Playing around with topaz video enhance some more I found the gaia model is generally the only one worth using, and has a CG mode (intended for artwork and CGI, I think) and an HQ mode (meant for general upscaling) Although the CG mode is more reliable it tends to oversmooth and blur the image On the other hand, the HQ mode gains higher fidelity upscaling at the cost of significantly more artifacting
In lieu of topaz having any kind of settings I rendered my source video in both modes and overlaid the two outputs in premiere, with the blend mode set to Lighten This made a sort of psuedo-medium quality that helped flatten the artifacts while retaining some of the extra detail
There are probably easier/better methods but I thought I'd mention it for anyone else trying to get a better result out of topaz k thanks for coming to my ted talk
