Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I do a lot of AI upscaling, specifically 1080p to 2160p with Topaz VEAI, and its quite good. That said, it isn't magic. It requires a really good source before hand (avoid anything with film grain or has been compressed) and you do not want to make a giant leap. The key idea is the more you tell the AI to fill in the gaps, the more you will get AI shenanigans. If you have a good clean BR rip, then the AI can bring it up to 4k quite easily.

what is the definitive best way to upscale to 1080p in 2023?

1080p to 4k is quite easy, but getting something to 1080p is massive mountain to overcome. Like I said above, you want to leave as little to the AI as possible. Bringing something sub-HD to HD means entrusting the AI with a lot since there isn't much detail to begin with. My best efforts have been 720p-1080p upscales, but I have had some good results with upscaling the 1990s Sabrina live action series and off the top of my head that is 480p. If you look really hard on those upscales, you can see some strangeness like how words in the back ground are just gibberish or maybe a hand doesn't move exactly right, but it is a vast upgrade over the terrible DvD release with its low resolution and interlacing.

If you are going to upscale, I recommend Topaz VEAI. Its really easy to learn (I went from having no video editing experience to being able to do some competent upscales in three months), its a lifetime license with a year of upgrades, and frankly its the best on the market. The only drawback is like any AI, you need a hefty rig. I am rocking a 3080ti, i9 processor, and 128gb of RAM. Its also very time consuming. My hefty rig can do the upscaling part in about 45 minutes, but even taking the mild tweaking in DaVinci out of the equation, encoding that same episode is going to take a good 11 hours unless you want a 200gb episode on your Hard Drive. (Please do not trust Topaz to encode for you, its a good upscaler but its better to let Handbrake do your encodes). Throw in the deinterlacing I do before I even run it through Topaz, and it can take me 24 hours of work spread out over a week to get an episode done.

If you have any specific questions, I will be happy to answer them.

I upscaled some old porn movies using this, but my 2080ti started flickering afterwards. Probably better to use the free Google resources: https://github.com/k4yt3x/video2x

I do this quite frequently for a certain youtube channel, you'll want MakeMKV, Hybrid, and Topaz. If you really want to go all out and make a huge project out of it you can upscale each scene individually and stitch them back together in Premier, ain't nobody got time for that though.

Rip the disc with MakeMKV.

Then open and deinterlace the file with hybrid, I use the QTGMC filter, if you're doing film content you should use ivtc. Do any other filtering or denoising in Hybrid, the video really needs to be clean before upscaling. Then export it in a lossless file format with passthrough audio.

Load that file into Topaz and upscale it with the Proteus AI model, I use the manual setting (40,20,10,1,3,-2) with 25% original detail recovery and the grain filter on a low setting to help restore what the filtering removed. Your settings will need to be adjusted for each project. Export again in the highest quality that you can, then load that file into your favorite encoder and compress it down to whatever size/bitrate you want. Topaz's encoder doesn't have any configuration options so I use Hybrid to do the final encode.

Before you upscale it is crucial to get the best rip possible. To my knowledge the best ripping and deinterlacing process is called QTGMC.

After that, experiment with AI upscalers. But the best Upscalers will only get so far when the initial rip isnt as best as possible.

Well, I just ripped a few of my old DVDs with handbrake, and I upscaled by setting the resolution to 720p and ensuring the "upscale" cjljeckbox is ticked.

Tovmy eye, it looks pretty good on my 55" 1080p TV, and I noticed in my voddeo player it scaled to my display size appropriately. If I imply ripped it, the video would have a hugee black box around it ony high red display.

I'd say using handbrake is fairly effective once you get it off the disk, for which I used a rip to mkv app in Linux.