Kona 3 SD to HD upconversion question

[Warren Eig]

If I’m not mistaken, the Canon XL-2 doesn’t shoot in a true de-interlaced progressive format. Canon’s 24 P isn’t a real 24 P.

Warren Eig
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[Jd Marlow]

It was shot to Mini-DV obviously with 24p advanced pulldown (2:3:3:2) that was removed upon ingest into Final Cut Pro. It’s not like those Sony “Cine-Look” formats.

[Gary Adcock]

[Jonathan Marlow] ” All looked great on an HD QC monitor watching both the output and input rout. Now when I look at this on a computer display I see artifacting: “

So what are you asking?
that there will be fine detail loss when upconverting?
YES there will be issues, it is not a silver bullet when converting highly compressed content from SD to HD.

if your delivery is the web, why did you upcovert?

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, IL

https://blogs.creativecow.net/24640

[Jd Marlow]

Gary,

My delivery is for HD, not the web. I’m really just trying to find out if what I’m seeing is an inherent product of the conversion from my XL-2 “progressive” footage or if there is something else I could be doing (i.e. running a blanket de-interlace to the footage prior to upconverting, etc) to improve upon this. The only reason I’m even bringing it up is because largely the upconversion looks terrific. It’s just in some details where there is certain types of motion that I’m seeing the artifacting.

[Gary Adcock]

[Jonathan Marlow] ” I’m really just trying to find out if what I’m seeing is an inherent product of the conversion from my XL-2 “progressive” footage or if there is something else I could be doing (i.e. running a blanket de-interlace to the footage prior to upconverting, etc) to improve upon this.”

JM, the problem is that there is no secret sauce.

While there are things that can be done to minimize the issue, you said yourself that it looks good on your QC monitor. Computer displays are not designed to handle interlaced content, so IMHO the ringing found when interlaced material is upconverted varies from content to content. If it looks OK on your intended output device I am going to say its going to be OK.

De-interlacing the SD footage prior to conversion will help somewhat, but note that much of your fine detail will be lost. Note too that you are working at 4x the size of your original and zooming any footage that much will show artifacts, especially if you are trying to additionally enlarge the image to fill the HD’s 16×9 frame. If you do need to do that- you need to look into Teranex processing to maintain quality.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, IL

https://blogs.creativecow.net/24640

[Jeremy Garchow]

PsF.

Also, if you go to the original frame (from the dv timeline) and look at the frames around it, did the cadence get removed properly?

Jeremy

[Jd Marlow]

Cadence was definitely removed properly. Nothing to be found in the original DV timeline. Even once it was transcoded to ProRes and bumped up to 10-bit prior to upres I didn’t notice anything that might suggest it would be blown up into a bigger problem.

I am thinking of trying some more tests as far as doing some de-interlacing filters on to the HD file. But I might also go back to the SD source and try some of that as well.

My first thought about this was that I’m dealing with PsF here — it’s not true progressive material coming off the other system. But I’ve also seen material captured from HD PsF sources and not had this issue.

[Jd Marlow]

Problem solved. For anyone who is interested:

I ran a number of tests in both Compressor and MPEG streamclip using de-interlace settings (despite the file being progressive already). Best solution I came up with was in Compressor doing a De-interlace to the video (set to Blur), as well as a de-interlace in the frame control tab. Here are the results:

https://www.jdmarlow.com/ats_deint01.png
https://www.jdmarlow.com/ats_deint02.png

Compare to:
https://www.jdmarlow.com/ats_artifact01.png
https://www.jdmarlow.com/ats_artifact02.png

Much improved, without further degrading the quality of the up-conversion.

Thanks all for your suggestions and help.

[Ben Scott]

Are you setting fcp to sd easy setup as timeline and then doing the upconvert via the secondary output this is the way to upconvert

Also watch out as there is at least a one frame delay to picture but not to sound to get accurate timecode and picture you must slip all visuals back one frame to get them in synch

Also presume it\’s a kona 3 you are talking about