SD to HD..?

[miseryguts]

Hello to everyone here, this is a great & very informative forum (if a little intimidating for a novice like myself)

I have some .mp4 files I'm looking to upscale to something approaching HD, someone has told me that you can get reasonable results using Avisynth/VirtualDub & several other tools and plugins if you have some time & more importantly patience to spare.
I have never attempted anything like this before, is it something a complete novice could undertake..? I am looking to learn, but appreciate something like this may be running before walking.

I'd appreciate any input/advice.

Thanks.

[sanlyn]

Below is a link to a recent thread that addressed this question. There have been many similar posts.

The quick first part of the answer to your question is, yes, SD material can be upsized and encoded to HD.

The second part of the answer is that SD will not "look like" HD, any more than VHS can "look like" SD-DVD. The reason for this is basic: HD looks the way it does because it begins with higher resolution material. SD looks the way it doea because it is lower-resolution to bein with.

The third part of that answer is that the worst your source looks and plays -- and few sources look worse or more noisy than low-resolution VHS -- the more cleanup and repair has to be done to prevent source defects from entering the upscaling process. The more cleaning and repair you do, the more original data is lost, even if the loss is neglible with careful filtering. Magnify noise and data loss several times for HD, and you see the problem.

The 4th part of the answer that most SD sources, whether they are cleaned up a bit or not, are upsampled with much higher quality by hartdware circuits in aplayer, a/v receiver or TV than is possible with today's software, unless you're willing to invest a few hundred thousand bucks in the level of equipment that is used to convert SD to HD commercially -- and even then, a lot of it still looks like cleaned-up SD. Or worse.

That said, you might consider this recent discussion:

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/344223-upsizing-video-SD-to-HD