You will have seen stunning AI-restored examples of movies and videos and TV shows. Whilst looking amazing, the cost of the software contains further hidden traps. For example, Topaz Video AI costs £299 for a lifetime software use. However, applying all the models to restore and improve your copied MP4 file from your video source will, running from your computer with a reasonable video card, take, days for even a low resolution 30 minute file.
So Topaz, and Hipaw for example, offer you a short-cut: upload your video to our cloud servers for a quicker conversion: hours rather than days. But it costs credits, which range from 50-400 credits. 50 credits costs $7.99 but will only take one or two hours off a two days operation.
If you had dedicated nvidia card costing 1000's of pounds, I doubt (with my software developer hat) the conversion routines will reduce the processing time by as much as it should: I suspect the digital conversion AI identifies such super-fast cards and cripples the performance. accordingly.
Oh even worse, you can spend two days or many currency units of money on credits from your AI conversion provider, and the process can crash with a internal bug or a resource problem. All that money gone, and you have to start again. Pay or Wait.
This problem is insoluble given the power requirements to run an AI model, and the costs of implementing heat dissipation by the data centre owner make conversion of long videos uneconomic.
