[sneak]

I don't understand why this is better than simply doing composite or s-video to 480p HDMI with a cheap little box and capturing that?

It seems like this is an order of magnitude more complex and expensive.

Is the quality really that much better?

[mosquitobiten]

I went that route and there's a catch. The composite/s-video adapters/upscalers to HDMI have a chip in them that is factory programmed with some video and color settings that can't be manipulated. You can do some alterations in OBS with filters or in Premiere after saving it to compensate for innacuracies.

For ex. my situation: cheap upscaler bought before covid had really high saturation and turned small areas of similar colours into one color squares no matter the bitrate chosen in OBS(this type of artefact is very obvious in 140p youtube video). After getting into it again in present day the upscaler stopped working and bought another one of the same kind. Guess what, it ships with a different chip and different settings, this time it has almost no colors and presents weird glowing around dark regions when the camera moves around fast. Now I'm in a pickle and I'm really considering going the above route.