Also, I came up with a new way to upscale videos for Youtube. Use OBS.
OBS has a scaling feature. You can downscale or upscale. And since you can run video files through OBS----you can effectively upscale them in real time. Previously, I was using a program which uses a very CPU intensive super resolution scaling algorithm, for upscale. The quality is amazing, but it encodes at like 2-6 fps on my quad core, for 2K or 4K upscale. That’s like 12 minutes to upscale the 40 second Dark Souls 2 clips I was testing.
In OBS, you encode in real time. and it uses a lightweight Lanczos scaler. The quality of scaling isn’t as good. But this is just to fake out youtube into thinking a 720p recording is 2K or 4K, so that youtube will put more bitrate on it. You can also do it at 60fps. So if your original video is 30fps—this effectively frame doubles it (not frame interpolation) to 60fps. And youtube assigns more bitrate for that, as well.
So I can run my video files through OBS and upscale them at whatever framerate I choose (assuming my hardware can keep up). Just crank the bitrate and let it rip! I tested a Soul Caliber 6 clip set for a 2K upscale at 60,000kbps bitrate and it was no problem. And at a bitrate such as that, the encoder you use doesn’t really matter. So, just use something fast! Like Quicksync or NVENC. I tested it with Quicksync.