FirstLoveMovies

Topaz - before (left) | after (right).
This is before I do a mild sharpen pass in Handbrake.
Topaz pass will take 14hours on my old card!

The landscape of the human face is the most important landscape for me. Looking forward to your final version!

but haven't bought a version of Topaz from the last few years

So I hope you're not still using this old Topaz Video Enhance AI (I think the last version was 2.64).

They have improved so much during this time and you really should consider an upgrade.

But if you're still using those old Artmis models, I understand that you're only making 720p.

I'm on 3.1 now - getting some good results!
I'm fixing the colours a bit with a hue shift. Film seemed a bit washed out.

can see the test encode here
[File]

The Proteus model is excellent - if you experiment with the settings. Here's a before/after.
it's improving the background a lot - look at how much better the tree and plants look!
The halo/ghosting around the edges is gone - look at the edge of the tree and sky - or the halo around the child head!
Click to see fullsize or the compare isn't so clear!

I've finished my upgrade of this - here's what quality we had before...

and here's the after (click to open fullsize, the forum is showing them smaller!)
In Topaz you can play with the settings - and too much AI stuff has over-smoothed skin. In this film 3 of the characters have freckles. They come out in sunshine! So very important to be careful with the settings. I kept the smoothing effect very very low so this was not lost. Kept the grain in the film too so nothing looked too modern and clean.

Also - I fixed the subtitles! That took another 10 hours. I compared every line in both:
1. the poorly translated subtitles on the original film - there's a lot of bad stuff in there. For example confusing million and billion Lira (the Italian Lira exchange rate was about 2000=$1 - so people aren't buying a house for 2million Lira! Confusing dozens of animal species mentioned. Confusing words like affectionate when they meant dear the animal (2 meanings of dear). Some bad timing. Long lines. Bad subtitle splits. etc
2. A Subtitle Edit AI translate. Which, because of the lack of background music did an amazing job.

Also the video quality (used to make the previous 1000mb mp4) of the DVD was awful. Colours a bit faded. A terrible contrast halo. There's a slight left-to-right ghosting that I couldn't remove. And the mp4 was a decade or so old encode that didn't take advantage of being a widescreen enhanced DVD.

Yes, the film is OT. But also the film is actually really good! The DVD cover says it won awards. Makes a lot more sense with my subtitle fixes, has some great humour in it too! Also the kids are the stars of the films. No adult faces are seen in the whole film. They deliberately shoot the film with the adults heads off the top of the screen!

Also - be careful about reading some of the "about this film" blurbs - one mentions a HUGE spoiler!

Here's the pixeldrain link!
Topaz upscaled - 2.6gb, 720p, mp3 Italian audio, 2x English subtitle tracks (1 = my improved version as default, 2 = the one from the original rip)
[File]

David32441 wrote: Sat Feb 07, 2026 12:43 amIn this film 3 of the characters have freckles. They come out in sunshine! So very important to be careful with the settings. I kept the smoothing effect very very low so this was not lost.

David32441 wrote: Sat Feb 07, 2026 12:46 am Also - I fixed the subtitles!

Fantastic! It has been so long since I actually looked at this that I did not even realize the subtitles would be an issue. I was expecting simply a visual upgrade but I am so glad that you took care of it all, thank you!