What actually happens to footage that is upscaled or downscaled? I was wondering if there was any hard number evidence for upscaling or downscaling footage to a certain raster size, and what happens to the quality or if any degradation or improvements are made to the output.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 320x240 video file and upscale it to 1920x1080 that the quality is lost - mainly from stretching pixels.
I know anecdotally that if you take a 3840x2160 video file and downscale it to 1024x576 that the quality in the larger areas remain, and but the finer details can be lost when compressed into a smaller pixel area.
I'm currently in an environment workplace that uses only SD outputs, but for some reason there is a push to take the incoming media (which can range from 320x240 all the way to 8k) and conform it to 1920x1080. When it is imported into the editor, it is an SD project, and burnt to DVD-Video.
For some reason the explanation of matching our output raster or device (DVD-Video) doesn't seem as sufficient evidence, so I wanted to know if there were any numbers or studies or factual papers I could use!

For the most part assume the conversions are performed with &quot;off the shelf&quot; converters, which most likely run ffmpeg in their processing. All resizes with in the applications too would be default - so Bicubic interpolation is most common.
May i understand your question as

How do i have someone/something that understands the missing puzzles from
my upscaled images?

If so, you are talking some intelligence/experience in upscaling or AI-upscaling. Then, plz take a look of AI Upscalers; it mentions

An open source AI upscaler (super sampler) based on a generative adversarial network architecture.
An open source image enhancer that seeks to restore lost texture details from known types
Commercial super sampler that uses artificial intelligence

Good luck!