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Why bother upscaling for YouTube?

Scaling your video to a larger resolution (e.g 1920x1080/1080p 3840x2160/4K) tricks YouTube into giving your video more bitrate, even though you're not actually adding any detail.

This is only useful for YouTube, it won't make your video look any better than when you're viewing it back in a media player, it'll just look less worse than the original file.

This should be done at the very last step of every project, right before uploading. It's a waste of rendering time to edit 4K content that's been scaled.

Why not just set the project scale to 4K before rendering?

VEGAS Pro (and probably other NLEs) uses the bicubic scaling filter which makes your video a bit blurry, using FFmpeg lets you make sure you're using the right filter

Voukoder zscale

If you're exporting from Voukoder you can also add an upscale filter. Compared to exporting and using an upscale script, it exports and upscales a single encode, which should take less time and lose less quality, learn how to do it here

Installing the CTT Upscaler

Running the following command will:

Paste the following command in a PowerShell window, (it doesn't need to be as an Administrator):

Automatic upscaler installer
iex(irm tl.ctt.cx); Get Upscaler

  1. Install FFmpeg

  2. Save this batch file as a .cmd file, it's recommended to save it in either:

    • Your Send To folder
    • Or saving it wherever and then dragging video(s) onto it

Your browser might make it a text file (e.g CTT Upscaler.cmd.txt), show file extensions in the File Explorer if it keeps opening Notepad when double clicking it.

Smartscreen will always warn you about the batch files you download online, Feel free to inspect the code yourself.

Comparison

Here are two videos, one was left as is, the other one stretched to 4K, watch it in fullscreen with the Settings -> Quality option maxed out.