Also, DS2 is a game that looks beautifully without any anti-aliasing filter (Majula at the very least).
But even with anti-aliasing, everything looks pretty sharp everywhere on that town, so even just a standard sharp upscale looks amazing.
But Sekiro is pretty blurry, even as I had with lower setting, and no anti-aliasing.
Lots of stuff going around, instead of large surfaces with a complex texture.
But ultimately I’ll want to sharpen a bit specifically because of the speed.
The game moves really fast, and yes, it has motion blur (it was on medium setting there). But add that to 3x compression (recording, editing, youtubing)… and the somewhat subtle but quick movements just disappear.
That is also another reason why I am always testing the full fight. This fight specifically has a lot of that. On the non filtered versions of the SS you can’t see any detail of Genichiro’s character, while on the original version you can see a few, and on the sharpen version you can see too much.
So yeah, depending on the game and what you want out of it, spending that extra time working with a filter to sharpen an upscale is always worth it on the long run.
Holy cow I got a 4K upscale to finish processing and it even has sound. Tell me what you think:
Dark Souls 2’s artwork doesn’t really have much more detail to give. But there is a teeny little bit more. However, The added bitrate has cleaned up even more of the image. Less noise around skinny stuff and high contrast edges. Also, distant things are more clear. such as the floor at the bottom of the stair well as you come down it, the ceiling of the stairwell as you approach, the cliffs outside, etc. And the dark shadowy transition as you go into the stairwell, is really good, now. It was still a little blurred and blocked, in the 1440p youtube.
Screens for comparison. As usual, one of them is a smidge different due to the frame youtube decided to skip to.
So at this point, youtube has given us enough bitrate that we are very nearly as good of quality as the source file, in terms of minimizing blocking, blurring, and artifacts. And the up-scaling process shines through with better texture detail.
The biggest problem left, is that Youtube’s VP9 codec messes with color way more than H.264 does. It pushes blues and yellows. in the outdoor shots, that can ruin some detail on the distant ground. Where many spots don’t have a lot of color variety and the textures are too far to resolve much detail. and that color squash can make it look a touch too saturated. There are also some subtle texture aspects lost here or there, due to the color squash. Such as smooth stonework.
However, with the overall good presentation and the added clarity of the upscale: Watching this in motion is kinda better, if you focus on the character. Otherwise, its very nearly as good, overall.
This is off topic but it’s a YouTube problem I’m having. My upload speed is super low when I upload to YT. It’s not my connection. I could upload way faster but it seems YT is throttling it way down. It’s there a way around this besides perhaps having a million subscribers?
I think I’ll try uploading to vimeo right now. I’m just looking to upload videos for private use, so they don’t take up space on my drive
Searching around online, all the people talking about this upscaling trick are also talking about game footage. Is frame rate a factor? I’m assuming game streamers never work in 23.976 or 29.97.
Since Youtube re-processes everything you feed it, Everything probably ends up as 30fps or 60fps.
I should try encoding some 30fps footage as 60fps. Not frame interpolation, just extra frames. I wonder if it would trick Youtube into giving me more bit-rate. Because they use more bitrate, for 60fps stuff.
It works. If you take a 30fps source and re-encode it with a 60fps framerate (not frame interpolation, just doubling frames), it tricks youtube into thinking its 60fps material and it assigns more bitrate.
Again, Dark Soul’s artwork here is at its limits, especially considering we are using an 720 upscaled source. But this has been an interesting venture and now you know what hoops you gotta jump through, to get your 720p or 1080p game captures, to look pretty darn great, on youtube.
This is a 720p 30fps source file, upscaled to 2k/1440p 40mbps. and then I re-encoded it through handbrake, with 60fps 80mbps. The resulting file looked completely identical to the previous 1440p 30fps @ 40mbps, which you can find in the first post of this thread. I simply doubled the bitrate for the extra frames, giving youtube every possible chance to do ok with it.
I’m sure its possible to do the 60fps during the upscale encode instead of encoding it another time, in handbrake. but I couldn’t get it to work. The x.264 VFW plugin is cranky. Something like Sony Vegas would make this way easier.
screenshots. look at the ceiling of the stairwell. look at the rocks on the far right. Especially the big one in the very back, behind the tree. that’s the sort of smooth rock and stone texture, which the 30fps 1440p version still had trouble with. I think it looks even better than the 4K 30fps upload, too.
2k/1440p 60fps (ignore the video label in the screenshot. I had it mislabed as 4K for a bit)
Open source animation and video encoding darling: BIG BUCK BUNNY
I thought it might be interesting to go through the same process, with something very different.
I grabbed their official 2k/1440p 30fps torrent download and made a roughly 30 second, 720p 30fps file from that, with Handbrake. I uploaded that to youtube.
Not a lot of artifacts and blocking. But, its pretty smeary with the fur and faces. Also look at the shadows on bunny, as he draws his bow. And everything is soft. Not a lot of texture details in buck bunny. But those which are there, are smeared in this youtube video.
So then I took my 720p/30 from Handbrake, upscaled it back to 2K/1440p, and then I doubled the frames to 60fps-----and uploaded it to youtube.
These videos line up perfectly. So you can pause it from the start and then use your arrow keys to skip through and compare frames. Open one video in its own window. Then you can full screen and alt tab between the two, while in full screen.
and here is one shot from the 2Kupscale source file, for you to compare and see that the 2K/60 upscale on youtube, isn’t too far off.
You’d be surprised how often actual production companies will just download our videos using a YouTube downloader rather than have me send the version from our collection. I’ll jump through so many hoops trying to maintain a lossless workflow on tapes that have to be pieced together from multiple passes and these dudes are cool with mystery YouTube quality.
