How to Deepfake

[Yash Atishay]

Hey everyone, am a video editor and a cofounder of a production business. We as a company are looking to explore deepfakes, we have found DeepFace Labs and Faceswap as softwares that we wanna use but we seem to be stuck there, we use Macs for editing and the only powerful computers we have are some kind of M1 Macs which don't seem to be the best things to run these softwares. Where do we start? Are there work arounds to running these software well on M1 Macs that we are unaware of, should we look into building PCs, can we repurpose some of our existing windows machines? For context the most powerful windows machine we have has 16GB ram, some 2nd get i5 which is quad cores and some SSD but no dedicated GPU.

[Radium_Angel]

16 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

cofounder of a production business

 

16 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

2nd get i5

 

16 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

no dedicated GPU

 

I'd start investing in some serious horsepower first.

[Bombastinator]

Also deepfakes are widely considered to be evil. It is unlikely you will find help here on that one.

[igormp]

46 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

Are there work arounds to running these software well on M1 Macs that we are unaware of

No.

46 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

can we repurpose some of our existing windows machines?

Yes.

47 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

For context the most powerful windows machine we have has 16GB ram, some 2nd get i5 which is quad cores and some SSD but no dedicated GPU.

Add more RAM and a recent-ish Nvidia GPU. AMD is a no go.

[Yash Atishay]

24 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Also deepfakes are widely considered to be evil. It is unlikely you will find help here on that one.

Well am very much aware of all the bad actors out there, but then that's tech right. We can use atom to generate electricity for a whole country or destroy it. Our use case is mainly to make videos for our clients who can not spare the time to come for a shoot every time but are subject matter experts and need to make videos regularly for social media presence or often as freebies for their clients. And we are in talks with some studios who are in process of getting the rights to use deepfakes of popular actors and we as a company feel this is going to be a growing market in the near future

[Yash Atishay]

44 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

 

 

 

I'd start investing in some serious horsepower first.

Since we have a fairly modern CPU (2nd gen i5, with 16GB ram) you think just buying a GPU is a good option since it seems Deep Face Labs uses GPU way more than CPU

[Radium_Angel]

1 minute ago, Yash Atishay said:

a fairly modern CPU

rofl...wait...are you serious?

Intel is on 13th Gen right now...a Sandy Bridge CPU is in NO WAY considered "fairly modern"

[tkitch]

7 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

Since we have a fairly modern CPU (2nd gen i5, with 16GB ram) you think just buying a GPU is a good option since it seems Deep Face Labs uses GPU way more than CPU

Uhhh, 2nd gen is 11 years old.  That's e-waste by most standard today.  

[Yash Atishay]

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

Uhhh, 2nd gen is 11 years old.  That's e-waste by most standard today.  

Yes it's 11 years old but I wouldn't call it e-waste, unless what you meant was a hyperbole. It's still got 4 cores and that's still enough to run lots of every day tasks, specially when paired with an SSD

[Yash Atishay]

27 minutes ago, igormp said:

No.

Yes.

Add more RAM and a recent-ish Nvidia GPU. AMD is a no go.

If am looking at the used market, any idea what is a good Nvidia GPU to look at. Should I go for 3060 or as per Linus's advice rather pick a 2080 or 2070Ti, cus they seem in the same ball park in the used market

[Kid.Lazer]

3 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

Yes it's 11 years old but I wouldn't call it e-waste, unless what you meant was a hyperbole. It's still got 4 cores and that's still enough to run lots of every day tasks, specially when paired with an SSD

Core count is meaningless. The single-thread performance of that thing is terrible by today's standards.

[tkitch]

10 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

Yes it's 11 years old but I wouldn't call it e-waste, unless what you meant was a hyperbole. It's still got 4 cores and that's still enough to run lots of every day tasks, specially when paired with an SSD

Considering I can buy a use business system today that'll run circles around it for 100bucks and change?

It's e-waste.  And not hyperbole.  

[LAwLz]

This thread is exactly what I expected from this forum. 

Someone has a question about software and the answers are "buy new hardware". Why not test how well the software works on existing hardware before buying new stuff? Why not figure out which software to use first and then possibly build a system for that?

 

Buying hardware and then figuring out how to use it is the completely wrong way to go about things.

 

I don't have much experience with deepfake so I won't comment on that, but I strongly recommend you actually find the software you want to use and the work flow, and then buy hardware for it. Not the other way around. 

 

 

Also, I don't think it's nice for a co-founder of a company to ask people on forums to essentially work for them for free. If you own a company and want a task done then hire someone to do it or do it yourself. 

[tkitch]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

This thread is exactly what I expected from LTT. 

Someone has a question about software and the answer is "buy new hardware". Why not test how well the software works on existing hardware before buying new stuff? 

 

I don't have much experience with deepfake so I won't comment on that, but I strongly recommend you actually find the software you want to use and the work flow, and then buy hardware for it. Not the other way around. 

 

 

Also, I don't think it's nice for a co-founder of a company to ask people to work for them for free. If you own a company and want a task done then hire someone to do it. 

in this case:  Deepfakes run both CPU and GPU heavy, and will occupy full threadrippers and multiple GPUs.

He's got a 2nd gen i5 with no GPU.  "Buy new hardware" is an appropriate response in this case.

[LAwLz]

20 minutes ago, tkitch said:

in this case:  Deepfakes run both CPU and GPU heavy, and will occupy full threadrippers and multiple GPUs.

He's got a 2nd gen i5 with no GPU.  "Buy new hardware" is an appropriate response in this case.

He should still figure out which software to use before buying hardware, even if what you said is true. 

 

I am pretty sure you're wrong though. Again, I am no expert on Deepfakes so take what I say with a shovel of salt, but if it's anything like other machine learning workloads I've ran then the CPU basically doesn't matter. 99% of the work is done on the GPU. It wouldn't really make sense to me to have this type of workload be done on the CPU. 

Which GPU to get will also highly depend on what the purpose is. Someone doing it for quick TikTok videos won't have as high demands on resolution and accuracy as for example someone doing it for a movie. 

 

A quick Google search also seems to indicate that there is no official support for 40 series graphics cards in DeepFaceLab (which seems to be the most highly recommended program), which is the kind of info you need BEFORE buying hardware. Which is why it's so important to know your work flow and software before buying hardware. 

 

 

And now I've ended up helping OP for free even though I wasn't going to.

[igormp]

50 minutes ago, Yash Atishay said:

If am looking at the used market, any idea what is a good Nvidia GPU to look at. Should I go for 3060 or as per Linus's advice rather pick a 2080 or 2070Ti, cus they seem in the same ball park in the used market

3060 or 2080ti due to the amount of vram, 8gb ain't cutting it anymore for anything modern when it comes to ML.

A used 3090 would be perfect if you can manage to snatch one. I bought mine from a miner and couldn't be happier with it for ML.

31 minutes ago, tkitch said:

in this case:  Deepfakes run both CPU and GPU heavy, and will occupy full threadrippers and multiple GPUs.

He's got a 2nd gen i5 with no GPU.  "Buy new hardware" is an appropriate response in this case.

No, they won't, unless you have a pretty heavy pre-processing step. It'll mostly use the GPU alone and some extra RAM.

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Yash Atishay said:

Since we have a fairly modern CPU (2nd gen i5, with 16GB ram) you think just buying a GPU is a good option since it seems Deep Face Labs uses GPU way more than CPU

That stuff is famous for eating immense amounts of horsepower.  There are modern gaming machines that can’t handle it.  Also expect even a high end machine to spend a long time crunching.

Edited December 22, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

rofl...wait...are you serious?

Intel is on 13th Gen right now...a Sandy Bridge CPU is in NO WAY considered "fairly modern"

2nd gen may be considered 4th gen so maybe a 4590.  A 4790k is about equal with the lowest end modern stuff.  Maybe a 10100. On a good day. If it’s overclocked. Part of the problem is IPC a haswell chip has no joke half the ipc of modern stuff.  So 4ghz is 2 ghz.  It may also be short on instructions that keep it from running at all.  Not super likely, but also not impossible.

Edited December 22, 2022 by Bombastinator

[Radium_Angel]

16 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Why not figure out which software to use first and then possibly build a system for that?

Normally, I'd agree with you, but at least part of what the OP wants to do is going to involve video editing/maybe even some motion capture, the software for that is well known to be resource heavy so the 2nd gen CPU is *totally* inadequate for that job at hand, nevermind trying to modify faces to achieve any sort of realism. If he had a 6th gen CPU, by way of example, and 32GB of RAM and only lacking a GPU, that would be one thing, but this...coupled with calling it "fairly modern" shows he's well out of touch when the requirements at hand.

[LAwLz]

51 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Normally, I'd agree with you, but at least part of what the OP wants to do is going to involve video editing

They are already doing video editing today, probably on the Mac(s) that OP mentioned.

They do not need a new computer to do video editing. They already got that part nailed down.

 

52 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

maybe even some motion capture

Nobody has mentioned anything like that in this thread. This is the first time anyone has brought that up. 

 

54 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

the software for that is well known to be resource heavy so the 2nd gen CPU is *totally* inadequate for that job at hand

You mean it is inadequate for the workload you are claiming OP is going to use it for, despite OP never saying it?

Come on dude... You're just trying to save face right now. 

 

56 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

If he had a 6th gen CPU, by way of example, and 32GB of RAM and only lacking a GPU, that would be one thing, but this...coupled with calling it "fairly modern" shows he's well out of touch when the requirements at hand.

I think you're out of touch too since you liked this post here claiming that deekfakes runs on the CPU and would fully load a Threadripper CPU:

17 hours ago, tkitch said:

Deepfakes run both CPU and GPU heavy, and will occupy full threadrippers and multiple GPUs.

 

It's bad to give advice regarding things you don't have any experience or understanding of, which is probably what a lot of people are doing in this thread.

It's the blind leading the blind. 

 

 

OP should, and need, to figure out what he wants to do first. Which software to use. Maybe even get some experience with the tools first. Then, and only then, should he consider upgrading computers if necessary. You need to figure out what you want to do before buying the tools to do it.

[Radium_Angel]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

you liked this post here claiming that deekfakes runs on the CPU and would fully load a Threadripper CPU:

Point of correction, that wasn't me.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

Point of correction, that wasn't me.

I know. That's why I said "you liked", as in, you clicked "agree", rather than "you wrote". 

[Bombastinator]

So there are macs in this? Intel or m1? Macs have a fairly long service life. I’d say a minimum of 8th gen intel with a good gpu for this to not take weeks. M2 could also be second gen.  It’s just not a very good definer of age

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Bombastinator said:

So there are macs in this? Intel or m1? Macs have a fairly long service life. I’d say a minimum of 8th gen intel with a good gpu for this to not take weeks

M2 could be considered second gen.  It’s not a terribly useful definer.

[Yash Atishay]

13 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

So there are macs in this? Intel or m1? Macs have a fairly long service life. I’d say a minimum of 8th gen intel with a good gpu for this to not take weeks. M2 could also be second gen.  It’s just not a very good definer of age

We have 2 M1 Mac mini, 2 M1 MacBooks air and 1 M1 Max Mac Studio