AI Upscale proof based discussion

spacepirate That's (imho) part of the problem- there are definitely studios who are just doing raw upscaling so instead of 5k they can release "7k/8k". Technically they're not wrong, but their image quality obviously doesn't improve with the increased resolution.

Topaz VEAI is a very cool application but agree with Rakly3 that it is challenging to actually get worthwhile results. I've been messing around with it for 6+ months in my personal life, and things can look hugely improved w/ a 2d comparative split screen of before/after...but then after spending a week to render 1 scene and putting on the headset to watch what you've made, it often looks either entirely too "artificial" or alternatively it only looks marginally improved from the original (meaning it was not worth the time & effort).

And the bigger argument to be made imho is that with camera improvements in the past year or so, along with the upcoming 8k cameras- there will be no need for AI upscaling. Already there are studios whose scenes I have not been able to "improve" at all using Topaz, even just with the 2d comparison.

doublevr Wankz upscale looks absolute garbage to me. Seems like overupscaled. Totally unwatchable.

LOL, dude. Are you on one of your pointless crusades again? Such exaggeration is ridiculous. At worst, the AI upscales is hardly any different to the original file (despite being substantially bigger), at best, the picture is a bit more clear and less grainy.

Nobody said that you had to remaster any of your own scenes though. If you don't want to do it, simply don't do it. But maybe you shouldn't base your whole strategy on only your individual vision "aka I can't see it so nobody can see it". That's the best way to ruin VR since visual perception can be wildly different between different persons...

Rakly3 That is not simply upscaling though. It's the AI interpreting the image according to parameters you set.

That's also what Wankz is doing...

doublevr

wankz remasters are badly stretched for me. It feels lacking a lot and 0 immersion. Every body and object is very unnatural. Totally can't watch.

They are bad compared to modern 6k/7k videos, but they are an improvement to their original videos.
That said there also sometimes quite huge differences how much they improve. I was pretty blown away how much better their first remaster was, I still have the original and the remastered file, and the difference is huge. (Gina Valentina and Bailey Brooke in Easter Bunnies).

The improvement of some newer scenes was quite a bit less, I am wondering if they cut back quality, to push out more remasters, as they said I think that it needs multiple days to upscale just one video.

I think the problem is more the expectation. Is an AI Upscaled video better then a video that is natively shot in the higher resolution? Of course not. Is it better then the original, well usually yes. If it is worth all the additional processing, well at least questionable, certainly for new things shooting with better cameras is always the superior solution. But for older things, where you either have the choice of a crappy video or a somewhat less crappy video most will prefer the latter.

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.

doublevr

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...

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?