Upscaling 1080p to 4K - Questions

[MidnightWatcher]

Has anyone tried upscaling a 1080p Bluray rip to 4K? Can it mimic a 2K DI from some 4K releases?What situations would this be advised and what settings should be used or avoided? I'm intrigued by this new possibility with the recent 1.4.0 release.

[Deleted User 11865]

Regular upscaling (as is done with HandBrake) is usually pointless. The typical/useful use of upscaling in HandBrake is to allow encoding at display dimensions with square pixels for devices that don't support anamorphic (e.g. you have a DVD at 720x576 storage with 1024x576 display, encoding at storage 1024x576 with 1024x576 display i.e. "square" pixels).

AI upscaling can sometimes give good results, but you cannot do that with HandBrake.

[Woodstock]

There was a long thread on this some months ago about using "AI-powered upscaling". At that time, I made a suggestion that was not taken up - pick a 4K title that also comes with a regular BD copy. Rip both, upscale the BD version to 4k, and then compare the quality.

[MidnightWatcher]

Regular upscaling (as is done with HandBrake) is usually pointless. The typical/useful use of upscaling in HandBrake is to allow encoding at display dimensions with square pixels for devices that don't support anamorphic (e.g. you have a DVD at 720x576 storage with 1024x576 display, encoding at storage 1024x576 with 1024x576 display i.e. "square" pixels).

AI upscaling can sometimes give good results, but you cannot do that with HandBrake.

If we apply light / ultralight sharpening, would it be performed before or after upscaling?

[Deleted User 11865]

There was a long thread on this some months ago about using "AI-powered upscaling". At that time, I made a suggestion that was not taken up - pick a 4K title that also comes with a regular BD copy. Rip both, upscale the BD version to 4k, and then compare the quality.

There's little advantage to upscaling anything if you have access to the 4K version to begin with. Provided the 4K version was authored properly, there's 99%+ chances it'll look better than a version of the same content upscaled from 1080p. Fancy upscaling algorithms are meant to be used when no better source is available.

[Deleted User 11865]

Regular upscaling (as is done with HandBrake) is usually pointless. The typical/useful use of upscaling in HandBrake is to allow encoding at display dimensions with square pixels for devices that don't support anamorphic (e.g. you have a DVD at 720x576 storage with 1024x576 display, encoding at storage 1024x576 with 1024x576 display i.e. "square" pixels).

AI upscaling can sometimes give good results, but you cannot do that with HandBrake.

If we apply light / ultralight sharpening, would it be performed before or after upscaling?

Some of the fancy upscaling tools have some form of sharpening built-in, so you would do both at the same time.

[rollin_eng]

There was a long thread on this some months ago about using "AI-powered upscaling". At that time, I made a suggestion that was not taken up - pick a 4K title that also comes with a regular BD copy. Rip both, upscale the BD version to 4k, and then compare the quality.

There's little advantage to upscaling anything if you have access to the 4K version to begin with. Provided the 4K version was authored properly, there's 99%+ chances it'll look better than a version of the same content upscaled from 1080p. Fancy upscaling algorithms are meant to be used when no better source is available.

I think that’s the point Woodstock was trying to make.

[JohnAStebbins]

Sharpening happens after scaling in HandBrake's filter pipeline.