Ah, thanks for the explanation and the clips. I’ve been upscaling the series (just to 1080p; not 4K: diminishing returns and all) for my own personal consumption and have made it to mid-season 5 already, and I wish I’d known about de-rainbowing filters earlier on when that was more of an issue. Running three passes of Topaz must take forever - I’m on a 1070, and I’ve found running even a single pass of the Gaia models prohibitively time consuming, hence I’ve settled with a single 200% Dione Interlaced Robust pass. Despite the name I’ve found it works impressively well for progressive footage; even recent 1080p Blu-rays. To get from the 1440x960 Topaz gives me to 1440x1080, I use Red Giant Instant 4K in Premiere (but just because I already had it; I bet bilinear filtering or the built-in ‘detail-preserving upscale’ or whatever Resolve has would work just the same) and then add a little noise and sharpening.
I processed the same bit of S06E06 as you did for your second clip so I could decide whether to nick borrow your methodology or not. Here’s my attempt if you’re curious. (I unfortunately don’t have access to the PAL DVDs and am stuck wrangling the framerate fun of the NTSC ones, so this is in VFR. That does however luckily mean I get to avoid the extra processing time of Avisynth/Staxrip and QTGMC. I think the frame skip with Odo at the very beginning is a consequence of me separating this bit out as that sort of thing doesn’t occur when I process full episodes.) Yours has better sharpness with the large, bold details - things like the Defiant’s text - and generally looks cleaner, thus avoiding issues mine sometimes suffers from like ‘dirty’ looking eyeballs. I think mine better retains the fine details, however. Could this be a consequence of the PAL vs NTSC sources? Yours is also noticeably cropped at the sides. I know the very edges shouldn’t really be visible and often have irritating green or yellow lines etc., but the crop you’ve gone with cuts off quite a bit. Is that intentional, or is it inherent to the PAL DVDs?