How do I upscale 5:4 to 16:9 ?

[Gotanno]

Hi all,

I'm in the processes of digitizing around 30 Video8 tapes from late 1980's to mid naughties (2000's), as a personal project.

I have captured a couple of tapes as 720x576 (5:4) HUFFYUV 4:2:2 (bitrate+- 65 mb/s)

I'm experimenting with file formats, size, quality, etc., and it seems that FFV1 is quite an interesting codec, so I have also transcoded the captured files from HUFFYUV to VVF1 4:2:0 (bitrate+- 35 mb/s), the latter being about 1/2 as large as HUFFYUV!

Now, I would like to improve the image as much as possible for it to play on 16:9 screens. I also plan on uploading it to YouTube.

How do I do this (the upscaling) using FREE software out there? I've installed virtualdub 2, handbrake, shotcut, avidemux....

I would like for the picture to fill the screen, so I am willing to zoom in and crop, etc. I'll leave the original files as 5:4 and archive them. I understand that it will NOT be anywhere near HD but I read somewhere that you can get quite decent results (better than looking at a square picture anyway)


Many thanks

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Hardware specs:

Camcorder: SonyDCR-TRV235E
Capture device: AVID Liquid Pro BOB, video captured via S-video (read that is preferable to DV if the source is analog).
PC: HP bs043cl Core i5 (7th gen), Windows 10, 12 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD drive and 1 1TB mechanical drive

[ehbowen]

Really, it sounds as if all you are doing is a simple mask and crop.

I know you're not me, but if it was me I'd just burn the original image to DVD as-is (well, with a little processing and masking to remove the garbage at the bottom of the screen) and then use the "cinema zoom" feature on my TV if I wanted the image to fill the entire screen.

[Gotanno]

Hey ehbowen.

Makes sense but I don't have a DVD player anymore, nor does anyone I know.

I would like to share the videos with family and guess the delivery (devise/ mechanism?) would be either pen drive , or, more likely, YouTube (smart TV/chrome cast /firestick).

[sanlyn]

Pen dive? What would grandma do with a pen drive?
Smart TV? I don't have one. Don't want one, either.

Get out your TV's user guide and learn to use the zoom feature. You paid for it, didn't you? Anyone who told you that doing what you propose gets "decent results" is clueless, not to mention blind as a salamander. Those who know better will tell you that your tv's hardware zoom control gets better results than software upscaling, and is 'way ahead of what you'd get with Virtualdub's second-rate resizing, and especially after third-rate deinterlacing and encoding.

Now, if you're talking third-rate and fourth-rate video (forget the word "improvement" -- you're clearly not into that), then YouTube's reputation for mutated video is your venue. Deinterlace your video in VirtualDuib with the yadif filter. Resize your video to 1920x1440 (that's the correct 4:3 aspect ratio of your original, you know) using the bicubic resizer which is nice and blurry just enough to soften the rough edges from yadif deinterlacing. To get a 1920x1080 16:9 picture from that, take your 1920x1440 image and cut 180 pixels off the top, then cut 180 pixels off the bottom. That will give you 1920x1080 (i.e, 16:9). Now encode it, and leave it deinterlaced for YouTube. You can use ffvi if you want, but when YouTube gets it they'll really chew it up with low bitrate high-loss encoding no matter how you encode it and will likely resize it as well. To really mesh with the YouTube crowd, when you deinterlace be sure to discard odd-numbered fields. That will cut your temporal resolution by 50% and look a little jerky during motion, but...well, after all, it'll be on YouTube, right? The whole world will be looking at it. Also, if you encode with ffv1 you might want to be aware that very few external players will recognize it, and no one's PC will play it unless they have ffv1 installed.