Had great luck up-rezzing (spelling?) a color transfer that came in at 2k. Footage was great, just too small. Topaz rocked it out, but I did not figure out how to carry timecode across and the missing first frame issue is still there. Also, no ProRes 4444 support - so I went with ProRes422HQ.
To fix the timecode - I re-ingested without caching the original 2k clips, set to 4k on ingest, then put the new up-rezzed clips on top, re-exported in case the editor wanted the 4k plates.
Would love any comments, tips, etc. for future work.
Topaz 4 is pretty good. Would love to see an OFX of it in Flame. I’m doing some emergency blow ups to UHD and for commercial work it’s very clever.
I haven’t touched Nuke in years… hows the Foundry upscale? I’d actually really like to get their Wireremoval spark back.
I just did a Topaz test. I have UHD, made it HD, blew up to UHD in Topaz, and brought back into Flame. It’s very impressive. Obviously it’s all fakery and 300% zoom you can see some small oddities, but I’d use this in production.
Super scale in Resolve works well too. I’ve had a few shots that I tried in both Topaz & Resolve and there was nothing in it. Because I already have Resolve and it is way more flexible, I just use it.
We’ve tried using Topaz extensively over the last 18 months and have pretty much abandoned it now. Occasionally it nailed it, but generally we found the results were too unreliable and where it was good in one area it would fall down in another. For instance the detail restoration might be good, but it would introduce a kind of fixed pattern noise, like a faint diagonal grid overlay. Or the edge detail would start showing artefacts before an acceptable level of sharpening was reached.
It probably didn’t help that most of our work is in ACEScg or ACEScct, and the algorithm was no doubt trained on Rec709 and/or sRGB.
And the nature of our work (longform episodic, vast quantities of media) means that we can’t spend half a day finding the best settings for that one shot.
Happy to hear it’s working well for some, but sadly not for us
You should have a moan about it on their feedback forum. I had a massive winge about the preview system not being as good as it used to be. This really sweet girl from topaz development organised a zoom call, and I ended up going through everything I wanted added or fixed. In the new version 4 I can see some of it has been implemented.
She was really chuffed to understand what a really pro user needed.
