is trying to do...and I don't trust it. AI is code for throwing a bunch of shit at a neural network until it works and you don't know why. @colorful人生 send me a really low-res video (and my mix pls) and I'll see what I can do with the five minutes of spare time I have a day.