Adventures in Upscaling: Handbrake and Nero AI

[OKC Yeakey Trentadue]

While ripping Blurays again, I noticed that Handbrake had a 4k upscale option so I wanted to see if there was an improvement over my standard encodes.

4k settings: medium speed, crf 22, h.265 cpu
1080p settings: slower speed,crf20,h264

What you are looking at is a small boat in the distance now zoomed way in. The first screen (4k) definitely looks sharper.

Size (had I not messed with dtsHD pass thru was about 10 GB for the 4k and 5 GB for the 1080p.

Other downsides, besides larger file despite hevc, was the halt day processing time. I will try 4k H265 using the GPU next once my day long HD upscale of Heat using Nero AI.

 

[OKC Yeakey Trentadue]

Ok now I tried upscaling using both Nero ai and the handbrake upscaler. The pics should load as DVD, 1080p ai Nero, 1080p HB upscaled, and 1440x960 HB upscaled.

Beyond taking forever, the Nero results were rather ugly. Perhaps I am not using the settings correctly, but I tried alot of different ways.

Handbrake did alot better. I used max 1080p resolution with optimized scaling first, but I think the best results are from doing a simple 4x pixel upscale to 1440x960.

 

[OKC Yeakey Trentadue]

Nero upscale is complete garbage in quality, time completed, etc

For now, I will just do handbrake crf 20, ac3 pass thru and aac with h264 1080p for most movies (around 7 GB).

For movies I really like, I will two versions: h.265 4k crf 22 with dts pass thru, ac3, and aac (don't have ears, audio equipment or HDD space for e-ac3 or dts-hd pass thru; 15-18 GB)

Second version will be for max compatibility: H 264 1080p crf 23 with lower audio quality, but still good enough (3-4 GB)