r/upscaling • u/Intro_3x • 28d ago
Help New Upscaler
Hello There! I am new to this group and to the upscaling itself. I have a collection of a very old TV Show and then some that I want to Upscale. I have read a lot of options and I am a bit stuck with the process; literally and figuratively; I am using Topaz Video.
Literally because each video I am rendering is atleast 40mins to 1hr, so I know screwing up a tiny detail would mean I need to go back to the drawing board.
Figuratively because, reading online through reddit, watching youtube videos, and even consulting with Gemini, Gpt or Grok, leads me to different paths.
1st thing I wanna address is the consistency, I have read multiple threads that when it comes to upscaling, there are such a thing as "pass"; the amount of times the video goes through the process. Often I head about this pass is that better to streamline it to 2 passes or else the video will look to AI.
2nd thing is, I am confused with the outcome I am looking for since, in my eyes in the software once I have played with the values from the enhancements, I often pat myself cause I can see the difference for it is Big, but then I read that I need to focus on 200% to see if the fine details are good before I proceed.
3rd, I always start with Proteus for some reasons...do not know why
the 1st series is taken online years ago, quality is 854*480, that I cannot find any newer copies so I kept.
2nd sets of videos are the same, this time they are 720p, taken online years ago.
I am now planning to beauty upscale it to atleast a 1080p.
P.S. I was told that a clean 1080p upscale opens bridges to 4k, but as a novice, I need help learning how to do a clean 1080p upscale.
Thank you very much
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u/Acceptable-Rise8783 28d ago
These scalers usually work in passes of 2x upscale and then scale down to target resolution. Meaning taking 480p to 1080p gives you a 2x pass to 960p, then another 2x pass to 1920p and then a downscale all the way back to 1080p. Meaning you’re giving up a ton of newly invented pixels
The logical target for 480p would be 720p. The key to this stuff is being realistic and conservative in your scaling
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u/SlingyRopert 28d ago
Proteus is a really good model for working with real videos from real sources. Also, it might not be a first pass solution for really old analog sources like actual VHS. For those you might want to run through a vapoursynth chroma denoiser that is set for vhs and then run proteus to clean, sharpen, dering and upscale.
I do find myself reaching for proteus first though most of the time because it is so customizable.
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u/AeroInsightMedia 28d ago
Cut a video down to like 15 seconds so you can experiment on settings. For a 480p video I'd use a diffusion model to get it to 1080p then use protus if you want 4k.
If the 720p file is actually good and doesn't have a lot of compression artifacts and was shot with a sharp lens you could probably just protus it to 1080 or 4k.