Duncan Edwards wrote:MPV undertook a project using the latest in AI tech to upgrade and restore the original Krystal scene. It's 479 meg so you can download it from this link at MEGA. We pulled together 11 smaller .avi files, then upscaled the whole thing from the grainy original to High Def 1080. Love to hear what you think. Enjoy.
Not a bad effort but still pretty evident that it was ran through Topaz or similar. The problem with AI is it just doesn't understand how the human eye perceives an image. For instance, if you look at her shirt or skin against the background, it's almost as if the engine drew an outline around the subject and it's just off-putting. The same can be said with the fabrics of her clothing, etc. The result is the subject almost looks "cartoony" and there really is no way to fix it either in post. AI just doesn't perceive field depth and shadow fall off the way the human eye does.
I am wondering IF you used the same correction model and set it as an overlay over the original version (or vice versa, you will need to experiment) and adjusted the composite mode and transparency until a nice blend of the two was made, the results could be better. Also, back off just a nudge on the denoise. I know noise sucks to have in a video but some caveats are needed when upscaling older footage. Once you get to the point where you are making the correction model guess what should be in the image, it will start doing weird things on you. It becomes less evident the closer the camera gets to the subject but panned out, you can see it pop up a bit
Otherwise, it's a great first shot. Just needs some refinement.
It's such