Upscale HD to 4k

How do I achieve the best result for upscaling HD footage to 4K. We're change our production equipment to 4K and the footage in the intro is HD. I need this in 4K.

Will Compressor give me a better result than FCPX?

Compressor does have different settings for upscale method, so you can test with a short clip and see what looks the best,
Set the Resize filter to 'best (Statistical Prediction)' for the highest quality.

You'll not get perfectly clean upscaling from HD to 4K with Compressor. It will do it, but not very cleanly. Also depends on how much action/movement is in the content. Run a short test and see what you get. I'll post some side by side examples later when I'm back in may office.

I have not tried this but maybe it is also worth checking out.
It looks like they have a free trial:
www.redgiant.com/products/instant-4k/

That's probably the best solution today. If you do this a lot, $99 ain't too bad.

After Effects "Detail Preserving Upscale" is pretty good. But then there's that rent....

Last time I tried with Compressor, I couldn't get the bitrate higher than 30mbps in H.264. It seemed like a compressor limitation? Not sure.

So unless there's a way to work around that limitation, I wouldn't use Compressor. 4K videos should have at least 45mbps for YouTube and even more for other uses.

Setting the data rate to custom should allow you to type in whatever data rate you want.
If this isn't working for you, maybe you have a glitch, or aren't starting with the 'QuickTime Movie' preset. (the MPEG-4 limits the bitrate for some reason)


Plus I kind of assumed since the OP was referring to a logo, that they would use ProRes.

If you apply one of the QuickTime movie presets, say 4K Video Sharing, and choose custom for bit rate in the Inspector, you should be able to specify something well above 30 Mbps.

Russ