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Question on quality ….
I guess this may not technically fit into this forum but since I use premiere maybe it would help me out.
My question is why is it that when I do a full screen playback off a regular movie dvd(whichever movie you want)….its sharp at full screen. Like super sharp. Say for example I take a lord of the rings dvd, pop it in my laptop and play it(not on a tv). Its native resolution is 720p so why is it that when it gets upscaled to full screen its still crystal clear? When take video off my dv camera the 720 comes out fine until i give it a fullscreen and then it clearly doesn’t upscale as well as a dvd movie.
Same goes for pretty much anything i render out of premiere. Even at the highest settings(no compression, animation qt file), at full screen it doesn’t look as good as the movie dvds do. Am I missing something really simple here?
Thanks in advance!
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17 Replies
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Your DVD player changes the screen resolution for your monitor when you play it full screen.
What if there were no hypothetical questions?
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I understand that, but is there a way for me to integrate whatever this upscaling feature is into my qt files so that at fullscreen they look as well as when the dvd player upscales it?
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Hi Stanley,
I believe the issue is that Hollywood movies ORIGINATE from film at a very high resolution and are also encoded to MPEG-2 using high-end encoders.
So granted, a Hollywood DVD and your DV footage are both 720×480, but a 1-chip (or even 3-chip) DV camera is no match for Hollywood footage.
Home footage will just never look as good as a movie.
I am now shooting 1080i, and though downconverting to SD for delivery, I have found that the DVDs I make originating from HDV look sharper than DVDs originating from DV footage, because there was more DETAIL and COLOR FIDELITY in the image to start with. Like the old computer saying – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Hope this makes sense
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
How do you know it is not upscaling?
There are many things at play here. First, the Hollywood DVDs were made from film, which is 10x the resolution of you DV footage.
And the few hundred thousand they spent encoding it to mpeg2 means the DVD is going to be much sharper than anything you can make in Premiere.
These DVDs are often encoded on dual layers disc and at higher speed than you and me can safely do on our DVD burners.
And finally, most of those Hollywood DVDs are encoded at 24P, and if your DVD player supports progressive scan, you are probably seeing native progressive footage as long as the pull down is properly reversed.
That’s a big difference compared to DV with actually gets deinterlaced first, thus actually losing resolution or getting softened first by the time you see it on the LCD screen.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
thanks for the responses so far guys
I get you guys on the dv footage, I’m not saying its not upscaling, just saying the upscale isn’t as good on my qt files even when the original sizes look great. But I still have one more issue. Say I make some effect in after effects purely with whatever after effects provides me(no footage/images). Just effects, shape layers , whatever. I’ve rendered it at HD 720. When I compress the HD one down to 720×480(highest mpeg2 settings i can get) and view it fullscreen ….it clearly looks like…well I don’t want to say crap because its not, but you can still clearly see the difference in sharpness.
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Basically, don’t downconvert in Premiere. Much like Final Cut I should add (I had to deal with that last week), it just does a bad job at it and, you can actually end up with something looking worse than if it was shot in SD, depending on the format.
Export progressive from AE and work progressive all the way to DVD.
And of course, watch for PAR changes from AE to Premiere.
If you are working with HD video, see a post made this week below about other options in Premiere, or use After Effects.
Feel free to post some still exports if it still doesn’t look the way it should
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
[Stanley Flomin] “I’ve rendered it at HD 720. When I compress the HD one down to 720×480(highest mpeg2 settings i can get) and view it fullscreen ….it clearly looks like…well I don’t want to say crap”
You are stepping on your DV footage a few times if you are taking 480i rendering it at HD720 then downconverting it back to a DV frame size and compressing it for mpeg2, I also notice a QT mentioned, try a normal DV workflow then compress it for mpeg2, and make a image file and run that through a computer DVD player -
Hmm….I’m actually downconverting in compressor since for whatever reason after effects/premiere can’t export as mpeg2(or maybe its just labeled as something else and I’m not aware of it?)… But when I output from premiere it ports it to adobes media encoder, is that the same thing as rendering from premiere?
Thanks again, oh and I work with just plain dv ntsc footage.
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err sorry if i wasn’t clear. I was giving an example of when I made an HD720p composition in after effects without any footage, just took a shape layer, threw some effects on it and rendered it. The purpose of that was to downconvert it into dv ntsc and see its quality in full screen mode. Which sadly was blurry. I did this because someone mentioned earlier that when studios downconvert it looks good at full screen because it was originally in much higher quality…so i did the same thing minus the footage but still using HD effects.
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Right, but you downconverted with Premiere, not a $100000.00 piece of hardware. As I said, try exporting 480p from AE and encode that in Premiere (progressive) and you should see some good results.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area
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