Options and recommendations for upsampling SD to HD

[Todd Kopriva]

Before you buy something additional, make sure that you know about the built-in scaling features:
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2015/08/favorite-features-cc-versions-after-effects-scaling.html

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects product manager and curmudgeon
After Effects team blog
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[Tero Ahlfors]

[Sean David] ” Also, is there a hardware device that would do this better/faster than software? “

Yeah. How much money do you have?

[Sean David]

I wouldn’t be able to pay more than $1K, unless the quality/speed was significantly superior to using software. There is about 3-5 hours to convert, in many smaller clips.

Sean

Asus G73JH i7-720, 8GB RAM, Radeon HD5870 1GB, Win7 HPrem 64 bit, Adobe Master Collection CS5, Cinema4D Studio 11, and more…

[Sean David]

Thanks, Todd. I plan to run a few comparisons to see if we need a third party solution.

Sean

Asus G73JH i7-720, 8GB RAM, Radeon HD5870 1GB, Win7 HPrem 64 bit, Adobe Master Collection CS5, Cinema4D Studio 11, and more…

[Michael Szalapski]

If you have any of Red Giant’s products, check to see if you have one of their resizing tools too. They’ve been included in various plugin collections they’ve sold in the past. If you don’t have it, you can download a demo. That way you can compare how your footage looks with AE’s Detail-Preserving Upscaling vs. Red Giant’s toolset.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Sean David]

Seriously, does Blackmagic or a similar company make such a device? They have lots of converter boxes, but they seem to be all display conversion vs file conversion.

Sean

Asus G750JZ i7, 24GB RAM, Nvidia 880M 4GB, Win8.1 64 bit, Adobe CC, Cinema4D Studio 17, and whatever else it takes to get the job done.

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Sean David] “Seriously, does Blackmagic or a similar company make such a device?”

Blackmagic is now making the Teranex so that would do it. The thing is that it’s made for signal based conversion so you would need to run your footage through it and capture it from the output. All processing is in realtime.

[Tero Ahlfors]

There’s also Digital Vision’s Thor but that cool piece of tech doesn’t even have a price tag on the site. I’d wager it’s in the tens of thousands.

[Sean David]

For interest sake, I did contact the people who make Thor, and the hardware (PCIE-16 card) is just an engine to speed up processing (up to 8x or so), and is optional. The conversion routines are in their Loki/Phoenix software which is made up of a group of modules. The pricing for the software is in the 10’s of k’s, depending which product/group of modules you choose. (Message me if you want the gory details, I don’t want to put the prices here.) They offer the full turnkey hardware / installation / training / support, which would be a pretty penny more. It is likely aimed at producers and broadcast clients like cable channels who are more interested in volume and the end product than in the cost to get there.

Sean

Asus G750JZ i7, 24GB RAM, Nvidia 880M 4GB, Win8.1 64 bit, Adobe CC, Cinema4D Studio 17, and whatever else it takes to get the job done.