It would be a wonderful world if we could just watch everything in glorious
4K or even at the very least full 1080p
HD. But we've all been faced with that
unfortunate choice when watching something that was recorded and encoded
at a lower resolution. Do you watch it in a tiny little window to keep the
picture sharp and just kind of move your face closer to the screen? Or do you
blow it up to full screen only to have everything look like it was recorded on
a potato? For years now, many companies
have been looking for a better solution to this, or at least a partial solution
to this, and it's called upconverting or
upscaling. And while you mostly see it used as a marketing tool on newer DVD
players or TVs, you've probably used up
conversion at some point in your life, even if you've completely sworn off
optical discs. For example, if you're watching a 480p YouTube video and you
make it full screen on your HD or full
HD monitor, then the video has effectively been upscaled to fit the
screen. You see, that 480p video contains about
300,000 individual pixels, which might sound like a lot, but full HD resolution
contains over 2 million pixels with 4K
being four times that amount. So, there
just aren't enough pixels then in low res video to actually fit the whole
screen without doing some kind of a conversion. Now, modern displays
themselves have logic that can apply an algorithm to a lower resolution video
clip or even something like your BIOS as you're booting up your computer for the
first time. And it what it can do is guess what the missing pixels should be
when it expands the video to full screen.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time it just plain doesn't look very good. For
example, if the display recognizes that there's a lot of, you know, grass in
Sound of Music, it'll fill in that grassy area with basically big chunks of
gigantic green pixels that looks pretty nasty. Now, upscaling logic can try to
smooth out the edges of those lines so they don't look so blocky, but this
amounts to basically an anti-aliasing
effect as opposed to something that really makes it look as though it were
actually shot, you know, in 4K, for
example. So, wait a second then, Lionus. If it's better than nothing, how do I
get this up conversion then? Can all screens do it? And if all screens can do
it, well, what's the point of those upconverting DVD players that I see at
the store? Are they just snake oil? Not exactly. So DVD, it's it's right in the
name, is a digital format, but most early DVD players only had analog
outputs like component video. This means that the signal is getting converted
from digital to analog and then back to digital again when it goes onto your
flat screen TV. This conversion and recon conversion ultimately leads to a
loss in quality. So modern upconverting
players have digital output such as HDMI to avoid doing so many conversions and
they also have their own more sophisticated upconverting logic that is
arguably better than especially what an older TV would be able to do on its own.
Remember though that upscaling isn't a
real substitute for watching native highdefinition or 4K content and an
upscaled video is always not going to
look as good as something that was shot natively and encoded in higher
definition. So specifically, no matter how good your algorithm is, and they're
always trying to sell the upconverting capabilities of this new TV when it runs
at a resolution for which there's no freaking content available. No matter
how good it is, you can expect some blurriness or other visual artifacts
from the processor guessing where the pixels should be. But you should notice
a slight improvement, making it at least a way to breathe a little more life into
your standard definition videos as long as you manage your expectation and don't
think that it's going to be as though the Wizard of Oz was shot on a freaking
Ari Alexa. With that said, if the makers of the Wizard of Oz had asked me if they
should use an Ari Alexa, I'd have said you should, cuz today's sponsor is
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yeah. And you can get a free trial, too. So, thanks for watching this episode of
Fast as Possible. I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, then hit that button. If you didn't, then I guess you
could hit the other button. Also, don't forget that we've got two other
fantastic channels, including Channel Super Fun, where we've got this video
that is definitely awesome and you're definitely going to want to check out because come on, let's face it, you're
done watching this video. So, you know, you need something to do, right?