I like Sakura Kikaku's videos the most, but since they are old videos, there is a lot of noise and the image quality is not good.
So, I tried upscaling using an application that uses AI to improve image quality.
Although the file size has increased, I think the image quality has improved visibly, so if you are interested, please download it.
I prefer videos that are too noisy rather than too soft so I'm not a big fan of your version, but it does look quite a bit better when detail is lost in the noise anyway.
I'm not sure you're actually gaining much from upscaling it though and it also created a couple of issues:
- The picture was cropped and stretched to fit back the original resolution
- The colors are slightly wrong(like the red bordering on orange) because they've been set to BT-709(for hd) instead of something like BT.601(for sd)
You're losing quite a bit of detail even if we downscale to compare to the original or upscale the original in player so simply smoothing when encoding and leaving the resolution as-is will likely provide a similar result and keep the file size way down.
Was a bit hard to compare since my player was deinterlacing the iso on the opposite field of your encode so the DVD picture comparison is 1 field off so I didn't do too many, but here's one shot with both the DVD and my own rip upscaled in my player to your resolution and then the opposite.
DVD (upscaled) | My rip (upscaled) | 2X rip |
| | |
DVD | My rip | 2X rip (downscaled) |
| | |
And here's a good example of where it's very beneficial to have it smoother rather than looking close to the original:
DVD (upscaled) | My rip (upscaled) | 2X rip |
| | |