Upscale 480p to 1080p Without Pretending It Is HD

A ripped DVD is 480 lines, and it is often interlaced. Scaling it to 1920 by 1080 in Premiere’s export is a stretch of those lines. The file becomes 1080. The picture does not become a 1080 camera original. You can make the stretch less ugly. You cannot recover detail the DVD never stored.

Deinterlace before you scale

If horizontal lines comb on motion, the rip is interlaced. Scaling those lines bakes the comb into the 1080 frame, and no upscaler fixes it afterward. Deinterlace in After Effects or in the tool that made the rip, and watch a frame of motion at full size before you continue. A progressive file can skip this. A DVD rip usually cannot.

Use Detail-preserving Upscale

Put the clip in an After Effects composition that is 1920 by 1080. Apply Detail-preserving Upscale and set it to fit that frame. It is slower than Premiere’s export scale, and it holds edges better. Render that composition to ProRes or a high-bitrate file, and do the rest of the edit on the rendered file rather than leaving the effect live.

Watch the result at actual pixels, next to the 480 picture at actual pixels. You are judging whether edges ring or faces go plastic. Those are the signs you pushed the effect too far. A slightly soft 1080 file is a better outcome than a sharp one with halos. Nothing in this process invents the texture a 1080 camera would have captured.