Before it was hot, I used ESRGAN and some other stuff for restoring old TV. There was a niche community that finetuned models just to, say, restore classic SpongeBob or DBZ or whatever they were into.
These days, I am less into media, but keep Qwen3 32B loaded on my desktop… pretty much all the time? For brainstorming, basic questions, making scripts, an agent to search the internet for me, a ‘dumb’ writing editor, whatever. It’s a part of my “degoogling” effort, and I find myself using it way more often since it’s A: totally free/unlimited, B: private and offline on an open source stack, and C: doesn’t support Big Tech at all. It’s kinda amazing how “logical” a 14GB file can be these days, and I can bounce really personal/sensitive ideas off it that I would hardly trust anyone with.
…I’ve pondered getting back into video restoration, with all the shiny locally runnable tools we have now.
Before it was hot, I used ESRGAN and some other stuff for restoring old TV. There was a niche community that finetuned models just to, say, restore classic SpongeBob or DBZ or whatever they were into.
These days, I am less into media, but keep Qwen3 32B loaded on my desktop… pretty much all the time? For brainstorming, basic questions, making scripts, an agent to search the internet for me, a ‘dumb’ writing editor, whatever. It’s a part of my “degoogling” effort, and I find myself using it way more often since it’s A: totally free/unlimited, B: private and offline on an open source stack, and C: doesn’t support Big Tech at all. It’s kinda amazing how “logical” a 14GB file can be these days, and I can bounce really personal/sensitive ideas off it that I would hardly trust anyone with.
…I’ve pondered getting back into video restoration, with all the shiny locally runnable tools we have now.
Do you have any recommendations for a local Free Software tool to fix VHS artifacts (bad tracking etc., not just blurriness) in old videos?
Do you run this on NVIDIA or AMD hardware?
Nvidia.
Back then I had a 980 TI RN I am lucky enough to have snagged a 3090 before they shot up.
I would buy a 7900, or a 395 APU, if they were even reasonably affordable for the VRAM, but AMD is not pricing their stuff well…
But FYI you can fit Qwen 32B on a 16GB card with the right backend/settings.
How do you get it to search the internet?