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I have a ripped DVD that I want to have digitally upscaled to 1080p. I have access to the editing software Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. I know Premiere is able to upscale when exporting, but I'm not happy with the results and I'm looking for a better solution.

So in short, what is the best way to upscale a 480p video to 1080p?

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  • Until now just simply 'set to frame size' in Adobe Premiere. The result was pretty noisy with visible artifacts – Gerlof Leuhof Jan 24 '18 at 22:21
  • Can you share a preview of your worst effect frames? – Ambo100 Jan 24 '18 at 22:22
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    Ripping we assume provides the best quality (unless it's compressing) so if you're getting noise and blockiness or blur it's probably multiple compression. Uploading a screenshot of a bad frame would be helpful. -- Also what do you mean "minimal quality loss"?, 2x and no compression will cause the least alteration but will be blocky, Lanczos3 + sharpen 64 will produce good results (for free) but alters the image (which is desirable), paying for infognition.com/articles/video_resize_shootout.html gives excellent results. Simple upscaling and double compressing is the worst. – Rob Jan 26 '18 at 2:38
  • In the meanwhile I searched around as well and tried different methods. I got good results using a bit of a complex method. I exported all my 480p frames as png's, then used waifu2x-caffe (github.com/lltcggie/waifu2x-caffe) to upscale all png's times 2. Then I loaded the results back in Premiere. It's not perfect but the quality especially on frames with sparse movement is excellent. I'll try to answer my own question with image examples later. – Gerlof Leuhof Jan 26 '18 at 16:19
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You can upscale Premiere Pro footage using the Detail-preserving Upscale effect in After Effects via Dynamic Link. The results will never be as good as actual HD footage, but the Detail-preserving Upscale effect does a great job at scaling footage without losing too much quality. There's a short tutorial on how to do this at the following link:

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  • I’ve also heard that AviSynth’s Nnedi3 rpow2 function is good for upscaling. Any thoughts on how this compares to After Effects? Plus there’s Topaz Gigapixel AI which uses AI data for upscaling while keeping sharpness – I was quite impressed! That would be another tool worth comparing. – Simon East Sep 21 at 13:48

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