What is the best way to upscale videos.

[Felow]

Obsolete

[manono]

This process is very time consuming and I believe hurts the quality...

You're right. It's also so bad as to be almost laughable if you hadn't said you were a beginner at this.

If you're serious about your video hobby, it'll be in your best interest to learn AviSynth. It has one of the best upscalers - freeware or commercial - in nnedi_rpow2. You can also resize, add videos together and cut out parts you don't want. All in a single script. Once done and tested you send it off to the encoder of choice for x265 encoding. RipBot264 will do the job, as well as a number of other encoders.

Others might have other suggestions.

[amaipaipai]

I'm a newbie myself in relation with avisynth, I can do very basic stuff but enough to do what I need. The best tool to resize a video by far is @hello_hello CropResize script, there you can find some samples and script examples.

From my experiences, quality wise H.264 and H.265 are the same, use H.265 if you are encoding 4k and up otherwise stay with H.264. Two-pass-encoding comes from the old days of divx and xvid when you are targeting a specific output file size, don't use it if your target it's quality, if you want to keep visual quality you use CRF instead. The drawback of H.265 is that it requires more hardware power to decode and not every equipment are compatible with it.
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265

For preset configuration use 'veryfast' instead of 'slow/veryslow' you get basically the same quality, a smaller size and half the encoding time (or better).
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffmpeg/comments/bhs6vf/x264_veryfast_preset_giving_best_size/
https://write.corbpie.com/ffmpeg-preset-comparison-x264-2019-encode-speed-and-file-size/
http://dev.beandog.org/x264_preset_reference.html

As for tutorials for avisynth (how to use, install, etc) there is tons of tutorials on YouTube and in this forum as well.

[Felow]

Isn't there something similar to avisynth but with a GUI?.

[aedipuss]

if it were me i'd use a video editing program like vegas pro to add all the source videos on to a timeline and then render out to whatever format you want.

[johns0]

Vidcoder.

[aedipuss]

i like vidcoder also. but if you add 2 or more videos to it's inbox, it doesn't join them. you get separate videos for each input. unless i'm missing something....

[Felow]

Thanks a lot looks like Vidcoder is what I was looking for! it will make my life easier, I will still use Avidemux to Cut and merge my videos because you can see what you're cutting.

[magnu]

You could try DVDFab, which has a program called Enlarger AI that does quite a good job with very little knowledge?

[Hoser Rob]

if you really must concat & resize (can't quite see why myself), wouldn't it make a lot more sense to DOWNSAMPLE the res on the 1080p videos?

[magnu]

There are a number of reasons I can see for wanting to do such a thing and upscale. For example, there's a TV show called Sharpe which has episodes released on Blu-Ray in movie format. However those episodes were originally two-parters and have had some scenes removed from them. Therefore, if you want to reinstate those particular scenes and at the same time have the best quality overall, you would upscale those scenes and hopefully they would match?

[Felow]

if you really must concat & resize (can't quite see why myself), wouldn't it make a lot more sense to DOWNSAMPLE the res on the 1080p videos?

The 1080p videos have great quality so I prefer not to downscale them.
https://imgur.com/a/LcGrEbN
Cuting and merging 20 small video into one is certainly helpful for me.

[lordsmurf]

This process is very time consuming and I believe hurts the quality so I'm looking for an alternative if there is one.

This. Waste of time to degrade quality.

[babygdav]

The usual programs noted for upscaling is becoming obsolete because they can't create new detail in areas that you expect. They only estimate based on what's there.

Movie companies are moving to AI upscaling.
https://doddlenews.com/ai-used-to-upscale-sd-to-4k/
https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/05/tutorial-upscaling-video-with-topaz-ai.html
https://www.dvdfab.cn/enlarger-ai.htm

https://bigjpg.oss-cn-shenzhen.aliyuncs.com/demo.png This is for an anime specific ai upscaler, but you get the idea.

[amaipaipai]

There are AI tools available for video already been used by professionals in the area, but they are not free yet. Behind the scenes some of this tools has been available like 2 or 3 years prior public releases.

https://topazlabs.com/gigapixel-ai/
https://videoai.topazlabs.com/
https://www.gdflab.com/
etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7QxthCBttw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0OR1g5vk0c

I work with Blackmagic tools like Davinci Resolve and they have this already since version 15 (current version is 16), they call it "neural engine", their tool can do a lot more than upscale videos like removing scene objects and other fancy things in their "studio" version, some examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6fl-wahdC4

[JoyBell]

I used Stax to upsample Rick and Morty from 1080p to 2160p with pretty good results. The key is to use the best resizer and also apply a good sharpen, or else you just get blurry blown up results.
I also upsampled (for my personal collection) Zombieland, before Sony released the UHD, my work came out better than the studios 4K. Done the same for Princess Bride and Farris Buellers Day Off. Much better results from clean sources than grainy ones. Need to have details to grab in the first place.

Screens of Rick & Morty 1080p Blu-ray vs Joys Encoded 2160p
https://slowpics.org/comparison/cc043a43-e043-45c8-8fec-55c31da5f0ab