Back in January, I started really digging into video technology, and this turned into a full-blown obsession with upscaling video. Ever since then, I’ve been recording almost all of the videos I capture at 1920x1080 (because it’s less resource-intensive) and subsequently upscaling them to 4K. The process is slightly different depending on the source; pixel art is doubled with virtually no effort, but 3D games typically benefit from switching into a different color space and adding a little additional sharpening. There are numerous reasons for the upscaling, but the main benefit is avoiding ugly color shifting and Compression artifacts on Youtube. But it’s also just prettier to look at on 4K displays. Why not shoot for quality?

The last game I reviewed was Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance, and I compared its visuals to a 2013 game that wasn’t very pretty even for its time. That got me thinking, though: what were the prettiest games I played in 2013? After some thought, I narrowed down the list to DONTNOD’s Remember Me and Larian’s Divinity: Dragon Commander. That’s when I remembered that I own both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of Remember Me. Obviously, I had to record the PC version at 4K natively and then see how far I could push video from the Xbox 360 version to match it. As always, I’ll be using DaVinci Resolve.

Back in mid-2020 when I was struggling to cover games while in the process of moving, I realized that I needed to figure out how to record PC videos without the aid of a capture device. I was too reliant on it, and the setup had all sorts of other compromises. Once I got settled into the new place, I shifted to using my computer’s RAM as a 10-20 minute buffer, allowing me to capture footage I’d have otherwise missed.

Part of the reason I’ve been recording things at 1920x1080 is that my initial attempts to record this buffer at 4K caused choppiness. It was easy to assume that the resulting videos were missing a bunch of frames. That might actually be the case in some situations, but Remember Me recorded at 4K without a problem.

One of the Xbox 360’s quirks is that its visuals tend to be a bit hazy and lacking in contrast. You can see that when comparing the two versions of Remember Me; the bright spots are less bright in the Xbox 360 version, and the dark spots are less dark. Using your eyes can be kind of misleading (and I haven’t figured out how to compare shots yet—that’s something you can do, but learning how hasn’t been a priority), so using the “parade” scopes that charts the brightness and darkness of the red, green, and blue channels in each video helps to figure out what to do. I settled on changing the lift to -0.04 and the gain to 1.11.

This Xbox 360 footage was run through the Mclassic on the green setting at 1920x1080. This gives it a very tiny bit of antialiasing. I’ve done a lot of testing with the mClassic and DaVinci Resolve’s Super Scale feature (which intelligently recreates detail at the edges of objects) and found that the two combine well in Xbox 360 games. Super Scale requires a certain amount of definition at 1920x1080 to function well—which is why it’s useless on, say, Playstation 2 games—and the mClassic adds a little sharpness and definition.

Super Scale isn’t magic, though, and while using my go-to settings for a natural look (2X upscale, medium sharpness, high noise reduction) can translate a good 1920x1080 signal into something that looks like a believable 1440p signal, it often requires a little extra sharpness. The best way of doing this is to change a node’s color space to Lab (CIE), then go into the sharpening tab and lower only the red value on the “radius” slider. I typically lower it to .48, but .47 can work in rare cases. This is a great way of sharpening video in general because it’s essentially decoupling the colors from the brightness and darkness.

The differences between the PC gameplay captured at 4K natively and the Xbox 360 upscale with all of the processing done to it were incredibly obvious when I exported and compared the two videos. However, Youtube compression is a constant reality and tends to blur the line. There are some things that post-processing simply can’t fix, such as the low resolution of the shadows and textures, but there are also points where the differences are surprisingly minimal. The part after the vent (9:37) is one such example.

Experimenting like this isn’t worthwhile if you don’t learn something in the process, and Remember Me has an especially interesting lesson to teach. You can see the credits that appear on screen shifting ever so slightly, and that’s because of the game’s noise filter. Noise evidently confuses the Super Scale upscale. I had already suspected that it was mainly a feature for game footage and other incredibly narrow use cases, and this goes a long way toward confirming that. Unless you’re shooting at ISO 100 in crazy bright conditions with a stopped-down aperture, this isn’t going to be a very useful feature for video cameras.

Since the Xbox 360 footage I was using had the mClassic antialiasing baked in, I had to go back and record a new video without it. This is video from the Xbox 360 recorded exactly the same way, save for the absence of the mClassic. I also didn’t add any post-processing effects to the above footage. The only processing here was a simple upscale to prevent Youtube’s terrible 1080p processing from skewing the results. All of the videos were uploaded at 4K, so they should all be subject to identical compression.

All Xbox 360 games share a similar haziness, so I decided to try messing with the lift and gain of another game using identical values. I’m speaking of course about SoulCalibur V, which has become one of my favorites on the system. The result isn’t terrible, but it’s not good, either. The video above has all of the same bells and whistles, from the mClassic to the Super Scale, and all of that benefits the visuals in a big way (here’s an example/test video from seven months ago), but messing with the dark and bright areas causes the backgrounds to look too dark. Evidently, some games worked around the Xbox 360’s haziness.

Just look at the parade scope for SoulCalibur V (with all of the effects off except for sharpening). The red, green, and blue are all clipping in both directions. The dark parts of the image are already stretched into pure black, while the brightest parts reach into pure white. It looks like this was done to give the image a high-contrast look to fight the haziness. As a result, messing with the values throws off the entire art style just enough to look wrong. My theory is that this is something that console-only games like SoulCalibur V planned around at the start, whereas games like Remember Me that derived their console versions from the PC version focused instead on getting everything working instead of counteracting the haziness.

Another thing to keep in mind is that dark videos and images look worse at the same bit rates. The header image for this post is less than half the size of most header images I use despite using the exact same process, and it looks worse. That means that reducing the shadows in post-processing will cause both your output compression and Youtube’s compression to introduce all kinds of artifacts. In a game with a lot of fast motion like SoulCalibur V, not even uploading at 4K60 can prevent this from becoming a problem.

Upscaling Xbox 360 video to resemble the PC version first appeared on Killa Penguin