VHS upscaling to HD?
 

I have seen some devices that state that they can upscale RCA to 720P and 1080P through HDMI. I am sure I will be biased for asking this, but what are your thoughts on this? I have seen some youtube videos with good results.

Example of one of these attached.

EDIT: I noticed that they output 60 frames per second, so that would be a problem.

That picture looks like it's actually the opposite, HDMI to RCA. When looking at ebay listings it seems some of them have pictures of both RCA to HDMI and HDMI to RCA connectors for the same product.

Anyway, we have a Converter box with that generic case where I work, which is RCA to HDMI 720P/1080P. I don't have an example picture at hand, but produces the most awful looking image imaginable full of Y/C artifacts. The RCA inputs on the TVs give a way better picture.

I'm not claiming all analog -> HDMI converter boxes are bad, but with these generic OEM boxes it's hard to say what you get. I do some analog capture via HDMI myself, but that's via a DVD recorder and at standard 576i, and some others here have experimented with devices that output via SDI (professional HDMI analogue). For capturing it's generally better to capture at standard resolution and scale up later after processing. Scaling makes it hard to to any post-capture work, and the scaler in the device will be much more limited than what a computer with lots of processing power and time can manage.

If you have a need for live analog input to a TV or monitor that only has HDMI, I would rather consider a used DVR or an AV receiver with HDMI out. For game consoles there are also specialized devices like RetroTINK.

How are they upscaling their footage?

https://vimeo.com/226560883

Though their standard VHS transfer looks quite blocky.

Man this is just a guess, but they probably ran the "better" footage through some AviSynth Filters and used a more accurate deinterlacer.

You ever use Adobe Premiere before? Make a new sequence with 1920x1080 resolution at 29.976 fps. Import your sd footage and just stretch it out. It's obviously going to look bad, but it's super easy to do. Literally as simple as click and dragging the corners of the video until they fill the preview window.

Don't do this because it will yield awful results.

Both the original and the scaled version look bad in terms of resolution, The original capture was bad, I bet if they have started from a lossless capture the up-scaling would have looked much much better.

The video in question looks like the original was digital, not an analog capture. Maybe miniDV or something. Though I agree neither of the versions look great, the "standard" version almost looks like it may even have been downscaled, but idk.