Downloading VHS/ Hi8 sourced YouTube clips, what is overkill?

[dtk17]

Youtube has become quite the source for many upgrades on classic concert bootlegs. The uploaders appear to go somewhat overkill with posting 1080p video though.

My question is: Is there ever a reason to download VHS/Hi8 sourced video in anything above 480p? The Kiss concert in the link below has an option for 720p or 1080p with 60fps. Would that make it worth the extra hard drive space?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO-29_XtCHg

[msgohan]

It isn't overkill. The reason to upscale before uploading to YouTube is that the higher resolutions are less degraded by YouTube. But even a 2160p60 YouTube-compressed version of a VHS looks worse than an original 480i or deinterlaced 480p encode sitting on your own hard drive.

At a minimum, 720p60 is required because that's the lowest setting where YouTube allows the original temporal resolution.

[latreche34]

If the video was 1080p before it got uploaded to youtube then you have to download it in its original quality (1080p), downloading it in 720p will not take you back to the original VHS quality, The upscaling is baked in and cannot be reversed. 720p has more compression artifacts and less resolution that will make the video look even worse, In other words two wrongs don't make right.