Ripping Blu Ray to later Upscale to 4K?

[DaBurner87]

Hello all. I am new here and in fact have never once ripped a blu ray disc. Long story short I have a show I love on Blu Ray and it will probably never be released in 4K, so I downloaded an episode and upscaled it to 4K myself and the results are incredible. Truly I didn't expect anything this good at all.

So now I want to take it one step further and rip the blu rays myself to a completely lossless format, and upscale to 4K, then burn to 4K discs. This entire process is going to be very time consuming but personally worth it. Just upscaling one episode took about 9 hours, and I'm blown away with the results but want to test more and see if I can possibly get it any better.

My question is, has anyone else done this? The upscaler I'm using is Topaz Video AI, but I don't want to lose any data especially audio data. I'm not sure how any of that works. Topaz does have mkv options, but when burning to an 4K disc will it know what to do? Can I copy the menus and stuff from the original bluray rips and use them with the new 4K video for example? Again I am completely new to this, and I'm looking at purchasing everything I need to do so. This will be a very big project for me.

[Billycar11]

nah leave it alone be happy with the bluray and if it ever comes to 4K get it

[dmdmmatt4]

Your TV doesn't upscale to 4k for 1080p media already? How is your upscaling process so radically different from the on-the-fly conversion offered by most playback chipsets? Impressive though AI upscalers can be, some TVs have them now. And personally I can't get over the feeling that this is simply fake data. I'm also a person who turns frame interpolation off, because it isn't presenting on screen what was placed on the disk for me to watch. Call me a bit obsessive ..

[Flesh]

How is your upscaling process so radically different from the on-the-fly conversion offered by most playback chipsets?

Having something take 9 hours per episode vs on the fly would either imply an inefficiency or more time & processing power allocated for (theoretically) better results. That would be my guess.

I can 100% imagine that taking hardware that is without doubt more powerful than whatever the TV is using on the fly & giving it adequate time would point to better results.

[Radiocomms237]

I haven't used Topaz Video AI yet, but I do plan on giving it one hell of a workout once I build a better PC (IE. something with a whole heap of GPU power).

I think the word "upscale" perhaps gives the wrong impression here. Topaz doesn't just re-encode the lower res video to a higher resolution as transcoding does, it actually spends hours and hours processing each and every frame, removing noise, stabilizing, deinterlacing, etc., etc... Well, you can read for yourself on their website.

I've never heard anything but glowing reviews from this software, everyone who tries it recommends it highly. But everyone also comments on how long it takes to work its magic as well!

I don't plan on creating any "4K" or above video myself, I only want to "upscale" content that's only currently available on DVD to 1080px. If I could buy it on Blu-ray, I would, but I can't, and 480px SD video looks absolutely crap on a big screen!

From what I've read, the downside is that it only processes video. AFAIK it doesn't do anything whatsoever with audio tracks. What I hoped would happen is that I can end-up with a higher resolution video track with the exact same frame count and frame rate as the source video, then mux the original audio & subs back in, then re-run it through MakeMKV and hopefully have it resync everything again. That's the plan anyway, I can only hope that will work!

[Flesh]

Ouch for $300 I'll wait on your feedback on how well it works before I consider biting the bullet on that.

[MaidenHell]

Reading up on it, this Topaz doesn't seem to do anything more than HandBrake does, and HandBrake is free and Open Source and the learning curve isn't too tough on HandBrake. Took you 9 hours for one episode, wow that's horrible. I use the h.265 10-bit NVEnc that uses the chip in my video card for 4K UHD video encodes, and it took around 2 hours to encode Oppenheimer, which is a three hour movie which the rip with MakeMKV was 90GB and after the 4K UHD encode was 31.3GB
I could never deal with something that was that inefficient on the encoding, mine turn out brilliant with MakeMKV for the rips and HandBrake for the encoding.
Yes HandBrake does beautiful upscaling encoding as well, did I mention it's free, and I use Linux not Windows and HandBrake is for Windows also, and I see this Topaz doesn't work with Linux. Of course it does all the audio and gives you many different ways to encode the audio to a different type if you want, or just do a Passthrough if you don't want to change it.
I sure wouldn't spend $300 on a program that I can do the same thing for free with a different program. Don't get fooled with things that add AI to the name.

[dmdmmatt4]

Ok, a pro engine like Topaz spends a lot of generic CPU time doing things that, IMO, you probably didn't want to do to the data in the first place in order to justify its expense.
I wouldn't call it "upscale" I'd call it an "enhancement" package, and tbh I usually turn those off, because the result is not what the director intended, or what you would have seen in the cinema.

Don't forget that dedicated hardware upscalers can be 10-100x quicker doing a particular encoding operation than a non-accelerated generic CPU. Witness my SLR which can do 30 full frame raw image decodes a second with full Canon colour handling pipeline, but the same software running on an i9 v10 takes about 5 seconds per frame.

So, eyes wide open here. You're looking to do some image enhancement to make a more impressive image from some HD material. So be it, but what you're not asking about is a generic upscale, which any old chipset can do better than you'd care about.

Topaz is not Handbrake though, I don't think they're quite comparable.