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Best tools to resize/zoom with image quality in mind
Hi I have been searching for best tool (plugin to after effects on windows 7 64bit) to resize/zoom videos. I would like to have best image quality so I want to disable my digital zoom on my camera and zoom movies later in post processing with software that could make illusion that the image is still sharp and full of details like you used optical zoom. I know there is nothing that will match 100% optical zoom, but there are much better approaches than bi-linear interpolation.
I have found plugin from infognition.com and digital anarchy, but booth of them have old reviews and I wounder that I have found outdated plugins. What are the best plugins for that in 2011? Like for the slow-mo I could name you 2 most suitable plugins for that, but when you search net you will find lots of worthless plugins what match your search terms.
And the problem I have right now, I can’t distinguish between plugin what are worth trying and what are just waste of time. I know they should use something like Lanczos resampling (I think there is something in VirtualDub, but I would like to have it in AE).
For any opinions I thank you in advance (and it doesn’t matter if it’s commercial or free product).
Anton
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3 Replies
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I agree with Dave- Instant HD from Magic Bullet/Red Giant can help.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
Thank you for both answers. I will give the “instant HD” a try, even that I want to use it for something else. I shot 1080p already, just when I use 20x optical zoom I can enhance it to 80x but by loosing details, now I found out that I can use digital teleconverter (2x – 2.3x) so I will get 40x without loosing details and without any accessories, just different settings on camera (clipping center from the 11Mpix sensor). And only what I need to do is to zoom it by 200% and I will have 80x zoom. But instead doing it in camera directly where I had 8x magnified pixels now I will have 2x magnification, but with more sophisticated algorithm which will give me much more better results from my original process. And I hope that I will get to the 80x optical zoom illusion as near as possible.
When I will finish with the tests with the Red Giant plugin then I will post you update how well did the trick for me.
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Now I tried the Instant HD and the resizer what reg giant bought, I think the resizer gives me almost the same results as the instant HD, but for my case it gives me easier controls (just to put 200% zoom and don’t have to calculate what is double of full HD). And it renders much faster.
I shot 3 movies, first 20x zoom, then 20x with 2x tele-converter (40x) and then 40x digital, that means 20x optical and 2x magnification in camera software. So I have original file, then I have the best case scenario (optical 40x) and worst case scenario (digital zoom in camera).
But both result (instant HD and resizer) gave me almost the same results as the worst case scenario. It’s is very hard to find any difference between the digital zoom from camera and the AE results. Is there any other alternative software to Red Giant, perhaps this one is not the best suited for my conditions.
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