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_snapshot_00.02.47.500.png dvd_snapshot_00.02.47.500.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342244-f6649605b3d08e8dc9e0bb3f5f5f258b.jpg) | ![MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.02.44.730.png MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.02.44.730.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342245-49a329c8fd38f80fcb8a970924819e3f.jpg) | ![MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.02.44.864.png MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.02.44.864.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342246-51011aed60795a1585a45ef674692cb0.jpg) |
DVD | My rip | 2X rip (downscaled) |
![OrigRes_dvd_snapshot_00.02.47.500.png OrigRes_dvd_snapshot_00.02.47.500.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342247-7140df30f3d75e91883027488ca65cac.jpg) | ![OrigRes_MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.02.44.730.png OrigRes_MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.02.44.730.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342248-6e2f4b3596ca27fc7337199c9f2ff873.jpg) | ![OrigRes_MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.02.44.864.png OrigRes_MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.02.44.864.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342249-95ea6bfce9ace932acae4065c88c2aae.jpg) |
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 |
![dvd_snapshot_00.57.22.600.png dvd_snapshot_00.57.22.600.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342250-e058d4b381ffd307b73e12b088fed5a5.jpg) | ![MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.57.23.773.png MPD-021_hevc_10bit.mkv_snapshot_00.57.23.773.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342251-f607b3f5a4bd4b8a12f0817bd4b54fae.jpg) | ![MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.57.23.888.png MPD-021_x2upscale.mp4_snapshot_00.57.23.888.png](https://www.akiba-online.com/data/attachments/3342/3342252-087af2dfbf15ffdd346748a4b7b06602.jpg) |