This looks like an amazing undertaking, especially seeing the comparison to the bluray version. I was planning on watching the trilogy on bluray but I guess I have better plans now. :) Thank you!

Being a child of the 90s and of the digital era I am always endlessly amazed at the quality and potential of film. Every time I hear a story about how something more modern won’t even be released in 4K because they don’t have a high enough quality source because it's all digital I’m kind of saddened.

Even digital video created with low-resolution cameras will eventually be viewable in 4K, 8K and beyond because AI upscaling technology is just so great. See Anime4K for examples.

https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

Yes it "guesses" what the missing information is and populates it. Similar approaches will work for live action media too.

And successive video frames encode so much extra resolution that a single frame doesn't capture, so there's a lot of information to pull from.