How does it make any sense to scale up to an 800×600 from 720×480…

[David Roth weiss]

[Stanley Flomin] “The reason I’m asking is because in fcp after setting the sequence size to 800 600 I have to render every clip constantly just to view it in the timeline…which is a huge pain in the rear.”
Clearly, you should not scale everything on the timeline during your preliminary edit, as you’ve determined already, that’s just a big pain in the butt. If they demand it, you should scale after your edit is complete, but before titles are added.

However, scaling up their SD video to 800×600 makes little sense unless they are trying hard to decrease resolution and sharpness intentionally. Are you sure they are not scaling down HD video to 800×600?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Stanley Flomin]

Oh I’m certain they aren’t down scaling. I’m partly helping them film so I’m 100% sure on them working with 720×480. But it gets worse, if I render from FCP the qt file squashes everything because they want square pixels. And they want the output from fcp to create a qt file that has the exact size of 800×600 and not ‘squashed'(without having to touch the qt file).
The workflow normal was working in premiere, which for whatever reason even though you tell it to render with square pixels, it would give you an 800×600 unsquashed qt file. Can’t say I know why this is, i’ve looked into the premiere settings to see what the difference is and I couldn’t find anything.

[Bret Williams]

Sounds to me like some sort of botched attempt to make the image 4:3 for the web since he said it’s viewed by the client on computer. Why they don’t just export it as 720×540 or 640×480 (or 800×600 for that matter) when it’s all said and done is beyond me.

[Stanley Flomin]

Sounds to me like some sort of botched attempt to make the image 4:3 for the web since he said it’s viewed by the client on computer. Why they don’t just export it as 720×540 or 640×480 (or 800×600 for that matter) when it’s all said and done is beyond me.

I was trying to convince them to just leave it at 720×480 but they don’t want to. And yea, it does get viewed on the computer. But I’m not sure what you mean with the 720×540. I do export it as 800×600 but like i said editing it, adding the hundreds of titles that i have to add with having to constantly prerender hours of footage so i could view it normally in the timeline is a huge hassle. That and im upscaling a video and the quality just dies but they don’t seem to agree and I don’t really know how to convince them otherwise.

[John Pale]

Hope they are paying you by the hour…

And yes…they are insane.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Here’s the rub. You are going to have to squash at some point. My advice would be to edit as normal, 720×480 non square. Export your finished render, then make a square pixel 800×600 movie in Compressor with high quality scaling turned on. 640×480 would be better as you could actually use the native resolution, but I guess you do as they say as they write the checks.

[Rafael Amador]

I agree with Jeremy about the procedure.
Your customer is not asking something crazy.
He wants to see a NTSC DV at full screen and without distortion.
You get a better upscaling in Compressor than the one you get with QT Player in “Full Screen” mode.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[John Pale]

[Rafael Amador] “Your customer is not asking something crazy.
He wants to see a NTSC DV at full screen and without distortion. “

The end result is not crazy. The current workflow to achieve it is.

Jeremy’s is much more logical.

[Bobby Mosaedi]

just edit normally like you would in the native resolution so that it is easy to make changes, add clips etc. When you get done and ready to export, export a self-contained and take that to compressor.

Is your footage 4:3 or 16:9? if it is 4:3, have compressor squeeze to fill the 800×600 frame, since 800×600 is a scale of 4:3. It will fill the screen perfectly. Only do this AFTER you have completed your edit. By keeping everything in the native resolution of 720×480 while you work, this keeps your options open to output to tape, do quick renders/ exports to DVD, and apply filters with ease.

800×600 is just the deliverable file, it is to be done only at the very end of your edit. We get a lot of off requests and file sizes. Keep it in broadcast res as long as you can until you need to change it.

Hope this helps

Bobby Mosaedi
Magic Video, Inc.

[Alexander Kallas]

Hmmm,
Has anyone compared upscaling with Innobits Video Purifier to that with Compressor?

Cheers
Alexander