Is there an industry standard? what do you all do?

[Mark Suszko]

It should depend on the needs of the story you’re telling and the aesthetic you’re trying to achieve. You CAN just conform everything to one size, of course the blown-up footage will be softer and hard to match. You can acknowledge and own-up that the footage is older/lower rez and just crop/frame it creatively within the larger frame, a device that in fact can help force attention to the clip better than blowing it up. There are all kinds of visual tricks you can do with a less than HD frame, including mutiple repeats, stacked layers in different scales, with blurs, manga-like multiple slices of the footage… you’re only limited by creativity and purpose.

A hard and fast rule that everything must be one way only? Sounds…. …unimaginative.

[Shane Ross]

There is no standard when it comes to anything, sadly. Every network has it’s own rules. One doc I worked on we were able to upconvert SD to HD, and leave it pillarboxed, so we could show the whole image. But the next doc, for another network, they didn’t want the bars on the side, so I needed to blow up the footage even more, zooming in to fill the screen.

It all depends on the network you are delivering to.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Lisa Robinson]

Thanks guys… Appreciate it. My former production manager says to keep the footage SD without bowing it up and use a background use two layers of the same footage and blow up the bottom layer and blurr it, keeping the top layer as SD, while the new production manager tells me to blow up all SD footage to fit the screen. I don’t know. I’m use to doing it one way, I guess

[Mark Suszko]

Context of the shot is everything. Is the shot “newsy”, or more documentary-like?

[Lisa Robinson]

It’s a local pbs news magazine with 3-5 minute packages. But they feel like mini documentaries

[Mark Suszko]

Then PIP-type effects with various frames, on blurred or animated backgrounds, are a natural fit for this kind of thing. One fun way to show them is to matte them into the screen of an old 4×3 TV screen, itself part of a 16×9 frame. The style of the TV chosen then gives a non-verbal cue to the relative era of the video being shown.

[John Rofrano]

Boris FX has a plug-in as part of their BCC Units for Image Restoration called UpRez that will scale up SD to HD and apply a Magic Sharpen that will sharpen details but not background noise. I just finished recoding a Boris TV episode on how to use it with FCP X and Motion 5 but it won’t be posted for a few days. You might want to look into it because it allows you to upscale with pillar boxes, upscale and stretch to fit, or upscale and zoom/crop to fit. So any way your boss likes it, it has you covered and gives great results.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Lisa Robinson]

Thanks…. I’m going to look into this

[Michael Gissing]

My experience in my area of broadcast which includes international deliverables to the US & Europe is that 4:3 material used to be zoomed up and cropped or more recently, scaled as 4:3 and leaving pillar boxing which is usually then masked by cropping to the edge to create a clean frame edge.

The trick of second layer zoomed and blurred is also common but in recent times, broadcasters have become more relaxed about leaving pillar boxed footage in including stills so the long answer is to claim creative intent and bluff the broadcaster unless the deliverables specifically state the image must fill the 16:9 frame.The extra zooming to fill the edges in 16:9 make an already scaled SD image even softer and the framing after either cropping top or bottom is a compromise of the original camera framing.

[John Rofrano]

Hi Lisa, Boris just posted my BCC UpRez tutorial to Boris TV:

Episode 227: BCC UpRez in FCP X and Motion 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqaDq0xTGOo
This should give you an idea of what UpRez can do.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

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