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help with trying to fake HD “look” for SD footage
hello,
i am — like just about everyone else — trying to mix SD and HD in one project. my situation is a little bit tricky though. my project consists of many short video clips of people on a white background that need to look as uniform as possible. unfortunately, i had to switch camera partway through shooting this project, so some clips are shot on SD miniDV with a PD150, and some are XDCAM. this project will ultimately be displayed on the web, not on a television. all the clips are being cut in final cut, but then sent out to compressor and compressed so that i can work with them in flash.
since flash is pretty flexible with size and resolution, i’ve decided not to upres my SD footage or downres the HD footage. instead i am keeping the SD footage 4:3, and cropping the HD footage to 960*720 4:3 aspect ratio. when played back in full screen mode on a computer monitor, they should look the same in terms of aspect ratio and display size on the monitor, and i won’t need to sacrifice my HD resolution.
however, i am struggling with the very different image quality. the SD clips look much more washed out, less contrasty, less sharp, and very interlace-artifacty on my monitor. they loo bad. the HD clips look very different, and the difference is extremely noticeable.
can anyone recommend things to do to give the SD footage more of an HD “look/” this is not about resolution, but about the other things. should i deinterlace the Sd if i plan to display on a computer? should i sharpen the edges, up the contrast? i know i can’t get it to look like HD, but i want to minimize the glaring differences. right now it is way too obvious that there are two sets of completely different-looking images.
any advice would be great.
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5 Replies
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There’s some Magic Bullet plugins that are designed to make SD look like HD.
Motion Design, Color, Editing
Simulated Wood Grain Cabinet Inc.
(Seriously though, that’s the name on the paycheck) -
thank you — i hadn’t heard of this, but am downloading the trial version now. does it do a good job?
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It does a decent job. I haven’t used it in a long time though.
Motion Design, Color, Editing
Simulated Wood Grain Cabinet Inc.
(Seriously though, that’s the name on the paycheck) -
If you do this with hardware you’ll come closer to the look you want. Your challenge is you’re starting with the DV codec which looks nothing like HD even if you center-cut the HD. A Teranex is the best hardware box followed by Kona (or similar). Another approach if you need the footage to match is to downconvert the HD to SD.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
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okay, this plugin seems very promising but it crashes my aftereffects every single time i try to render. i’m very, very frustrated! i really want to see a sample of the rendering so i can decide if it’s worth buying a license! will poke around the AE forum and see if there’s anything about this.
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