The video that made me ask this is this one [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914)
A-ha: Take on me in 4k. How is this possible when 4k didn’t exist when the video was made?
In: Technology
tl;dr you can’t.
there are two ways you can think of resolution:
* number of pixels – you could simply say that if video is encoded at 3840 x 2160 pixels, “it’s 4k.” this could be misleading though, because you could take very low resolution video, like 640×480 digital video from the early 90s, and just scale it up, so that each pixel in the source video was just made 6x bigger (that is, scaled to a 6 pixel x 6 pixel box). this operation would technically increase the number of pixels, but would leave the amount of information unchanged, because the image would still look all blocky.
* ability to distinguish details – you could say that an image or video has higher resolution if you are able to look at it and distinguish a higher number of details, like strands of hair or pores on skin. this is true regardless of the medium – for example, high-quality film images can be high resolution even though film doesn’t represent image data as pixels.
so if you take source information from the relatively low-resolution film they used in the 80s and map it onto a digital format with very many pixels, you increase the resolution in sense one (pixels) but not sense two (ability to distinguish details).
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