Any AI Upscaling Pros on here?

[Perseverant]

There's a lot of great old 480p animated content that got a DVD release, but never made it to BluRay (and probably never will given the focus on streaming nowadays).  I've seen some impressive upscaling results floating around on the internet, but I haven't seen much explanation of what software they used and what settings they used in that software.

If anyone is a pro at this stuff I'd love to see some of your work and learn from you.  I've messed around with the freeware upscaler "Waifu2x", but it has some bugs/drawbacks right now that disincline me to use it.  I'm not sure how good Topaz's offerings are at animated content, but from what I've read they seem to be the kings of handling filmed content.  I'm no noob to Jellyfin or dealing with various video formats/parameters (framerates, resolutions, aspect ratios, etc., etc.), but I'm quite new to AI upscaling.

So if you're willing to share...  Please do!

[LambTalk]

Most of the great results you see are from people using esrgan or real-esrgan and training models for a specific show using custom datasets. There's not really any general purpose upscaling model that works for all content

[Perseverant]

I've been looking into what you mentioned and man is it a rabbit hole. I'm a data engineer by trade, so AI upscaling is not so technically complex that I couldn't see myself figuring it out, but the time investment would be significant.

I suspect that innovative developers will consolidate/formalize these processes into a more user-friendly UI that will allow you to feed in some video, receive back 10 examples of how it might look, select the undesirable examples to eliminate, then keep repeating that process until an optimal model is made which can be saved and used on the media in question.

Shame it's not more user-friendly at this point, but I bet it's coming. I still have so much media to extract and transcode that delving into the world of upscaling would be a bit overwhelming right now.

[TheDreadPirate]

I was ripping Futurama DVDs a couple nights ago, and your post made me experiment a bit in Handbrake since animation should be much simpler to get non-AI upscaling to look good. I tried some of the filters available in Handbrake, sharpen, chroma smoothing, deblocking, etc. But the ok, but not great, results was not worth the loss in encoding speed and extra storage. 50-60fps vs 600-800FPS, 1.3GB vs 300MB. Definitely not even close to whatever upscaling process was used for Futurama on Hulu.

[Perseverant]

I was ripping Futurama DVDs a couple nights ago, and your post made me experiment a bit in Handbrake since animation should be much simpler to get non-AI upscaling to look good.  I tried some of the filters available in Handbrake, sharpen, chroma smoothing, deblocking, etc.  But the ok, but not great, results was not worth the loss in encoding speed and extra storage.  50-60fps vs 600-800FPS, 1.3GB vs 300MB.  Definitely not even close to whatever upscaling process was used for Futurama on Hulu.

I don't know about Futurama, but some streaming services are 100% receiving HD versions of shows that were never released on physical media.  One particularly annoying one for me is Monk, a show my wife and I really like, which has a DVD release, and is available in HD on streaming platforms, but which has no Bluray release, so you end up kind of stuck deciding if you want to buy the media in 480p and just live with the cruddy quality or hold out and hope that one day it gets a physical release (not likely...).  I've put shows like this at the end of my acquisition list so they have as much time as possible to get a Bluray release.

[TheDreadPirate]

I was ripping Futurama DVDs a couple nights ago, and your post made me experiment a bit in Handbrake since animation should be much simpler to get non-AI upscaling to look good.  I tried some of the filters available in Handbrake, sharpen, chroma smoothing, deblocking, etc.  But the ok, but not great, results was not worth the loss in encoding speed and extra storage.  50-60fps vs 600-800FPS, 1.3GB vs 300MB.  Definitely not even close to whatever upscaling process was used for Futurama on Hulu.

I don't know about Futurama, but some streaming services are 100% receiving HD versions of shows that were never released on physical media.  One particularly annoying one for me is Monk, a show my wife and I really like, which has a DVD release, and is available in HD on streaming platforms, but which has no Bluray release, so you end up kind of stuck deciding if you want to buy the media in 480p and just live with the cruddy quality or hold out and hope that one day it gets a physical release (not likely...).  I've put shows like this at the end of my acquisition list so they have as much time as possible to get a Bluray release.

My wife and I noticed this for Archer.  The early seasons WERE available on blu-ray.  The later seasons were DVD only.  Not sure if the last two or three seasons were ever made available on any physical medium.

But my wife and I are both of the same mind and are willing to go without some of our favorite content.  Neither of us likes where things are going in regards to companies positioning all their IPs for the recurring revenue that investors demand.  Lower quality is acceptable if it means not contributing to the recurring revenue trend.

[Perseverant]

But my wife and I are both of the same mind and are willing to go without some of our favorite content.  Neither of us likes where things are going in regards to companies positioning all their IPs for the recurring revenue that investors demand.  Lower quality is acceptable if it means not contributing to the recurring revenue trend.

Similar with me and my wife and at some point I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and buy DVDs of content we like (and will probably get more into upscaling at that point).

A few years ago we were discussing the prospect of starting a family (something we still want to do) and the content we were seeing...  even the ads we were seeing were not things I'd want my future kids watching.  I want kids to be able to be kids without having the mess of the world on their shoulders.  Saturday morning cartoons.  Classic Disney movies.  Shows that enrich their mind and fosters within them a sense of responsibility, morality, creativity, and wonder.

It does seem like a foregone conclusion that streaming is the goal of corporations and once they get their way they'll jack up prices to rates that will exceed the relatively paltry amount I'll probably end up spending on physical media when it's all said and done.  I'm glad I started all of this about 2.5 years ago before certain physical media gets unattainably expensive as more and more people realize the physical media cliff that is approaching.  I distinctly remember the bittersweet feeling of looking at my server early on and thinking "This is kind of sad-looking" when I only had a few films on there.  Fast forward to today and I've managed to get 150 films and 15 shows on there.  It's a great feeling.  Feels like I'm almost bottling up some of the joy of my childhood, waiting to pass it on to my kids that don't even exist yet.

[bitmap]

*sad Mission Hill noises*

[KrisMarshall]

There’s a lot of older content that could really benefit from a good upscale, especially animated stuff. I’ve tried a few upscaling tools myself, and while I haven’t used Waifu2x much (I know it can be a bit buggy), I had great results with AI Content Platform for improving image quality. I was initially just looking for something to boost the resolution on some old footage, and the AI tools there did wonders. I used it on a few old anime episodes and was impressed by how much cleaner the images looked. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s a good step forward.

[Venson]

i did quite some AI upscaling with a lot of free tools but eventually tried Topaz tools.
They are quite pricey upfront and you only buy like 1 year subscription (allthough the versions released in that time are perpetual use after that).

AI upscaling cannot work wonders. This has to be clear. But if there is suffcient bitrate and not too many artefacts TopazVideoAI works very good and Stargate/Battlestar Galactica in 1080p60fps looks just awesome.