My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic | Season 7 Intro (4K Test)

Description YT

MAKE SURE TO WATCH IN 4K!
(Read below for how this was done.)

This video is a test demonstration of what My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic could look like if it were properly upscaled into 3840x2160 (4K) resolution. Rather than use a traditional method of upscaling, like exporting the file in the YouTube 4K preset from Adobe Media Encoder, I instead took a completely different route which I will outline below.

---
IMAGE SEQUENCE:

To begin, I exported an image sequence from Adobe After Effects. This sequence contained 844 PNG files, totaling 1.16GB in size.

The image sequence was created from the YayPonies iTunes rip, transcoded from .mkv to .mp4 with a Quality Target of 15 inside of Handbrake. This had the adverse effect of increasing the base filesize by around 20%, but ensures there is no data loss during the transcode.

TOTAL IMAGE SEQUENCE EXPORT TIME:
4:29 (4 Minutes, 29 seconds.)

---
UPSCALING

Once all 844 image files were exported to a directory, that directory was then imported into an image upscaling software called waifu2x. This is a very powerful piece of software, whose designated purpose is upscaling anime artwork. One great side effect of this is that it also works surprisingly well with other cartoons, such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

SETTINGS:
https://i.imgur.com/zK1iLFO.png

Each image was then magnified and de-noised with the above settings, outputting a clean, sharp 3840x2160 image.

TOTAL UPSCALE TIME W/CUDA CORES (GTX 1080 Ti):
1:37:37 (1 Hour, 37 minutes, 37 seconds.)

---
THE ENCODE:

Once all 844 images were successfully upscaled through waifu2x, I then imported the image sequence back into Adobe After Effects. The composition was set to 3840x2160, with a framerate of 23.976. This composition was then loaded into Adobe Media Encoder, and the project file was exported using the YouTube 4K HD preset, with a bitrate of 40 / 40mbps, VBR, 1 pass.

TOTAL EXPORT TIME:
3:22 (3 Minutes, 22 seconds.)

---

Overall, upscaling this 35 second clip took me around two hours of total time investment. This process may be done faster, but the results will not be nearly as clean. This is a test to see if creating 4K footage for specific scenes will be beneficial for future, final projects regarding my editing in the fandom.

Leave a comment below about what you think!