It's becoming a bit addictive for me. I'm glad I stared doing this over the holidays when work is fairly chill, otherwise I would have lost hours of productivity doing this stuff. I should also really watch some of the tutorials at some point instead of just experimenting wildly. Having said that, I have noticed a few things:
- Deinterlacing certain clips has been the trickiest thing for me so far, and I didn't realize until after a multi-day render (seriously) that the final converted video would not have audio. But in that case I used Davinci Resolve (free yet incredibly robust video editing software) to resync the old audio to the new clip and export it out again.
- Even though most of the native clips I upscale are progressive, I've sometimes seen better results selecting CG as native video type. It's weird.
- Videos with higher grade production value and lighting are always gonna look better. In my experience the size of the original clip doesn't seem to matter as much as the amount of lighting in the original clip. Bad compression is bad compression irregardless, but a low-rez/size clip of something shot in a well-lit studio or outdoors often still upscales better that even some my HD clips where the original footage is underlit or moody.
I'm just gonna put this out into the universe in the hope that it somehow manifests ... but it would be incredible if someone took the original masters of the California Wildcats videos and upscaled them for the HD age. Younger fans might scoff at the big hair and outfits but I bet more than a few of us Gen X types would gleefully fire up our charge cards to see
$600 Wager or
The Newcomer in 4k.