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back and forth SD and HD comps
I began work on a bunch of stills with the intention of outputting SD only. I did layers, lights, precomps with DV-size comps. Now I’ve decided I want to save the products as 720p.
Will I lose quality by dragging a “finished” SD comp into an HD comp and scaling up? I’m afraid I will, but then nothing’s pre-rendered, maybe After Effects will reference the actual resolution of the photographs and everything will be fine.
That would be the easy way. The hard way would be to go back and redo each precomp manually.
If I get a quick answer here, I won’t have to test and tax my eyeballs trying to tell, and maybe the answer will help others. Thanks.Larry Gibbs
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4 Replies
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*If* there is enough resolution in the original footage (photographs etc) you just need to place the SD Comp in the HD Comp and click the Collapse Transformations switch and you won’t degrade the image by scaling
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Awesome. Thanks.
Larry Gibbs
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Like Brian said, as long as the images have enough resolution you can scale up without quality loss. However, I would not recommend nesting an SD comp into an HD comp because SD and HD are different pixel aspect ratios and different picture aspect ratios, so you would end up with a horizontally squished image. I’ve had to upres a LOT of old SD projects and I used the Scale Composition script, which seemed to be the best and easiest solution for me. When you run it, set the “new comp width” to 1280 and hit “scale”. Then go into the comp settings and choose the “HDV/HDTV 720 29.97” preset. Since the picture aspects are different, you may find that your images that filled the 4:3 frame don’t quite fill the 16:9 frame. In that case, just create a new null, parent everything that isn’t already parented to something else to the null and just scale up as needed. If that happens a lot then maybe just skip the script and just use a null to scale.
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Thanks Eric.
My SD comps are 1.21/1 and the HD ones are square pixel 16:9, so I would guess I’m okay on that.Larry Gibbs
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