ASAP! I can't seem to get Google to find me what I want. It keeps showing me results for frikkin DVD/CD player upscalers. I DO NOT WANT. I want software that will upconvert some of my old files so that they can be played back in a 720p/1080p crispy clean resolution. Not upscale, convert! Anyone point me in the right direction? ~K.
What is your source material from and what format / resolution is it saved in on your PC? I've seen this questioned asked on the handbrake forums by people who want to take a DVD or some AVI file they have saved on their PC and upscale it to 1080p resolution just like you are trying to do. The general answer is that this method doesn't work. a) the source material is 480 (for DVD's) or lower -- there isn't a program on earth that can magically replace the lost data that a real 1080p film would have. b) it takes a god awful amount of time and your file size goes from roughly 1.2 gigs to 18 gigs for no reason at all. Generally, if you want upscaling for playback on your TV - an upscaling DVD or BlueRay player works fine. Most TV's have pretty decent upscaling chips in them. Because of that reason most people who are in to the home media server thing tend to scale down the resolution on the blue ray movies because visually there's no real picture difference.
*EDiT* Had to edit because....original reply was just me going off. *sigh* I'm gonna be pissed if upscaling is all there is. I thought for sure there was software out there that would upconvert? Fucking dammit. ~K.
There is no software that is magically going to create more lines of resolution for you and make anything look better. I work with scalers and scan converters all the time, and commercial grade stand-alone scalers that cost thousands of dollars do not improve video quality, so you aren't going to find software that does it. It all depends on the source material. The reason people scale things is to get one source to play at a different resolution to make it match a display, most times. NOT to improve video quality. If the source material only has 480 lines of resolution, you can run it through a scaler to format it so that a 1080p display will be able to display it, but it's only 1080p in the most technical of considerations... it doesn't actually look like what you think when you hear 1080p. I've done some installations for college or hospitals who have old ass VHS tapes from the 80s that they still use for training, and have scaled the output on a VCR to match all of the higher resolution equipment installed... so yeah there you go your 320x240 (or whatever VHS was) picture is now displayed in glorious 1080p.... annnnnd it looks exactly like it did before! Nothing that can be done about that short of "digital re-mastering" like they do on old movies sometimes and I'm not entirely sure what that is, tbh.
I know dude. It's all stretched. I been aware of what upscalers are doing...since there was 'upscaling'. This is why, I thought, by now [2011] there would have been some public release of some sort of relative software that was already emulating whatever the fuck it is that HollyWood studios are doing to their old films. Ugh, guess not.
Believe it or not, the Hollywood studio's are going back to the original 35mm film that was originally used to shoot the movie and reprocessing it using modern technology to output a 1080p film. At most the studios may be doing some color and timing correction digitally in the post production process but the point here is that the material is coming from the original stock. Interestingly enough - even film from the 50's and 60's has a better resolution than 1080p although you would never be able to tell with the displays from the time. ** as an example, you may remember some of the very very first HD-DVD films that were released. The studio's basically tried the approach you are looking to take. They used dvd material and upscaled it for playback in HD but it looked like crap.
At first I thought you were full of shit. But then I thought: "Why the flying fuck would HollyWood want to do that and waste their fucking time duplicating shit, probably for several different versions they would sell unless they were preparing for another/better forma--" "Oh crap! Are they already preparing for another/better industry standard/tech?!?" (HVD, ect) ~K.
We won't be seeing anything available in the residential market beyond 1080p for a little while yet. Hence the reason everyone is trying to push 3D now. Gotta sell something.
Dunno where you got that from but CES been showing HDTVs with 2/3Xs the HD resolution of current hardware for the last couple of years. (CinemaScope, ect). 3D is still niche-market. It ain't never ever gonna go beyond that. ~K.
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say there is nothing out there without higher resolution than 1080p, I said it will be awhile before it is available in the residential market. What you see at trade shows and what you can actually buy are 2 totally different things. As for 3D... like I said, they're only pushing it because they need something new to sell since high def is so common now. It will phase out and the next selling point will move in.
