So in terms of upscaling AOTC, I compared a straight lanczos3 4K upscale up against a waifu2xphoto denoised 4k upscale.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/1743
As you can see some objects scale well that already have sharp lines, but most of it is still a blurry mess and doesn’t look that much better. I used the maximum setting for denoising which cleans up all the image but does scrub away some detail. So essentially there’s no big difference.
The reason being is that the shot is already cropped in from the full 1080p output of the camera with poor upscaling, so the footage is already sub-1080p. George Lucas frequently cropped shots in, sometimes for a zoom effect. AI upscaling usually only looks good if the input is in it’s native resolution. If it’s been previously upscaled it blurs the input and the AI can’t find the edges and fine detail.
What might work better is a multi-frame upscale for each shot that accounts for details that change across the frames.