[Idea] Is there any (semi) automated method for restoring a cut w/ a new source (details)?

[TomArrow]

I was thinking about how many fanedits live an existence of low quality/SD and I was thinking it should be somewhat trivial to program a software that takes a source (like for example the HD version of a movie), analyzes it, then analyzes the fanedit, and matches the most similar frames and thus recreates that fanedit with a new source, without needing the original project file.

Of course that wouldn't work with rotoscoped stuff and the likes, but the technology for this already exists I think. For example dupeGuru does image comparison for finding duplicates and can do so across different resolutions and even with partial images. It expresses similarity as a percentage. Each frame could simply be matched to the frame that is most similar to it (with a quick pre-pass to find roughly similar frames).

Would probably take a few minutes or maybe hours to do the analysis-pass, but it should not be that programmatically challenging (for someone who knows C++ or the likes - I'm just a lousy PHP developer and PHP is too fucking slow).

If that effort was invested by someone one time, we could, with relative ease, restore a lot of fanedits to higher quality (and do some manual corrections where it didn't work). If that is in anyone's interest, anyway.

[spoRv]

Actually, I thought, too, that there are many intersting fanedits that were not available in HD.

Still, I don't think there is a software that can do what you are asking - at least, not at the moment; maybe with neural net it would be possible. (of course, happy to be proven wrong!)

So, for the moment the only viable options should be to re-do that from scratch using HD sources (and eventually upscale just the parts which are not available in HD), or upscale all using better techniques than the ones found into a usual HD/UHD TV set/hardware or software player (that are usually bilinear or bicubic).