Laserschwert said:

Jonno said:

for display at 1024x768 square pixels (you do accept that, right?)

No, I don't ;)

And I'm pretty sure, you've used the word "effective" wrong, as the effective resolution of a PAL DVD is always going to be 720x576, no matter how big you stretch that image. That's all I wanted to point out.

Ah, I mistyped the second resolution statement (of course it isn't 1024x768, I meant 1024x576 as per my initial post).

It's quite possible I used the word 'effective' wrong in an attempt to differentiate from 'actual' (are the two in fact the same, then?) I was simply trying to express to the OP that a 16:9 PAL image imported into a square pixel 1920x1080 workspace will occupy 1024x576 pixels; a considerably more generous starting point for upscaling than non-anamorphic letterboxed NTSC (the next best thing from laserdisc sources) and one that yields impressive results if using a high quality scaling engine (I use InstantHD with Adobe, but I appreciate more folks around these parts are Avisynth inclined).

I chimed in here because I've been doing a lot of this kind of thing myself - making intro reels for various films using original cinema ads and trailers. It's frustrating at times because of the low quality of most sources - I've had to employ quite the bag of tricks to make scuzzy SD stuff sit happily next to the HD main feature. I've quickly realised that Youtube rips are pretty unconvincing - soft is ok, blocky is not. I'll be very interested to see your results if you share them (and I hope there are more helpful leads on SW trailers!)

back when TVs and broadcast signals were launched, they didn't use resolutions like 1024x768

Well, no. They didn't.