KBABZ wrote: Mon May 06, 2019 9:22 pm
Robo4900 wrote: Mon May 06, 2019 6:05 pm
Your TV then either upscales it to whatever resolution it displays at
Is there a difference between upscaling and, well, "enlarging" like in Photoshop?
No.
Well... Yes and no. It depends.
Basically, you have two kinds of upscaling...
First, You have the normal upscaling that your TV, your Blu-ray player, your PC's media player, etc. will do, which works like a Photoshop enlarge type affair (in fact, while I don't know about Photoshop for sure, if you use GIMP, one of the upscaling types it lets you pick is Lanczos3, which is most likely what the media player on your PC will use to upscale, if it uses a software filter); it spreads the picture out across more pixels to fit a larger frame size, turning a 720x480 DVD image into a 1440x1080 HD image. Or indeed the reverse, or indeed some other weird operation of a similar kind, including downscaling a 1920x1080 full HD image to a 1280x720 HD image.
Any commercially-released upscale Blu-ray will have done the same thing.
Then you have fancy upscalers like Waifu, which try to actually fake the image being higher-detail. I'll be honest, on a digital anime production, this can work surprisingly well; a straight upscale of the original will still look better, as Waifu and other such things tend to destroy subtlety in images, give an overall smeary look, etc... But it can work on digital animation, I'll admit.
Literally anything else, these fancy upscalers will just not work. A best case scenario would have it look something like Funi's DBZ Blu-rays.
There is at least one exception, I will admit; there's a somewhat-popular machine learning-based upscaling algorithm that's somewhat commonly-used for upscaling video game textures in the modding community. It's no-where near perfect, but I've heard it does tend to give better results than a standard upscale, so it's quite impressive.
But as far as upscaling video content from DVDs, or indeed for home media upscales, you'll really only have the standard upscaling algorithms, or the awful crap like Waifu that doesn't work, but people parade it around for some reason.
I suppose it is also worth noting, as an aside, that some of the more clever versions of a standard upscaler will involve "Super-resolution", which is a very fancy way of saying "it looks at previous and following frames to try to determine more detail than just upscaling an individual frame on its own", but this really isn't any kind of fancy, new trickery; my family's TV from like 2002 had super-resolution involved in its upscaling; that was one of the big things the marketing team bragged about on the box.
Basically "Super-resolution" is just a way of making a standard upscaling process look a bit better. It's not going to suddenly make your standard-def DVD from 1999 look like a Blu-ray release from last year, but it will certainly improve the process.
I imagine some of the stupid fancy ones like Waifu will involve super resolution at some point in its process, but really, I've never cared much to dig into exactly how and why Waifu works (or, more accurately,
doesn't work. Again, to be fair, it can work for digital productions, but in the context we're talking in, it doesn't).
The point of Dragon Ball is to enjoy it. Never lose sight of that.
