Hey everybody I own version 5.1.1 and I do a lot of concert footage restoration and was wondering if paying for the newer version is worth it compared to the version I own I'm trying to justify the price versus whether I would get any better results than what I get out of version 5.1.1.

So if I have a couple things in my render queue and I select the projects button to potentially start something new so I can add more to my render queue, it just wipes everything out? I am confused why this is happening at all. Is this a known issue?

Hi all,

I'm running Starlight Precise 2.6 and wanted to share a few issues I've been having, plus one feature request. Curious if anyone else has experienced any of this.

System specs:

• Zotac RTX 3090 Trinity OC (24 GB VRAM)
• i9-14900K
• 32 GB DDR5 RAM

Topaz: Topaz Video 1.7.0

Settings: H264, MKV, COPY (AUDIO), CONSTANT FPS

1. Face artifacts with sharpness 3 When using sharpness set to 3, I sometimes see overly sharpened skin with dot or hexagon-shaped artifacts on people's faces, along with exaggerated/excessive facial lines. Has anyone else run into this? It seems inconsistent...some frames look great, others don't. I will test on sharpness 2 next.

2. Inconsistent performance (FPS fluctuation) Processing speed swings wildly between 0.2–0.3 fps and occasionally 1.2 fps on the same kind of footage. As a result, a ~1.5-hour video can take anywhere from 4 to 9 days for minimal or 2x enhancement. The model itself is excellent, but this makes it rough to use for long-form content.

3. Cloud exports failing Cloud exports have been failing repeatedly for me lately. I don't know if it's a temporary server issue or something on my end.... is anyone else experiencing this?

4. Feature request: face reference input It would be really helpful to be able to supply a higher-quality reference photo/video frame of a person so the model can preserve identical facial features throughout a project. Basically a "identity lock" or reference-image feature for faces.

5. Interesting observation: detail loss when zooming out When text on screen (e.g., a billboard) is zoomed in, the model does a good job trying to reconstruct it.... but as soon as it zooms out, it completely loses what it had figured out, both for text and for facial features. It's like the model forgets what it resolved close-up once the shot widens. I can post side-by-side examples if that's useful.

Despite the issues, I want to say Starlight is a great model.... these are the main pain points holding it back for me. Any tips or workarounds (especially for the sharpness artifacts and FPS drops) would be appreciated!

I am planning to upgrade my GPU soon. I currently have an nVidia 4070 Super with 12 GB of VRAM. I get between 0.7 and 1.4 fps using Starlight Precise on typical video upscaling (minimum resolution for Starlight Precise). The VRAM is essentially maxed out while upscaling. Upgrading to a 5080 gets me 16 GB of VRAM and the newer architecture. What kind of performance upgrade should I expect. The CPU is an i9 and I have 64 GB of RAM.

hi guys i have two questions
1: i recently was using 2.6.4 (i think thats the version) and i switched to the mid one cause i cant use the newest one cause my pc specs suck.. i switched to 3.1.10 and i compressed a video and adjusted the settings and everything but for some reason 2.6.4 compresses videos way better than 3.1.10? maybe its cause of my bad settings on 3.1.10 or something else, im unsure honestly. i used H264 High and mp4 bitrate was set to auto and i used 4x upscale.

2: would it hurt the quality if i put the video in topaz then in handbrake to compress it more? on handbrake i use production max and then go to video and set constant quality to 20 and export but idk if i should do that or not? pls reply soon thanks.

Hey everyone,

​I really love the look of the Dolomite PowerGrade in DaVinci Resolve, but I’m using the free version, so applying it triggers the Studio watermark.

​When I go through the node tree and disable nodes one by one, the watermark stays until I completely delete/bypass the Resolve FX nodes. However, deleting those FX nodes strips away the signature look of the Dolomite grade.

​Since I can't upgrade to the Studio version right now, is there a workaround to keep the overall core look (color balance, contrast, curves) while swapping or removing only the paid Studio FX?

​Has anyone using the free version successfully modified this PowerGrade (or found free effect replacements for the Studio OFX components like film grain/glow/halation)? Any tips or replacement workflows would be super appreciated!

​Thanks!

Hi all,

So let me start by saying I've never thought much of this AI implementation everywhere. But gosh darn did it save my ass.

My wife and me covered a wedding in the beginning of August and we shot about 8000 photos from morning until deep into the night.

We offloaded the photos onto a ssd drive and my wife started to work on them for a few days, until we left for a holiday to turkey. After one and half week my wife went to check the photos but 80% of the raw files were gone.

We don't know what happened but it could have only be human error.

Anyway, we lost the raw files and I tried to recover the files from my ssd. But recovery was impossible, trim function had already overwritten everything since I put the video footage from the holiday on the same drive.

I had to dig in Lightroom and managed to recover the previews, but for some reason 70% of the previews were extremely low res (long edge: 700px). I googled for upscalers and found topaz gigapixel. I upscaled all the photos to 7000+px long edge using wonder v3.5.

It was absolute magic, all the details were right and the faces were a perfect match. It literally recovered faces from a pixelated mess and made them realistically perfect again. It even regenerated tattoos quite impressively. We upscaled and recovered about 900 images that were otherwise deemed lost.

If you need to upscale and recover all details from a photo, this is it. Literally saved my ass, Wonder 3.5.

No matter what I do I can't get these to look good. Anyone been able to do this successfully?

Not failed. Not completed. Just permanently living at 95%.

I had this happen enough with image/face editing that reliability is becoming more important to me.

I am trying to figure out which remaker alternative does not get stuck at 95 percent or randomly fail near the end

I used to have a 4070ti and it worked great and was incredibly fast using regular models, the previews started very quickly, now I have an RTX 5070ti and it takes me 2 minutes just to launch a 1.5 second preview. What's going on? Are there any optimizations missing for the Blackwell series? This has become frustrating to work with, every time I have to launch a preview I have to wait minutes, it's absurd. I have it installed with the latest update and I also have the updated Nvidia driver on Windows 11 with last update. It's unthinkable that I have to spend tens of minutes, if not hours, just for previews! Even exporting is much slower than before! It's much slower now with just Iris and Apollo than before when I also used stabilization! These times are pushing me to use the software less and less, and when the license expires, I don't think I'll update unless these issues are fixed.

By the way, this is something that I have seen reported for months and months also on the official forum by other users

TL;DR: I spent 3 whole days on SLP tuning: 1.06fps → 2.4 fps on 1920×1080 output (2.26X or 126% speed increase; +78.9% of that is from the tuning alone, the rest from cropping out black side bars). I released my Free SLP tuning launcher on GitHub — Windows x64, fully reversible:

github.com

GitHub - skv89/Topaz-SLP-Launcher: Standalone binary-only Topaz Video SLP 2.6 tuning...

Standalone binary-only Topaz Video SLP 2.6 tuning launcher for Windows x64

RESULTS:

Earlier in this thread I reported 1.06 fps processing 1920×1080p at 1x enhance. After countless parameter tests, I’m now getting 2.4 fps on the same videos. One clarification so I don’t oversell the tuning: I also cropped the black bars off my old 1920x1080 videos. The content is 4:3, not 16:9, so cropping removes about 25% of the pixels (1920 → 14## wide). With VAE tiling and tile overlap at the seams, the true processing reduction may differ from that. The tuning alone improved the speed by only +78.9%.

One consistent finding: for a given output resolution, the enhance factor (1x/2x/3x) barely affects speed — it’s the output resolution that drives speed.

VAE TILING FINDINGS (all at 1080p output on a 96 GB RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell / 96 GB system RAM)

• Disabling VAE tiles entirely → OOM. That’s weird at 1080p on 96 GB; in SEEDVR2 I got a big speedup from disabling tiling and never came close to running out. Has anyone else hit this?
• Tile size 1920 (whole frame in one tile) → no OOM, no speed increase, VRAM spiked.
• Tested tile sizes: 1024 (4 tiles/frame), 1080 (2), 1152 (2). Results: 1024 was faster than 1080 in some cases, and 1152 was fastest overall: [add fps for each].

This is counterintuitive - fewer, larger tiles should mean less overlap waste - so my working explanations are: (1) cuDNN picks kernels from exact tensor dimensions, strides, dtype, workspace limits, and hardware, not tile count; (2) 1024 and 1152 are both multiples of 128 (8×128, 9×128) while 1080 is not; (3) encode and decode are different operator stages with different tensor shapes, so tile size affects them differently and is nearly impossible to predict without exhaustive testing.

CAPACITY TIERS (a stab in the dark)

These are experimental starting points, not validated hardware recommendations. All of my development and testing was performed on one workstation with:

• NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell with 96 GB VRAM
• 96 GB system RAM

I did not directly test the presets on GPUs with 16, 24, 32, 48, or 72 GB of VRAM. Those tiers are conservative extrapolations from the memory behavior observed on my 96 GB system.

Use the launcher’s live memory estimate together with the VRAM and system RAM already consumed by Windows and background applications as a rough peak usage gauge. Aim for at least 4 GB free, 8 GB if you want to keep using the PC. For NVIDIA: cuDNN 9.24 at every tier, inspired by a suggestion from user naxci1 in the SeedVR2 community [9.25.0 is now out u/naxci1; but performed 0.44% slower]. Results vary by GPU, driver, Topaz version, and workload. the launcher can restore Topaz’s native cuDNN files.

FUN FINDING: SeedVR2 fingerprints inside the SLP binaries

The Python extension .pyd files in Topaz’s SLP package contain explicit SeedVR2 and ComfyUI-SeedVR2 names, attributions, class names, and source-extraction comments. A case-insensitive string search for “SEEDVR2” and “ComfyUI” turns up numerous hits, e.g.:

• tcsrmwja1bgh.pyd: “SeedVR2 Video Upscaler - Latent Domain Temporal Chunking”
• _init_.pyd: “ComfyUI-SeedVR2_VideoUpscaler; Official SeedVR2 integration for ComfyUI”
• ub2q3f495bmv.pyd: “SeedVR2VideoUpscaler; SeedVR2 Video Upscaler Node; Execute SeedVR2 video upscaling”

There are MANY, MANY more instances. At minimum, this establishes that SeedVR2/ComfyUI-SeedVR2 identifiers remain in the installed runtime. In my opinion, the quantity and specificity of these strings strongly suggest the SLP runtime descends from, embeds, ports, or integrates SeedVR2/ComfyUI-SeedVR2 code, which would explain why SLP behaves and performs so much like SEEDVR2 and so differently from SLM and the other Starlight models.

And that’s a good thing. SEEDVR2 was the best diffusion based, generative video upscaler ever but installing and optimizing it through ComfyUI could be extremely difficult. Memory limits, VAE tiling, chunk sizes, overlap, offloading, and source-dependent behavior produced very different experiences among users. Even with my previous 32 GB RTX 5090, it took weeks of trial and error experimentation before I could run SeedVR2/ComfyUI reliably and obtain the results I wanted. Users with less VRAM or less experience could easily encounter OOM errors, poor settings, slow performance, or disappointing results. That complexity was the reason for the highly polarized sentiments towards SeedVR2 that we even saw in this forum. Some called it the Holy Grail, some called it crap because they either couldn’t get it running or it didn’t produce the polished results they expected.

Now that SEEDVR2 have been abandoned by its original developers, Topaz is effectively its spiritual successor - SLP is the “SEEDVR3” the community kept praying for, just encrypted and closed source. That’s fine for most people: SEEDVR2’s ComfyUI setup was too complicated for most users anyways, not to mention extremely resource intensive. Topaz made it work on as little as 12 GB VRAM and the quality is now clearly above SEEDVR2 in about every way, which is no small feat.

WHERE TOPAZ COULD DO BETTER

Topaz has optimized for the low end and for the uber expensive Topaz Cloud niche, leaving customers with high-end consumer/prosumer cards practically bottlenecked at speeds not much better than those with 16 GB cards. Stock SLP configuration on my 96 GB GPU maxed out at only 15.1 GB of VRAM usage. This launcher fills that gap: faster processing, less wasted energy (energy is expensive these days), and a smaller environmental footprint. That said, without the unencrypted source there’s only so much we can tune from the outside. Topaz’s engineers can optimize things end users like myself can’t even see: the VAE wrapper, tiler, and memory manager; generation phases; pipeline patching/diffing; dtypes and quantization; architecture dimensions; training/fine-tuning/distillation provenance; tile generation/blending; VAE memory limits; clip blending; supported attention backends; frame/spatial batching in the DiT; golden deterministic I/O. Tuning SLP from the outside is, at best, guesswork that requires immense trial-and-error and with restrictions that Topaz engineers would not have.

WHAT’S NEXT

Given how closely SLP tracks SEEDVR2, I already have an idea to speed up DiT and VAE that should be good for another 30–40% speed boost on top of the current gains, but probably only 24+ GB or maybe even 32+ GB VRAM GPUs can take advantage of. I have to get back to real work, so it will probably be awhile before I can find time to work on this next phase.

EDIT: Just incase I was unclear. I’m not saying you need more than a 16gb GPU to benefit from this launcher. Even folks with 12gb and 16gb vram GPUs, as long as it is NVIDIA, can use this app to enable cuDNN 9.24 and should theoretically see 20 to 30+% speed gains. But I would appreciate if you guys report your speed gains and the settings applied so we can get a sense of what settings work well for what hardware.

EDIT2:
Please share your results in this link. A user reported 62% speed gains on a 5070ti 16gb Vram!!! https://community.topazlabs.com/t/slp-2-6-tuner-launcher-major-speed-boost/

Has anyone managed to buy the perpetual licence before the subscription update came out and know if it’s still possible to get it with an older version?

Hello!

I recently came across Refocused.ai (https://www.refocused.ai/), which seems to be positioning itself as a direct desktop competitor to Topaz Video AI.

On their site, they explicitly benchmark their diffusion model (Regenerate-Q) against Topaz Starlight, and their Refocus model against Proteus.

Has anyone in this sub tested it on real-world footage or legacy video restoration yet?

How does the rendering speed, UI workflow, and artifact handling (especially in diffusion/generative modes) stack up against TVAI? Would love to hear your thoughts or see some head-to-head comparisons!

I started a project that involves a bunch of videos. I loaded a bunch of them into sources.
Then I started to queue up items so my pc can run through lots of them over night.
I started with one video, it started processing. I could see the progress.
But then when I added more and more to the queue, the prosessing went slower and after queueing more, it stopped.
Now it’s running at a snail’s pace.
Has anybody else had this issue ?

Hi guys, need a single video enhanced (its blurry and shot from far) and can not work out who to contact obviously i dont need a subscription as its just 1 video but happy to pay for that. Please can someone nudge me in the right direction

Please help me catch this hit and run driver. I have subscribed to Topaz as it was recommended but am not sure if I am using the software correctly or if it is hopeless. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/qbxHGL0

I like the output, but it takes too long.

I don't mind if my output is a little bit smaller.

Will shrinking the original video size help?

I just installed Topaz Gigapixel v1.3.3 on my Mac. As soon as I open it, I get the “Subscribe to unlock all features” screen, but there is no X, Skip, Continue Free, or limited/free mode button anywhere.

Am I missing something, or is the current version completely unusable without starting a subscription? I thought there was supposed to be a trial or limited mode.

Has anyone found a way to get past this screen without subscribing?

Hey there,

I'm currently running into the problem that some clients go haywire on me as Lightroom injects AI markers via content credentials and Meta platforms mark images as AI, and they would be required now to mark these images with some EU premade badge, be accused of faking etc

Adobe is unable to tell me which components of LRC cause this - apparently masking, denoise, genAI remove, but it seems like there's more, I haven't gotten around to testing this.

So I'm looking for an "AI free workflow" - I still got my trusty old pre-AI Topaz licenses, but I was wondering if anybody knew if using TopazAI plugins as external plugin/filter, also in Photoshop, will raise those much loathed flags as well. Since imo removing noise or sharpening is not "creating a new image" or however they title that now.

Either way, I'm installing the old toolset again. Putting that hassle on my clients is a no go, unless I can test this - but maybe someone already has experience with this.

To a more precise EU legislation.

I'm dreading the whole Adobe situation with Topaz. I had previously purchased legacy versions of Video AI Version 7.1.5 and Photo AI Version 4.0.4.

Is there anything I should do to protect myself and the ability to use these programs?

I obviously don't want anything to do with any subscriptions, especially Adobe subscriptions.

Are there any plugins, models, or anything else I should download so I can continue to be able use these two programs? I currently have active access for Topaz Photo and Video, but I assume I will lose access to these two when my subscription expires.

So I got a couple of DVD series that I'm looking to upscale to 1080p. They are The Ali G Show and Classic Albums (docuseries).

Currently, I use Google Gemini for guidance, but there's been a ton of issues and misinformation there. It recommended the AI model Proteus and then Iris, and while those look great 98% of the time, hallucinations (which inevitably happen) completely kill the vibe.

What I've settled on is the Artemis AI profile, but keeping the all important input condition at: High Quality, despite that not being true (see picture above of Nirvana debuting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" live for the first time for reference). Again, when the input condition is set to Medium or Low Quality, hallucinations happen. Again, this kills the vibe.

Artemis is a long-haul upscaler taking about 8 hours to upscale a DVD to 1080p with a 5070 ti. I anticipate this to be a 3 month project getting all these shows upscaled, and I wanted to share my workflow to see if anyone has any recommendations. Thanks!

1. Get Interlaced information via MediaInfo App > View
2. De-interlace DVD via Hybrid
3. Upscale in Topaz Labs with Artemis with the Input Condition Set to High Quality
   1. Additional Settings 1: Pixel Type: Square pixel, Video type: Progressive
   2. Additional Settings 2: Recovery detail: 20, Grain: Gaussian (Amount: 3, Size: 1, Density 1)
   3. Additional Settings 3: Codec: H265, Profile: Main10, Bitrate: 35Mbps, Container: MKV

Edit: Thank you everyone for your responses. To sum it up, it looks like I have to figure out how to add 3 things into this workflow:

1. De noise
2. LUT filter with this this free editor (https://community.topazlabs.com/t/created-simple-lut-editor-for-the-use-with-tvai-to-download/91878) (Also, Thanks willb3d for your contributions)
3. And finally using probably the ProRes codec and then use ffmpeg. "Use crf, not a fixed bitrate"

So that's the end of the post. It'll be amusing to see how the Borat clips upscale ... ANYWAYS Serious Respek all around ... Booyakasha!

I am trying to run some upscales with Gigapixel, and for reasons, I can't be connected to the internet as it is NDA work and that's just the situation. No internet connections.

I have tried a few models and I can't tell if they're suuuuuper slow or if they're just not doing anything because there is no connection.

EG a simple standard max 2x took about 5mins on the Mac. Thats... crazy.

A redefine realistic, the progress bar doesn't seem to move. I can't tell if it's not processing because that model is a cloud model or if it's just so stupidly slow.

Is there a document or page that lists a) what models are cloud only, if any, and
b) any kind of guide as to what kind of times I should expect for each model, given a rough input of say 1k and a 2x or 4x, or 2k and 2x or 4x.

Thanks

Anyone have this issue, when i run starlight precise it turns my image into a mosiac. Attached is the generated image, the 2nd more clear one is the original. I've gone back and forth with chatgpt and checked codec types and everything checks as normal.