4K video editing

Gary3000 wrote:

99% of cameras can shoot 1080i and 1080i it's still the most dominant format being broadcast.

Yes, live broadcast in the US is still stuck at 1080i, at least for now. Nobody produces content (other than live) in 1080i though. ATSC 2 (current) maxes at 1080i, but ATSC 3 includes 3840 x 2860 UHD and up to 120frames, wide color, blah blah...lots of stuff that should make content producers ditch 1080i now for future-proofing if nothing else. ATSC 3 has been approved for the US, and has been used at the 2018 Winter Olympics. Relative to the OP's question, 1080p will scale to UHD better than 1080i in most cases.

and yes. all this technology does indeed improve the appearance of upscaled 1080 video, even that which has been upscaled to "true" 4k. (which honestly, is irrelevant to the OP's question, as very few work in true-4k).

Um...no, not all, and not with all footage. The problem is that algorithms must make certain assumptions, and the assumptions are not always correct. Some content defys analysis. That's when manual tweaks and human judgement come it.

But just like with photographs that have been scaled up 200% in Photoshop, video scaled up 200% will look better.

Yikes, well, that's not true! Photoshop scaled images have more pixels, not more detail. The faked detail in 3rd party still or video algorithms comes from some rather intensive content prediction that fakes the detail. But, look at that detail carefully, and closely. It's not real, nor does it hold up or work well on close inspection. Great at a distance only, and very sensitive to specific content and some extremely touchy manual parameter input.

You should do a test, open up a 1080 movie on your computer monitor and make the window 4x as big.

Then save a movie that's been upscaled it to 4k and view it at 2x as big, and view the movies side by side.

the 1080 will eventually look pixelated, while the 4k/UHD will still hold up better, because it has additional pixels and those additional pixels have additional detail that's been added by the algorithms. -even "nearest neighbor" looks better, toss in a sharpening filter (which all NLEs have), and it looks even better.

My comments were based on my own tests. I don't find the basic NLE adding any significant detail when scaling.