HD Upscaling of DS9 & Voyager

Inviere

We've all seen the clips by now, whereby people are using AI (specifically the Topaz Video Enhance AI program) to analyse video frames, upscale them, and put them back together as a video stream. I think they look really incredible...(you need to view the clip in fullscreen on a tv to really see the difference shine)

I'm planning on building a new pc next year, and am STRONGLY thinking about giving DS9 & Voyager this treatment. Currently it takes an ungodly amount of time to do (one episode is roughly 10+ hours depending on the power of the pc doing it), so all in all for something like DS9 I'd be looking at a considerable time investment (though it is automated so could just leave it to do its thing). The software itself is on offer at €200 at the moment, usually €300...but given the results, I'd consider it a worthy investment.

I'd want to give Voyager the same treatment, and extend it to other shows like Red Dwarf (the recentish blu ray versions of Red Dwarf are appalling...my 1:1 dvd rips are better in quality), Space: Above & Beyond, Stargate SG1, and possibly others. It'd be a massive time investment, and storage one too, but given how unlikely we are to see these shows get the official HD treatment, this may be about the best we can hope for

_Kaiser_

Hmm.. interesting. What sort of power is needed? I've a dual Xenon Poweredge T420 that is idling most of the day and acts as my Domain Controller, Fileshare and Plex Server.

Even if you started with the "big" episodes it'd be worth doing ....

Evade

Would it not be worth the extra step to try get it to 4k?

I'm sure you could probably find a group of like minded people willing to split the work.

Inviere

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Hmm.. interesting. What sort of power is needed? I've a dual Xenon Poweredge T420 that is idling most of the day and acts as my Domain Controller, Fileshare and Plex Server.

Even if you started with the "big" episodes it'd be worth doing ....

From my understanding, I think this program shifts work to the GPU in order to crunch the numbers (they're way faster than a cpu in that regard). The video above was done on an RTX 2080 I believe, which isn't a cheap piece of kit...and the new RTX 3k series is coming soon which should hopefully help with prices. If you're into pc gaming though, a decent gpu will be a must anyway. I'm planning on a 3080 for next year, with a Ryzen gen 3 cpu...so hopefully the time taken to upscale will reduce.

hawkeye_bmr

Does anyone know what limitations are on the trial version? I know this is not ST, but I've tried a sample video of this https://archive.org/details/FatherTed1x01GoodLuckFatherTed , to this https://youtu.be/2uz39dlgTXo, just with default settings......extraordinary results....

Inviere

hawkeye_bmr wrote: »

Does anyone know what limitations are on the trial version? I know this is not ST, but I've tried a sample video of this https://archive.org/details/FatherTed1x01GoodLuckFatherTed , to this https://youtu.be/2uz39dlgTXo, just with default settings......extraordinary results....

Not sure of the limitations myself, probably a time limit of the video output or somesuch. I can't see the comparison as the video you uploaded has been blocked by CH4 unfortunately.

_Kaiser_

Inviere wrote: »

From my understanding, I think this program shifts work to the GPU in order to crunch the numbers (they're way faster than a cpu in that regard). The video above was done on an RTX 2080 I believe, which isn't a cheap piece of kit...and the new RTX 3k series is coming soon which should hopefully help with prices. If you're into pc gaming though, a decent gpu will be a must anyway. I'm planning on a 3080 for next year, with a Ryzen gen 3 cpu...so hopefully the time taken to upscale will reduce.

I have a 1070 in my gaming rig but if CPU isn't the main need, I have a small Poweredge T20 with a Pentium D that I could throw a GTX 970 into and just leave it to work away.

Inviere

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

I have a 1070 in my gaming rig but if CPU isn't the main need, I have a small Poweredge T20 with a Pentium D that I could throw a GTX 970 into and just leave it to work away.

Yeah that's not a bad idea. I've a 1070 in my current pc which I'm planning to replace next year...maybe I could keep this pc on as a machine dedicated to hd upscales...hmm....

If all goes to plan, I'll come back to this thread next year and demonstrate some of the results for DS9 & Voyager.

Optimus Prime

Would love to see this ! Do it !

10000maniacs

I am thinking of getting Topaz AI to enhance the DVD I made of Live 8 in 2005.
One question I have is if the computer reboots or if there is a power outage, can you continue where you left off or do you have to start again?
This is crucial as if you are doing a big file, you want to be able to continue on.

hawkeye_bmr

You can set it to output frame by frame .png's, so you could have multiple PCs running set frame ranges, say 0 - 1000 and 1001 - 2000 on another.

Then its just a case of ripping the audio file and re-encoding the separate frames into a video and joining the 2.

AllForIt

Can it not be done on the fly i.e as your watching it. That way you wouldn't have to go through all this laborious process for every episode. With a video player that has that capability of course.

Personally I don't think it's worth the trouble. You're not working with the original source so it can never be as good as if it were done in the studio. What I do is play with with normal pic settings, usually down the brightness level, up the contrast and adjust gamma if needed. Basically just to reduce that white-ish hue you see on the original there is the sample thus improving contrast.

Personally I don't like the high definition versions of the original series or TNG. It just seems wrong, where you can see Data's makeup glisten etc and there isn't as much detail on the bridge in TNG as the newer series where the control panels just like like drawings with lights under them - which is what they are of course. The ship in the opening credits also just looks less realistic. Rocks in underground caves look more like what they are - painted foam or whatever their made of. Reduced resolution can make it looker better rather than worse in some cases is what I'm saying.

The studio HD updating of the movie's are great though. When I got my first HD TV back in 2008, a plasma, the first movie I watched was the blu-ray version of The Wrath of Khan and was blown away by it.

I'm by no means an expert on video conversion but that's my 2cent anyhoo.

Inviere

AllForIt wrote: »

Can it not be done on the fly i.e as your watching it. That way you wouldn't have to go through all this laborious process for every episode. With a video player that has that capability of course.

Doing it properly on the fly isn't realistisic, and won't be for a long time to come. It takes a current-gen mid-high end GPU the guts of 10 hours to do a single episode, so the computational requirements to do this on the fly aren't in the consumer space yet. I know dedicated blu-ray players can upscale on the fly, but the result is not at all the same. It's not really 'laborious' either, it's a simple click & let the software do its thing. I think you only need to remux the audio back into the end result, but again, a click & go solution exists for that too. I'd consider it a small bit of effort for a very nice result.

You're not working with the original source so it can never be as good as if it were done in the studio.

While that's true, this certainly is more a hobbyist approach...it's not looking like we'll EVER get the official treatment from the studio, so it's going to be stick to standard definition, or upscale. Also correct that it would never be as good as a studio release, but you have to consider this is being done on home pc's using consumer software and consumer hardware, personally I think the results range from no difference, to good, to astounding...so it's a case of personal taste I think. Also factor in as tv panel tech continues to evolve, we're asking more and more of the crappy scalers in tv's to enlarge and stretch images for us. SD content on an 8k tv will not make for a pretty sight in years to come - but with this method, that fixes the problem.

Personally I don't like the high definition versions of the original series or TNG. It just seems wrong, where you can see Data's makeup glisten etc and there isn't as much detail on the bridge in TNG as the newer series where the control panels just like like drawings with lights under them - which is what they are of course. The ship in the opening credits also just looks less realistic. Rocks in underground caves look more like what they are - painted foam or whatever their made of. Reduced resolution can make it looker better rather than worse in some cases is what I'm saying.

I think there's far more to be gained in upscaling, than what is lost. Personal taste and all that, but TOS & TNG aren't in the same league when comparing SD to HD...I'll probably never watch them in SD again....they're actually awful looking in that format imo.