Fuck AI

A guy did some great work with the original terminator movie. Another guy did it without using ai, but spent a hell of a lot more time on doing it. Smoothing out and fixing the stop frame motions for the skeletal terminator makes it look way better and less dated.

I went through a phase of testing out Topaz AI upscale tools on videos. Ultimately I didn’t like the results, as impressive as they are you always end up with some hallucinations ruining details.

The exception is cartoons. They upscale really well.

Yeah, most of the open source models that do the upscaling were meant for anime waifus. Also, cartoons don't often have things out of focus in a frame like live action does.

I've tried upscaling an old cartoon from 1080p to 4k using some open source models and it worked quite well. However when I tried to add frames with interpolation, it added a bunch of frames that were quite horrific, especially during quick movements.

I also tried to upcale a 90s live action class so I could see some of the details the instructor was showing. It was not near as good and even without frame interpolation, there were a bunch of new artifact glitches that were added so I didn't keep that version.

Couldn't tell you if it was AI upscaling a normal upscaler, but the only time I've ever had to delete a torrent from my external hard drive was an upscaled cartoon where you could really tell it was upscaled. The outlines didn't look right and things just looked kinda blurry and slightly fuzzy and off somehow. So, definitely depends on how it was upscaled.

I’ve watched most of DS9 upscaled. And it was an improvement for sure. I never noticed anything strange like these examples.

But I also don’t think the upscaling/cleanup was this aggressive.