Just met Topaz creators. They confirmed its useless to upscale 4K to 8K. Also it's intended for flat content and significant work is required on their end to make it work with vr because of projection.
We arranged they will take one video and do their best to upscale the very center of the video to see if it is even worth doing any further research.
doublevr source: trust me bro
No visual improvements? Are the improvements worth it should be a better question. Without a doubt there are visual improvements. Again, the source material must have good exposure and noise/block levels. Nothing will be able to fix that. If those old really blocky scenes were being upscaled, I can see why they would not work. I will work on getting some samples up for people to compare on their own.
Here are a couple of screenshots of an upscale from 4k to 8k that I am working. Would love to hear back from other users to see if they notice any difference. First is the original 4k version, second is the upscaled 8k version, and the third is the upscaled 8k with a little color tweaking for my preference.
Original 4k
Upscaled to 8k (No color grade)
Upscaled to 8k (color grade)
I recall a discussion about this topic from some months ago.
AI upscaling for VR has potential. However, for there to be visible improvement one would have to improve the textual models generated specifically for VR -- from what I've been told, and what seems logical.
One would have to begin with the studio file or the original recording in highest resolution, so the film doesn't suffer from iterative downgrading (through compression from the various encoding formats, most of which are lossy, not lossless).
A company, like Topaz, would then have to re-train their AI working from images captured with a fisheye lens.
You could try this and use an in-house model (developed for VR). It's free.
https://towardsdatascience.com/deep-learning-based-super-resolution-with-opencv-4fd736678066
The difficulty would be training it for your needs. But you have a fantastic library to draw textures from!
You know what you could also do... Ask Meta. Of course, they are really creepy to deal with, and they say they HATE porn (because secretly they just LOVE it)... But if you claim to be a researcher you could probably get help and ideas...
With better algorithms and better screens there should be more of the difference. The only thing it is only relevant for old videos while we are looking bright into the future
April 2024 Update: we've been doing some further tests with upscaling recently. The tech has come quite a long way in the past year or so.
Here's a sample video on the SLR Labs channel with a few random snippets of some older SLRO scenes, both the original versions and the upscale samples. If you look up towards the very top of the screen you'll see whether what's currently playing is the "Original" or "Enhanced" version.
We would be interested in hearing any thoughts & feedback! I've noticed that the visual improvements are more obvious w/ the downloaded versions vs streaming (this is something we're also looking at for the "enhanced" versions).
Is it worth considering putting more time/effort into this effort for older SLR Originals releases?
justsomedude101 Why did you pixelate the image? The original doesn't look like that.
Hairsational Why did you pixelate the image? The original doesn't look like that.
It's the cover pic for the SLR Labs test scene. I assume it was used for dramatic effect.
Edit: removed the cover pic from the thread 
. Be sure to watch the actual scene!
justsomedude101 Putting it in a thread where you are asking for feedback will mislead people into thinking the improvement is much better than it really is. Just sayin'.
hello, didn't see any difference (deo streaming then download with heresphere)
I didn't see any difference either
doublevr your request from the other thread earlier:
Stargate:
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The Stand:
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Married with Children: [
TBH, most of my favorite videos on SLR are the older ones, especially the likes of Nancy A, etc. I'd love to see them get upscaled.
@doublevr I think it might draw people in that otherwise wouldn't use the cloud service. I probably won't use the cloud service because I already have memory smd don't use PT. But upscaling old 4k videos might be a thing I would consider.
Also I was saying maybe you could upscale old videos that are on SLR but not from your studio. I don't know if that is allowed but maybe some smaller studios do not have the money to do it. You could advertise that you are the only site with these upscales. If somebody likes old Virtual Real Porn scenes and is thinking about a site to join. If SLR has upscaled 8k versions and everybody else has the 4k version then they will join SLR.
Seen some impressive open source upscaling model release lately. No idea how good they handle porn though
