About a month ago, I posted an article in which I used Davinci Resolve (a powerful program with both a paid and free version) to upscale video from Nintendo Switch games from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, primarily by using its excellent Super Scale feature to retain a great deal of detail during the upscale. The effect wasn’t always perfect—outside of visual novels, the effect it had was less true-4K than 1440p-upscaled-to-4K—but I had a lot of fun obsessing over ways to make various games look better. It’s something I’ve played around with ever since (just look at how well Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia upscales), but I’ve learned a few things over the past month. The first thing is that I was applying far too much sharpening. The second is that aliased edges are a problem when intelligently upscaling video.

I purchased an Mclassic to mitigate both of this issues. Basically, this thing applies post-processing to the HDMI signal, mainly to provide antialiasing and sharpening. The original idea for this article was to use the mClassic to prepare the recorded video for upscaling. Instead, my comparison shots ended up being sidetracked by a mild obsession over Youtube compression. Now this is an article about both how to improve the look of your 1080p gameplay on Youtube and keep it looking true to the video you uploaded.

First, though, an affiliate ad for mClassic to help pay my bills

Let’s start with two identical videos rendered at 4K and 1080p

Since I focused on the Nintendo Switch last time, I figured it’d be worth focusing on another console this time around: the Xbox 360, one of my all-time favorites. Since SoulCalibur IV and SoulCalibur V haven’t been added to the Xbox Series X/S’ backward compatibility and that day-1 omission ended up being a major disincentive for buying a next-gen console, I figured that focusing on the SoulCalibur series’ Xbox 360 entries would make for a nice variety of fast-paced games to upscale. I also know for a fact that Tira’s character model in SoulCalibur V has lots of little shimmers that are perfect for mClassic’s antialiasing.

I also included SoulCalibur II HD, which is backward compatible, just to have a game with lower-res textures to compare against the later entries’ busier visuals. Since turning the mClassic on and off during gameplay causes my Elgato HD60 capture device to freak out, I had to record each video individually and try to match them up by finding similar animations in similar stages. The video begins with the leadup to a training fight in SoulCalibur IV, Setsuka’s story ending in SoulCalibur IV, and then moves into some training gameplay that I was able to make a short in-game loop of in SoulCalibur V, followed by some stage opening dialog from SoulCalibur V. The effect of the post-processing is very subtle. In fact, it’s likely barely perceptible to most people, even at 4K, which is why I included a bunch of comparison shots at the very end to show off the improvements that the mClassic and upscaling are bringing to the table.

Part of the reason it’s so subtle is that the DaVinci Resolve Super Scale feature is doing the heavy lifting here; the mClassic excels at eliminating very fine aliasing, but it doesn’t do much for the really blocky stuff. That means that it’s amazing for some titles and borderline useless for others. I’ll include a best-case example of something that benefits from it at the very end of this article, but for now, the various SoulCaliburs are only moderately affected. What’s impressive is that it doesn’t damage the text anywhere as much as some antialiasing that I’ve seen, though; back in 2011, I used to play some games with injected SMAA, and it would absolutely ruin any subtitles that appeared. The mClassic is much gentler with them.

Outside of the mClassic being included, the post-processing is very similar to last time. In DaVinci Resolve, I went into the clip properties and turned on the Super Scale feature to 2X, medium sharpness, and high noise reduction. Since the mClassic adds a little sharpness by default, I didn’t add any more in Resolve.

Here’s where things went a bit off the rails for me. I had the random idea of exporting the same video, edited on a 4K timeline, to 1080p in DaVinci Resolve. Since most of the thousands of videos I’ve uploaded over the past 9 years have been at 1080p, it seemed useful to figure out if the mClassic and DaVinci Resolve post-processing would be noticeable in a video uploaded at that resolution. Especially since I had heard that 1080p videos look better when uploaded to 4K, even if you don’t do anything to them. I wanted to test the quality loss. It ended up being astonishingly bad. All of the clickable images below are lossless.

mClassic + DaVinci upscaling

Admittedly, I did a terrible job naming these thumbnails. Using the number keys and a Chrome addon that allows me to download .png screenshots of Youtube videos (fittingly called “Screenshot Youtube”), I was able to zero in on and save the same frame in a 4K upload playing at 4K, a 4k upload playing at 1080p, and a 1080p upload playing at 1080p. All of these screenshots have the mClassic and DaVinci Resolve Super Scale feature turned on. Notice the strange greenish discoloration in the 1080p upload.

And here are three screenshots with no post-processing

Since the mClassic supposedly messes with the colors ever so slightly (which, as far as I can tell, only means that it increases the color contrast in some scenes by making the ugly transparent parts of the image more solid—I have no idea how it accomplishes this, but it looks good and remains a very subtle effect), I captured the same assortment of screenshots from the parts that are a simple upscale to 4K. No Super Scale, no mClassic. Just a 1080P image rendered at 4K and 1080p. The weird green tint remains.

The original video files have identical colors

The two screenshots above are from the 4K and 1080p videos and have identical colors, so the degradation of the 1080p video is happening from whatever Youtube does to shrink the video on their servers. This is something they do; just upload a video and then download it from your Youtube Studio page and you’ll notice that it’s significantly smaller than the one you uploaded. What’s strange is that the color shift reminds me of the kind of thing you get when converting to and from an analog signal by, say, screwing around with component cables (there are some examples of this shift in this article).

The color shift stops happening at 1440p and above

The led me to one question: what about 1440p? I hadn’t thought of testing this until after I got rid of the project in DaVinci, but I imported the 4K version and rendered it down to 1440 (at a strange aspect ratio because Resolve evidently doesn’t think of it as a real resolution and I’m still learning how everything works), then captured a screenshot for it to test against the others. No color shift. At least, it’s no better or worse than the others; when I captured a similar frame from the original video to compare against, I started noticing a slight loss in the blues, though that could be because I didn’t capture the exact same frame. Only expert colorists with color-calibrated monitors (or crazy people pixel peeping) would notice.

Fast motion is where the muddiness becomes a problem

Of course, color shifts aren’t the biggest problem with uploading at 1920x1080. Instead, it’s that fast motion, even in videos uploaded at 60 frames per second, leaves you at the mercy of compression artifacts. Effectively, your video looks like it’s smeared in jelly whenever things start to move too quickly. Uploading at 4K and playing at 1080p doesn’t prevent this image degradation entirely, but the absence of the color shift (which can also make the image quite a bit darker, as you can see) and presumably higher bit rate allow more detail to show up. Just look at the backgrounds in the second image compared to the third. It’s no contest, though the 4K image playing at 4K produces so few artifacts that it’s the clear winner.

Post-processing can make a difference even at 1920x1080

The above video is pretty much a best-case scenario as far as SoulCalibur V is concerned, and while the effect is most visible in the comparison screenshots at the end, it should be possible to notice a slight increase in clarity in the processed video. It’s the kind of improvement that would likely be lost in a 1080p upload, but I noticed that the extra clarity can be seen when playing this 4K upload at 1080p.

These are screenshots captured from the above 4K video with the quality set to 1080p, and you can see a boost in clarity around the characters that makes them appear slightly less blurry. I suspect that this is both the mClassic and DaVinvi Resolve Super Scale 2X working at their best; the mClassic’s tendency to increase the separation of elements by messing with transparency has a positive effect in hazy environments like this city area filled with smoke, while the Super Scale improves the sharpness of text, menu elements, and the brightest parts of the image, further separating the elements on the screen.

Bonus: Separating out the mClassic and Super Scale effects

Of course, DaVinci Resolve is a video post-processing tool and can’t improve your image in realtime, so I’m aware that some people won’t find it useful that I’ve thus far bundled that effect with mClassic. To help show off what each tool is adding (and provide an example of video the mClassic makes a big difference on), I recorded some gameplay of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Nintendo Switch, which suffers from some of the finest, most prevalent aliasing I’ve ever seen. The above video is captured at 1920x1080 and rendered at 3840x2160 to avoid the color shift, with the first clip being unprocessed otherwise. The second clip is recorded through the mClassic to show off what it looks like when that feature is working on its own. Finally, I ran that second clip through the Super Scale to sharpen up the text, (some) edges, and menu elements and provided a bunch of comparison screenshots that help to show off the differences.

The mClassic is doing the heavy lifting of smoothing out Fire Emblem: Three Houses‘ many jaggies, while the Super Scale is only adding a tiny bit of sharpness to the text and bright edges. Super Scale did the heavy lifting in the SoulCalibur examples while the mClassic added a little seasoning, but the opposite is the case here (and you’re unlikely to notice the Super Scale in the above video unless you’re at 4K).

The biggest thing you can do to improve your uploaded Youtube video, then, is to upscale it to 1440p or 4K. Doing so avoids a really ugly color shift, though this effect will be more pronounced in some games/color schemes than others. The higher resolution gives you more headroom to show off fast motion before things start to look like a mess of compression artifacts, though, so upscaling is the biggest, easiest way of improving the quality of any uploaded video regardless of its original resolution. Beyond that, post-processing software and interesting hardware like the mClassic are options for cleaning up your image even further. Is the mClassic worth it? I don’t know! I’m planning on running it through a bunch of different games on different systems to find out how often its presence makes a positive impact on the end image. Until then, suffice it to say that it’ll excel in certain cases and be a paperweight in others.

If anyone has any suggestions about specific games to try running through the mClassic, hit me up at the email on my contact page. If I have the game in question, then I’ll definitely be sure to give it a whirl.

Upscaling, mClassic, and Youtube uploads: how to get the best quality out of your gameplay first appeared on Killa Penguin