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STAR WARS: EP IV 2004 REVISITED ADYWAN *1080p HD VERSION NOW IN PRODUCTION — Page 460

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I’ve done it before, turns out it’s a very tedious job. First, you have to upscale it to 480p, then you convert the video to 720p, upscale that to 720p, then convert the video to 1080p, upscale it to 1080p, then so on.

I’ve done it before, it’s a long staking process, I think I would be fine with doing it because, my computer can handle that force. I think. Last time, it took 28hrs, and I thought it was a waste because, there were certain artifacts that I wasn’t particularly fond w/ seeing.

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But, then again, I don’t feel like it’s worth it on my part. I would leave it up to the professional who has the proper video upscaling equipment, AKA a registered Topaz Video Enhancer AI…

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G&G-Fan said:

Isn’t the video in 480p to start? Why would you need to upscale it to that?

How does it look? Are you willing to share your upscale? I would be curious to see it in 1080p or at least 720p.

Also, there was someone who made this. Apparently they upscaled it to 4K and it looks absolutely incredible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6mA1U3lUVc

That video was part of ANH:R (HD), not (SD).

Besides, I’ve deleted mine a while back, I cannot share it. One thing that I would give a heads up is, if you upscale it directly from 480p to 1080p/4K, there will be huge pixels on the video.

You need to upscale it gradually to prevent this. Anyone up to the task, I wish you good luck.

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 (Edited)

That depends very much on how you upscale it. If you just do a ‘Nearest Neighbour’ upscale to 1080p, then yes, it will be made up of ‘giant pixels’: 2 or 3 pixel wide/tall rectangles. If you perform an upscale with a different algorithm - bilinear, or Lanczos, or any of the upscalers you can use in AE/Premiere like Adobe’s Detail-Preserving Upscale algorithm, or Red Giant Instant 4K etc. - then you most certainly won’t have ‘giant pixels’. Unfortunately, there’s not much point doing that, because those upscalers are, frankly, only slightly better than what your TV already does in real time when you play 480p 576p files on a 1080p or 4K screen.

The real trick comes with machine learning upscalers. Unlike algorithmic upscalers (the ones described previously) which essentially just perform some maths on the image, these actually have some sense of what they’re looking at. They’ve been ‘trained’ for many many hours on pairs of images, one low res and one high res, to be able to notice patterns and recognise things in a way much closer to how we as humans perceive images. The most consumer-friendly of these currently is Topaz Labs’ Video Enhance AI, but others exist like TecoGAN and SOFVSR. Getting a good result out of these requires a good video card, lots of trial and error, and plenty of patience, however.

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Yeah, take the PAL DVD9 720x576 video track, change the framerate from 25fps to 23.976fps, upscale that, then pair it with the NTSC DVD9 Dolby 5.1 audio track. Upscaling based on the downscaled NTSC release just seems like a bad place to start.

There’s already an MKV floating around made from the PAL DVD9 that basically does everything I mentioned minus the upscaling part.

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My brain has gradually melted over the last half dozen comments I just read. Genuinely you all sound like you were written by unedited George Lucas and all I can think to do is bow to my technologically savvy superiors. 😮

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I think what someone should do is, take the Revisited PAL-9, throw it into the Aimersoft Video Converter, convert it to either MP4, or MKV. Then, use the same program to convert it to 720p. Use the Topaz Video Enhancer AI to upscale to 720p, rinse and repeat.

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You don’t want to use Aimersoft or any other tool to crudely resize it, because VEAI works best if you just feed stuff in at its native resolution (sometimes, a slight downscale prior to processing can actually help). There’s a lot of information about this here and in Joel Hruska’s other posts about his Deep Space 9 project (warning: Star Trek).

This is straying fairly off-topic; I’m pretty sure there are already other topics for this.

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I ran ESB:R through Topaz AI to upconvert to 4K. It took a few days and the program either locked up or crashed at least 10 times before I finally got it to go through. I think it looks sharper and the blacks look blacker. I might be able to do even better if I understood all the settings. I upconverted ANH:R with DVD Fab. The file size went from 1.82GB to 13.6GB, but it’s not that much better-at least I don’t see it.

The shot of Vader’s tie leaving the Death Star always bothers me. The three ties are locked together as they fly off. Here is the concept I’m working on in After effects. Moving on to Element 3D in hopes of making a worthy clip-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr1LsNolYaw

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adywan said:

THE REVISITED SAGA WILL NOW ALL BE RELEASED IN 1080P INSTEAD OF JUST 720P

Upscaling ESB:R should only take a month or two. Luckily i still have all of the project files so, if needed, i can replace a shot that isn’t working in the upscale with a newly rendered version. Then i can move onto ANH:R. All the work i have done so far on ROTJ has all been in 1080p, so no need to do any upscaling there. ROTJ:R will be native 1080p.

Adywan, Thanks very much for your intending on upscaling ANH:R to 1080p. I saw samples of the VFX that you’ve created for ANH:R and I wanted to check it out on my 54-inch TV, but I couldn’t tolerate the image quality being below 1080p (once I go 1080p, I’ll never go back), so I held back on watching it.

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Is the ANH:R upscale gonna be different than ANH:RHD?

After being beaten and battered by prequel hate, I promise not to be that to the next generation.

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He’ll upscale ANH:RHD from 720p to 1080p. The original ANH:R from 2008 will stay 576p, I think.

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He was making it in 720p, and isn’t going to start over again again.

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Right and I imagine we’ll get ANH shortly after the Empire upscale since he’s probably nearing the home stretch for ANH:R HD. It’s ROTJ that’s a long ways off.

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timdiggerm said:

Maybe, but he’s previously said he wants to release ANHRHD & ROTJR simultaneously. Being able to release them as a 3-pack would make sense.

Given how long ROTJ:R will take, maybe it would be better to release them as they’re completed. At the very least, it’d be nice to have the cleaned-up ROTJ as its own release.

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Absolutely. Hate to sound impatient or entitled but I’d much rather have them be released as they’re done so I can watch them as soon as possible.

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