Upressing SD to HD? How to?

[John Pale]

The best way…. Take your footage to a dub house and have it upconverted on a Terenex.

Next best way…purchase a Kona card (or Blackmagic Decklink) and upconvert on ingest.

The software solutions, such as Compressor, After Effects, and various plugins are not practical if you have lots of footage, as the render time is very lengthy. Blowing it up within FCP will not yield good results without use of plugins (Boris and Digital Anarchy make plugs for this purpose)

[Graeme Nattress]

Actually I’ve found FCP quite good for upscaling. Make sure you turn on high quality motion filtering in the timeline and it looks pretty good. I’d try that first before I spend on another solution.

If you’re dealing with progressive video or you want to deinterlace interlaced video, scaling up in Color can also look pretty good, but for that I tend to go in and denoise and other stuff as well, which can help.

Graeme

– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP

[Rafael Amador]

[Graeme Nattress] “but for that I tend to go in and denoise and other stuff as well, which can help.”
Which other stuuf Graeme? Cam on, give us your secret:-)
WTW are worth those pluins mentioned by John or the InstantHD of MagicBullet?
Cheers,
Rafael

[Uli Plank]

Well, since Graeme is too modest to tell: definitely use his plug-ins before trying to upscale in Color.
In this case his de-interlacer (the one in Color really sucks), maybe with motion detection, plus some chroma enhancements. There are some very helpful fx-node trees coming with his set.
Regarding ReSizer and InstantHD: I’ve tested both of them with FCP (and written about the whole, tedious process). I’d say: They do what they say, but you’ll need to do quite some tweaking according to your imagery until you really see much of an improvement over FCP itself.
If you want to work with Color anyway, I’d rather suggest buying Graeme’s tools. They can do many more things, you’ll learn a lot about Color in the process and you can achieve everything the specialised plug-ins can do with some clever combination of his filters.

My two cents (Euro),

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Rafael Amador]

Thanks a lot Uli. I haven’t got yet to the “HD World” but I’m prepareing my self for the the “big jump” (XDCam? DVCProHD?, Red? thanks God I can-I have to- wait).
Cheers,
rafael