I recently purchased a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K to round out my photography experience with new videography challenges, and all of the company’s cameras come with the full version of their Da Vinci Resolve software that’s traditionally used to put together and color grade movies. I’ve spent a couple of weeks watching dozens upon dozens of tutorials, and the one feature that stood out to me was its ability to upscale video intelligently. With speculation in the air about Nintendo releasing a Nintendo Switch 2 or Nintendo Switch Pro that supports 4K, I got to wondering if this technology could be used to upscale 1920x1080 Switch footage into believable 3840x2160 video. It turns out you can, given the right circumstances, and it’s very impressive when all of the stars align. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

First, an affiliate link to Da Vinci Resolve because I spent my money on this instead of a console and have no money now

My first stop was the safest bet: Aokana

There are going to be a lot of thumbnails in this post and few of them are going to be readable because increasing their quality would cause this page to load slowly for most people. Every image embedded into this page can be clicked for a high-quality 4K jpg version that’ll load in-page. Those of you who are reading this on a sub-4K monitor or TV can click the image to zoom in 100% and see things better.

With that out of the way, there’s nothing left to do but to explain what’s happening here. Basically, I recorded video at 1920x1080 with all of the quality settings cranked to their maximum values. The cleanest, least compressed signal has the best chance of upscaling well (that’s also why I recorded at 60 frames per second despite none of the games I’m showing off making use of it). After dragging the video and audio into the timeline, the first stop is in the clip settings. Specifically, I’m using the “Super Scale” option that intelligently increases the resolution of your video. A visual novel game like Aokana with no aliasing and virtually no movement is a best-case scenario for this tool, so I set it to 2X and medium sharpening because going beyond that looks oversharpened and causes weird halos between colors.

Then it’s on to the Color tab, though not to mess with the color. The color tab has the best sharpening tool, though, and dragging down the blur radius below .50 quickly sharpens up the image. It doesn’t take much to overdo it, so I settle on .48 as a middle ground between too blurry and oversharpened.

Then it’s time to switch to the deliver tab and export the 4K file. I only used H.264 because it’s a standard at a place that I’ve been submitting stock videos to. Shrug. The program defaults to the best settings and you just have to name the file and tell it where to save. It couldn’t be easier. The export ends up taking 4 minutes and 27 seconds, but that’s not bad at all. I thought upscaling a clip to 4K would take longer.

These video comparisons are best viewed on a 4K display

Here’s an image comparing the original (stretched) & 4K render

You don’t need a 4K display to see the difference in the still image above. I captured a frame from both videos, then stretched the original video’s screenshot to the 4K resolution and cut holes in different spots so that the two can be compared. I used black borders to show where the holes are. If you zoom in to 100%, you can definitely see that the upscaled Da Vinci Resolve version has resulted in something that’s 4K. It just is. Apparently, Aokana maxes out at 1440p even on PC, so this might be the highest-resolution in-game Aokana screenshot ever posted. Well, half-screenshot. Whatever. I’m just glad that this worked.

Flying too close to the sun with Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Aokana only showed off how well things can work under ideal conditions, so I decided to get a little more complicated and pit the tool against Fire Emblem: Three Houses. The game has a confusing mishmash of art styles that the console can barely handle, and the problems became apparent immediately: the lower rendering resolution and strange art style conspire to cause shimmering, and Da Vinci Resolve tries to replicate this shimmering since it’s a part of the original game. I tried to soften this a bit by increasing the Super Scale option to 3X (this is the only game that the higher scales made a visible difference on), but “garbage in, garbage out” applies here. Sometimes, there’s only so much you can do to improve a clip.

The aliasing is a big problem, so I got a bit more aggressive with the sharpening for this one to compensate, dropping the blur radius (which again, sharpens when set below .50) to .46 and the scaling to .19 in order to reduce how much of the image is sharpened and focus on emphasizing the edges.

Increasing the Super Scale value drastically increases the amount of behind-the-scenes work that the computer has to do, resulting in a drastically longer render time of 28 minutes and 29 seconds. The end result isn’t as bad as it could be, but I’m not sure that it’s good enough to justify a 30-minute render.

Again, these comparisons are best viewed on a 4K display

Here’s an image comparing the original (stretched) & 4K render

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is definitely an upscale that looks better in motion than it does in screenshot form. Da Vinci Resolve takes the aliased edges and blows them up to a resolution where artifacts like that stop becoming an issue, which hits a kind of uncanny valley. Some lines look better than others, though; portraits look clearer without a doubt, while the text and UI elements are significantly sharper in the upscale. It’s not bad by any means. I was just hoping for a cleaner, more intelligible result. Also, if Nintendo really has a 4K Switch Pro in the works, they’re going to need to patch some higher-quality prerendered backgrounds into this game. The higher the resolution gets, the worse these look.

Going full-bore on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Breath of the Wild has a cel-shaded look to it with no lines differentiating the cels. For whatever reason, cranking up the Super Scale beyond 2X had no effect, so I stuck with 2X to reduce the render time.

The art style almost gives it a kind of cloudiness, so the time for subtlety has passed; I cranked the blur radius down to .42 and then lowered the scaling to .11 so that it isn’t oversharpening the smaller details and causing weird artifacts with our UI elements and text. I kept switching between Link’s shield in an early part of the clip and the grass outside later in the video, trying to balance those two things without taking the sharpening so far that it becomes unrealistic. Breath of the Wild has plenty of aliasing, just like Fire Emblem does, so I tried to get everything to “pop” without that aliasing becoming more pronounced.

This video is a little longer than the Aokana video, so it ended up taking 7 minutes and 49 seconds to render, but that’s much more palatable than the almost half-hour that Fire Emblem: Three Houses required. It’s crazy how stark the difference is between Super Scale 2X and 3X. I shudder to imagine a 4X render.

Breath of the Wild is another game that looks better in motion at 4K

Here’s an image comparing the original (stretched) & 4K render

I had to line up all of this post’s comparison shots by finding something that appears (or disappears) in a single frame in each game. That way, I could advance frame by frame until it appears and be sure that the shots would be identical save for the post-processing. In Breath of the Wild‘s case, the “talk” option was the ideal way of lining up these screenshots, but that means that the comparison is of the more underwhelming indoor area from the beginning of the video. You can definitely see the improvement in text and UI elements when zoomed in to 100%, though, and the 4K upscale looks much less hazy.

Bonus video: using AI to simulate 60 FPS in BotW

Da Vinci Resolve has plenty more tricks like upscaling hidden within its recesses. One last one that I wanted to try was to take a video from a game that maxes out at 30 frames per second and use its (supposedly) AI-powered motion interpolation in order to simulate the other 30 frames per second, bumping it up to 60. This 14-second clip took me almost an hour to render. Also, the AI goes crazy when the camera pans down to the shimmering shadows at the end. It makes sense, though; this is a feature designed for single shots, not an eclectic menagerie of shifting camera movements. Cutting each camera movement into a separate clip and processing them individually might have produced a better result.

Update: One more bonus—an Aokana screenshot at 8K

Okay. Earlier, I said that the 4K screenshot was likely the biggest screenshot of Aokana that’s ever been posted, but I post 4K screenshots of things all the time. That’s not remarkable or magical. Because of that, I set my sights on an even more elusive goal: taking a 1920x1080 video and blowing one frame of it up to 7680x4320, more commonly known as 8K. My first few attempts at accomplishing this were too blurry or sharp and with too many details upscaled in an ugly way, so I instead broke down the process into two steps: upscaling to 4K and exporting an image, and then using that frame to jump from 4K to 8K (with that second step using the 4X Super Scale option for the greatest chance of success; I was working with images at this point, so there wasn’t a crazy rendering time to contend with when cranking that option as high as it goes). The end result isn’t quite as clean as Aokana‘s 4K upscale, but I’m happy with it.

Here you go: Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue 8K screenshot

Upscaling Switch videos to 4K with post-processing technology is trippy first appeared on Killa Penguin