The quality of the original source sits on the average. The native resolution is 720p, and while upscaling to 1080p, a few aliasing and ringing artifacts were produced, which make the image looks blurry and lacks details; also the lines are surrounded by loose and latticelike artifacts. Considering that the source has no full HD contents except staff lists and the logo, we decided to downscale to 720p for encoding. The process of downscaling can eliminate many kinds of artifacts caused by upscaling, and it saves bit-rate as well. Besides, we also applied de-banding.
As said above, we downscaled the resolution to 720p, and in order to maintain the colour info after pre-processing, this series is encoded using YUV 4:4:4.
The comparison pairs below use images that simulate 1080p playback using non-ringing Lanczos 4 algorithm to compare with the source.