Vegas Pro Ai Upscale
Rosella Bowlan
Hello. I noticed that the upscale went from smart upscale to AI upscale. I am wondering what are the full steps to successfully apply this new upscale? Is it simply move the bar or do I have to set up things in the pan/crop. Please let me know. Thanks.
So to be clear with the whole steps, I add the upscale fx before the pan/crop fx in the plug chain. I will then adjust the video's dimensions to the target output. The original dimensions of the video is 1536 x 960. Thus, I will change the dimensions to 1728 x 1080 in pan/crop fx in the width and height sections under the Position tab. And then, I render to 1728 x 1080?
Is this how it works? For the upscale fx, what does the vertical slider do and how come I cannot use the horizontal slider?
You don't use pan/crop when upscaling. If you need to zoom in on the image, there is a slider in the upscaler that lets you do that. I'm going from memory, which is a bit fuzzy, but if I remember right, adding it as a media effect will upscale it automatically according to whatever your project settings are.... so if you add a 1080p video clip to a 4K project, it will upscale the 1080p clip to 4k. Adding it as a video event effect will let you specify the amount you want to upscale it manually. I may have the order of those backwards, so experiment. The proper way to do it will be in that manual (I wrote with the help of Gary Rebholz, lol, sorry, I have bad memory) that is linked to above. You can select between smooth or sharp upscaling modes, sharp gives the best results but takes longer to process. AI is used to reconstruct the image and fill in the missing pixels, making it superior to the old smart upscale effect, which used much simpler methods to interpolate the missing pixels.
@Musicvid Sorry to say, but that doesn't look impressive at all to me. Ofcourse I don't know how the original interlaced footage looks and it's hard to compare but the deinterlaced and upscaled footage looks like... here a screenshot of what I see:
Those are interlacing artifacts, magnified by, but not caused by Vegas Smart Upscale, which can be used independently of Smart Deinterlace. Here are the results of those tests, since that's what you are interested in comparing. Feel free to draw your own conclusions:
It's only disappointing that I see no difference at all between original and an upscale with Vegas, at least not with my footage. So I was hoping that someone could convince me of the usefulness of this new upscale FX with before and after samples.
I just bought and installed Vegas Pro 20, and I also installed the Deep Learning Models (version 20.2.0.0), but If I try to run 'upscaling' on my old DV material I get the message that the media cannot be upscaled because the upscaling model is not present on my system and that I have to download it.
If your computer does not meet these specifications - especially by generations - this could very possibly be the reason that Upscale is not working. When the original DLMs were released just over 2 years ago with Vegas Pro 18, none of the DLM AI FX worked for me at the time because my then editing computer did not meet the minimum recommended specs/
The material I use is old SD in .avi format 720x576
I tried both project settings: first, when importing the material in Vegas I let Vegas use the same settings as the source material. I also tried with project settings set to 1280x720
In both cases I get the warning: 'the media cannot be upscaled because the upscaling model is not present on your system. Please install the Vegas AI bundle, which you can download at www.vegascreativesoftware.com'
Also make sure your Intel graphics drivers are updated using Intel's driver update page ... the DLM uses an Intel igpu if it is detected. If you're not sure what version you have, the Vegas help driver-update will tell you but you need to go to Intel to check for updates for the 9700k igpu.
Musicvid, thanks for the tips. After checking the intel drivers I will do some testing with your tips.
I de-interlaced my .avi files, but not with Smart Deinterlacing, but just in the project settings.
I can get that error when project resolution is the same as media resolution . it results in scale set to 1 and the error about the models not being loaded. Try increasing your project resolution first, then add the upscale, the upscale figure should automatically populate to the correct value, the difference between media resolution and project resolution.
Btw I tried an old free upscaler and compared it to Vegas. it's approx a 2.3x upscale. Vegas is on right, Video2x is on the left. You can see Vegas has a huge problem with noisy footage, while Video2x is able to moderate the noise somewhat. Video2x is 0.7fps in this example, compared to about 6fps with Vegas, even though Video2x uses 100% GPU, while Vegas uses only CPU.
@Frank-Bee
On this screen I see that your Intel GPU 630 as part of the CPU is not visible.
Probably it can not being used because it is not allowed in the BIOS of your computer.
Try to allow it yourself or something else.
BIOS has to be opened and set to allow the Intel Graphics to be shown and used.
After that you have to install the latest drivers for that GPU from the Intell website, drivernumber gfx win 101.3729.101.2114.
After that your Help/ Check for Driver Updates has to look like this
I'm in the process of converting a few DVDs i own to FHD 1080p for viewing. Here you can see the original 480i displayed at 1080p alongside Vegas Upscale. A few problems getting from here to there, but pretty pleased.
Vegas Pro's Upscale FX is great. Just the other day I changed a 29.97 fps 720p video to 4K 25p using the Properties R click menu option on the event and clicking on the match project settings (i.e. 4K 25 fps) and selecting optical flow. Then used the Upscale FX. The result was amazing. And in comparison Upscale worked much better than BCC's Uprez FX.
@Dexcon Yes, I thought that was what it was. However, I'm not getting the same kind of result as @Musicvid. In fact, if I disable the effect in the chain, I don't see any difference at all. I must be doing something wrong.
I did a lot of testing with the Sharp models, and found them both to be too much for my needs. With my in-house shows, which are natively interlaced, the Sharp model re-introduced combing artifacts, which were unacceptable.
Instead, I've chosen to add a super light Unsharp Mask to the Media, befor the Upscale fx, like this. I found the results to be very close to using Topaz, which takes many hours longer; however, I've been told I can't share those tests here bc they use a short movie clip.
@Musicvid, @Dexcon Thanks for your efforts guys but I'm not getting anywhere with the upscale. There's no difference between it being enabled or disabled. I've tried it as a Media FX as in @Musicvid's image as well as an event FX. Frankly I'm getting better results by just using the Unsharp Mask FX.
I must be doing something wrong because @Musicvid's initial image comparison is so good.
Then add the Upscale fx at the Media level with the exact upscale factor you determined. On my system if I move the timeline cursor around after doing this last step but before rendering, it messes things up, so make adding the effect the last thing you do..
@Musicvid A few questions if you wouldn't mind.
set your project properties to your exact output dimensions
Do you mean by this my delivery dimensions, in my case 1920x1080?
add the Upscale fx at the Media level with the exact upscale factor you determined
By upscale factor, do you mean by this the ratio of 1920/1278 (1278 being my source)?
@Musicvid Thanks for all that info. But, it looks as if the capture device I used (to be honest, my son recommended the one I bought) doesn't conform to any standard. I ran the file through MediaInfo and this is what I got.
The frame rate mode is most worrying. I should have posted this earlier, sorry.
I might just have to settle for what I've got. Thanks for your efforts, and the technical info you provided will come in handy in the future.
Jack, I just rescued a broadcast capture recording that was at least as "nonconforming" as this. I think I know how to iron out the wrinkles in Handbrake, but of course it would add another encoding step, if you plan to upscale the result in Vegas. Handbrake has a couple of production presets that are as close to lossless as it gets. If you have a not-too-long capture clip to share I could show you how to make it more "politically correct". I have seen footage from those 720p capture setups before.
Thanks @Musicvid. Your results look a little better than the original so I'll follow your instructions. It's unfortunate it's such a bad capture, but it is what it is.
Your efforts are much appreciated.
Regards
@Jack S I had a go too, and also failed. Not sure what's wrong with your original. I made an assumption the actual detail in your capture was 640x480 or 720x576, also made a worst case assumption of 480x360. I didn't see any improvements in apparent resolution with any.
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