So maybe this is something to add to our list of offerings later. As I see there are certain places that do it (so it is possible). The expense of the software is really nothing compared to the amount it could bring in, so that is no issue. Could I up the video from 480 to 720, and then 720 to 480 pretty safely?
I really don't understand how disney could pull from stock that's high res if it was the 70's, and HD wasn't even around. Could you go into that in a little more detail?
Going down is easy, going up is not easy. You can shrink the video as much as you want in resolution and it will look great - that's why DVD rips to iPods look just fine. But going up, the software has to fill in the blanks, so it starts to look all pixely. Think of it like a towel - you can scruch it up smaller if you want to pretty easily, but when you start pulling it to make it bigger, the threads start coming apart. Not a great analogy but you see the point - you start getting holes.
The software has to figure out what to put in the holes. Basic uprezzing is just a pixel-for-pixel uprez, which looks pretty bad, so a lot of programs use some sort of sampling to make it look a bit better (software that guesses what to put in the digital holes better). This still results in a soft, pixely image, but at least it doesn't look as bad as a straight uprez. And when you throw in motion, instead of a still picture, it's a bit harder to notice. Go to Youtube and then click fullscreen on a standard-definition video and notice how it looks all grainy and pixely and just generally "bad". That's because the software is just upscaling the existing image without anything special. You can do a bit better with software, but not much.
Disney and other companies are using analog media, which has a lot more flexibility in terms of upscaling because they have the original sources to work with. Think of it this way - when you scan in a photograph into your computer at like 4800 dpi, it comes out HUGE right? Like bigger than your monitor. So if you have a movie shot on film or an original frame from Cinderella, you can just increase the DPI and scan it so that it comes in at HD. You can do MORE than HD if you want. Movies at the movie theater are shown to you in 1080p and then sold later as 480p DVD's. If you have access to the original footage, then you have a lot to work with. If all you have is a crummy VHS tape or digital Youtube clip, then that's not all that much to work with because you have no flexibility with changing the original input source.
So that's why old movies can look great in High Definition - because they ARE high definition, not upscaled movies. But not all movies are done this way, because it can get really expensive to do. Some movies are called "flippers" - they simply take the VHS tape and flip it to DVD, so instead of getting a nice, clear 480p picture, all you're getting is a cruddy VHS transfer. One of the early Batman movies was like that, and you can tell just from watching it on DVD that it wasn't really DVD quality.
So the moral of the story is, you can't get more than what you have, but you can sometimes fake it pretty well, and if you have the original source footage and the tools to import it digitally, you can do a great job going to HD (but that's expensive & time-consuming stuff). In closing, I'll leave you with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
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