No, it’s not actually this bad, but the fan remasters I have seen definitely suffer from the usual AI “upscaling” issues like smooth skin, weird text, etc. What is the best quality these shows can actually be found in?
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AI disclaimer: If it’s not obvious, the punchline at the bottom is an AI-generated image. I found it by browsing already-generated Trek-themed AI images. I believe this post fits the AI rule on this community, but I understand if not. My first idea for the punchline was to run a photo of the DS9 cast through a 2015-ish Deep Dream model or whatever (the kind that makes nonsense like this), but apparently that’s no longer a thing.
Teach a man to fish…
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/324466-tutorial-how-to-upscale-star-trek-deep-space-nine
Starting with 480p tho, you’re gonna have to be realistic with what you can end up with. What you’ve found and what you’re complaining about might be the best possible image quality already.
Don’t count out device level upscaling either. Having that on top of the AInl upscaler might help, or it might make your problems worse.
I’ve got a 4k TV that does a really good job of upscaling, so for me the Goldilocks zone is upscaling to 1080, then letting the TV upscale. Rather than trying to upscale to 4k and play that natively.
Good info.
There’s also a lot of tweaking that can be done. Things like changing the scheduler can have a huge difference on things like smooth skin, some schedulers focus on low frequency details (like large objects in the image) and less on high frequency details (like skin texture).
If you want studio quality upscaling while coming from a low res image, you’ll really want to have a person looking at every frame and tweaking settings and cleaning up manually with photoshop. This seems like the kind of thing some dedicated nerd will do eventually, assuming the IP owner doesn’t do it first.