Booshman said:

Does anyone have any tips on upscaling the DVD footage from the RIC? I have magicbullet for after effects, but if there is a better option I’d like to know. I need to increase the the size by 28%, and it would be nice for it to look as good as possible.

I am not sure about magicbullet’s resizing filters, but it might be worth trying against some of the avisynth plugins (a comparison was done a few years ago, archived here: http://archive.is/7bvQj ). One thing to keep in mind is that cleaner ratios scale better ie 25% upscaled probably comes out sharper than 28% (3 lines into every 4) - sometimes a slight black windowbox is the least worst option - though not ideal when mixing sources.

The makers of the original disc must have messed up somewhere in their workflow and it means there are a lot of frames that look like this:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ZUak59n.jpg[/img]

Could this be sorted out with avisynth?

I have a fair amount of experience with deinterlacing across a variety of sources, but can’t tell what you are dealing with for certain without access to a short clip… but that ghosting appears to be blended fields (seen on some 24->PAL->23.976 conversions) in which case it is possible to bring back the original cadence (the old RePAL filter for Avisynth + a smartbob filter does the trick) but the footage will still have blurriness. Gets you back to 23.976 without dropped frames though.

In order to fill a 720P 4:3 frame vertically, the original 1080P source only needs to be scaled down to 96%.

I thought I would add that it makes more sense to trim the few lines off the 1080 source to make 720 rather than scaling it down 96%. You gain massively on image sharpness (very slight scaling does the most damage) and only lose 4% on the edges - hardly anything at all given what is already lost to the P&S process!