Recently I had quite a surprised when I uploaded an script and included in the links an 720p, 1080p and 4k version and decided “why not” and include a poll to see if people liked the 1080p and 4k versions that are 60FPS that I upscaled from the original 720p version. I was expecting the poll to come out with 4k being the winner but uh…
I was surprised…so then I’d thought that why not properly ask what video resolution is preferred and also attempt to find out why for non VR intended videos.
What FPS do you watch/accept?
30 or less
60
90
120
144
Source
0voters
Which video resolutions do avoid/dislike?
480p
720p
1080p
1440p
2160p (4k)
Other
0voters
Which of these video resolutions is acceptable to you?
480p
720p
1080p
1440p
2160p (4k)
Other
0voters
How much importance does FPS have on a video? (0 = none/don’t care, 10 = top priority)
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0voters
How much importance does Quality have on a video? (0 = none/don’t care, 10 = top priority)
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0voters
How much importance does resolution have on a video? (0 = none/don’t care, 10 = top priority)
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
0voters
Does video quality matter for what resolution you prefer?
Yes (can you give an example?)
No
I have no idea
0voters
Does FPS matter for what resolution you prefer?
Yes
No
I have no idea
0voters
What do you dislike bigger resolution?
Takes up too much disk space
My graphics card/monitor can’t handle it
It’s just too big for me
I don’t
Other (I’ll leave a comment)
0voters
Would you download and use an upscale of an video?
So re:fps i think 30 is the absolute minimum but it being 60fps or higher is dependent on the source or the media itself. Cause i can only really play at 60fps minimum for games but these aren’t videogames so the fps to me isn’t as noticeable.
If the source is rendered as 60 fps then its probably fine but Ive seen many movies and anime that have been interpolated to be 60fps posted on youtube and those usually make me queasy. So it prob depends on how well its done. So 60fps is probably mostly fine, ive just seen too many shit interpolated 60fps vids on youtube.
From my experience so far with interpolating (via Flowframes) when you try to do anything more than doubling the FPS of the source video you end up with blurring or jittering textures that’s more than you eye should normally ignore/miss. The human eye can catch however the clear cases of where it just goes wrong like say blinds in the background that are all in the same color but have light on them will just look weird no matter what.
Reason why is because I’ve noticed Flowframes interpolation sometimes makes a blurry image copy to be the extra frame, sometimes it also doesn’t do an blurry image (usually if no movement is occurring)…it also sometimes does an in-between of the two if one area of the video at that point is having fast movement occurring.
Oh and one last thing…a lot of videos aren’t exactly rounded to the nearest ten (e.g. 25FPS is most common) which means interpolation results in 60FPS not being possible. (e.g. 50FPS from 25FPS) It doesn’t stop there as there’s other cases I’ve seen of where the FPS isn’t rounded to the nearest 1 so you can end up with 59.5629999FPS in media-info stats.
But tis my observation from my experience so far and I’ve not uploaded to YouTube so I don’t know if YouTube is doing something further to murder the videos than it’s compression.
It mostly happened when I watched something that I had already seen in its native fps then watched later watched the 60fps version. Like there was a clip from the 2012 avengers movie interpolated to 60fps. I think some people in the comments said it was motion smoothing or something idk i dont know any of the technicals about this stuff. But basically like from an objective standpoint everything still looked fine but it just felt too fast or it would give me a slightly uncanny feeling.
Like in general idk how to describe anything on the technical terms, I just know it doesnt feel right and it makes me motion sick if its not ‘right’. 30fps in games also does the same where i can get motion sick from that.
Hm yeah to me that sounds like what I was meaning of doing more than an doubling of FPS as I’ve done a quick check online just to check and the original movie was 23.9FPS ish rather than the full 30. (Dunno why, haven’t looked into it) So yeah someone doing 60 meant that it wasn’t an easy job for the interpolation software, especially to round it. (I don’t remember and can’t find it from a quick search but I found some data that said to avoid forcing the FPS to be rounded due to bad consequences)
So yeah you were noticing the blurry frames added in is my best guess and it was throwing you off even more since you have a vague recollection of what it should have looked like and yet it didn’t. It seems like an case of someone going “Chuck it in the oven and demand this from it no matter what” rather than taking time and putting effort into it.
Here would be how I would break it down personally.
Animated content:
More Frames is better video regardless of method
More upscaling is better video regardless of method
Live action:
More Frames is better video if it is simply encoding with more frames, interpolation often looks off in my opinion, but I’ve found that simply being encoded at higher framerates leads to a smoother video experience.
More upscaling is better in specific cases. Maybe as a general rule going one step up in scale is acceptable, but often times upscaling leads to it looking fake / instagramy and i find that offputting as well. Again though I find that simply encoding at a higher resolution can lead to slight improvement overall in the playback experience.
For playback, I hook my (old) i7 dual core laptop via hdmi to a sony 54" display, and use MPC-HC and MFP to drive the OSR2. If the FPS is much more than 30, the playback stutters and the motion stops and starts, sometimes violently.
It doesn’t matter if the file is on the local SSD or over the LAN.
Most times I use WinXVideo to shave the frame rate from 60 to 30, (or 50 to 25, etc.,) and the resolution down to 1920x1080. If the upscale video is the only one I have to work with, that’s fine. In the process, I’ll usually accept the default and let it re-encode the audio to 126kbps in the process.
Frame rate matters more than resolution - I’ll have an animated file < 1280x720 but 60 fps, and that will stutter, but a 1920x1080 at 30fps will be smooth.
Just playing back the video in MPC-HC, without MFP, seems to do fine, but with both running, it just won’t keep up with the 50-60 FPS video.
I think you should look more into why the stuttering is occurring as it shouldn’t be occurring with MFP if it doesn’t without it. First ports of call I would do is look at updating the programs themselves and your graphics drivers along with using something like MediaInfo to check it’s encoding to try and find the common link apart from FPS. (I have found that some videos when interpolated just stutter no matter what while some stutter depending on using MPV or MPC-HC)
Final thing to check as it’s an old i7 laptop is seeing if the hardware itself is running okay. (playing a video shouldn’t be touching 20% usage)
Late reply but there are several videos I can think of from FPSBlyck where the quality of their animation is so good at 1080p that upscaling it, even very cleanly, to 4K actually degrades the quality imo.
Also, one thing I didn’t think the pole let me express is that I heavily would prefer 4K over 1080p in general, but I’m happy with 1080p if the video is good. I’ll almost always go with 4K given the choice, unless the quality difference is almost non-existent but the file size is drastically higher.
It might depend on the settings used that made the quality get a bit borked when doing the upscaling as I found this occur very clearly when I upscaled Disney’s “A Goofy Movie” where the grainyness increased or decreased and same for bluryness. It’s also an AI that’s doing the work too and it is nowhere near perfect so it will just fail with an video. Interpolation is what can cause the biggest drop in quality but that’s linked usually to trying to increase FPS by more than double or the FPS already being fairly high…and that’s presuming the video’s textures are liked by the AI. (60+ FPS is a struggle to get increased)
With poll options I did consider doing an preference thing for them but the poll type isn’t there for it so I went with what seems best at the time. Sadly if I change options now to try something new or new polls are added it will wipe all previous results.
Oh you’re good. Wasn’t critiquing the poll, just felt like that nuance to the data may be missing and wanted to bring it up.
And, yeah, I’m no pro at upscaling, I’m sure there’s ways at making it work better for animation like FPSBlyck’s. The main thing with their’s is very high bitrates and finely detailed texturing on things like skin especially. My understanding of all this is limited, but it seems like the AI almost mistakes the small details of the skin as grain or noise and smooths it out. Which ends up looking worse. Not a problem I’m currently trying to solve, but it’s just one example of how a quality 1080p video might be preferred over 4K like you were asking about.
All good just felt best to respond in-case it was rather than ignore the concern. Also it’s rare that anything isn’t 1080p these days just as it’s very rare to find any video in below 720p quality unless it’s an non-content created video. (FPSBlyck seems to be making 2k versions recently instead of having 1080p be their best resolution)
I think it’s probably due to not using the AI setting that attempts to simply upscale without changing any details but I have yet to do any of FPSBlyck’s work nor do I personally plan to as their work is usually less than a minute long works or loops. (although that means they’re really easy to do tests on since up-scaling them is very fast)
I generally don’t care too much personally about the resolution as long as it’s not overly grainy, which tends to mean larger than 360p tbh. FPS doesn’t matter all that much either but I also do not have a good setup for doing VR, which of course is the main reason why someone might want a higher FPS video imo.
And per my poll answer, I generally avoid larger resolution videos and upscales because my internet is only about 40Mb/s on a good day and downloading multi gig files takes way too damn long (720p seems to be about the sweet spot for me.) Especially in the case of upscales where I barely notice a difference at best and at worst notice a significant decrease in quality than the source.
