[Alden Ford]

I actually came here today to search for this exact topic, I’m in a similar situation. I have 4K and 6K footage, delivering at 1080p. I’ve found that scaling the footage into a 1080 sequence is a lot harder on my system than editing it at higher-res, so I’ve been editing in 4k, and playback is nice and smooth. A Cam was shot in 6K so we’d have room to punch in in post, so a huge number of our shots need to be punched in to 1:1 at 6K.

But David is right – it turns out that Premiere doesn’t resample your source footage when you export. I’m in trouble because we are not only using 4K sequences, but we’re also using nested sequences where the 6K is scaled down to 4K – so disentangling all the scaling is thorny.

Premiere’s upscaling is good enough that we didn’t notice we were losing quality until we did some tests.

But I did find a sort-of workaround, if it fits into your workflow. If you import your sequences in After Effects, they do refer back to your source footage. So if your sequence is simple enough, or if you were planning to finish in After Effects anyway, that may solve your problem.

[Alden Ford]

I’m actually working on a project that is supposed to be a zoom call and I’ve experimented with a couple different things.

If I’m not mistaken, what Zoom and other software does is (in combination with some sort of difference matte) use the depth data from the camera to create a mask that removes anything that isn’t in focus – the camera can parse this out because it knows more or less what it’s focusing on. After it’s shot, of course, AE can’t tell what the camera was doing, so it’s harder to reverse engineer. I suspect what you’d need is some way for the camera to record focus info in the metadata which AE would then interpret, but I’m not sure that’s a thing either software can do.

The tough part is that for the vast majority of footage, unless you have raw, locked off footage with zero grain or compression, a difference matte is essentially worthless.

Fortunately, if you’re actually going for a zoom look, then the roto brush (don’t forget to extend the span so you don’t have to keep messing with it), or a track matte set to position/scale/rotation/skew with adjustments as needed should get you about as close as Zoom would (which is to say, not close at all, but it will have a similar look). If it needs to look good, then you probably need to do a more precise roto with the brush or Mocha.

[Alden Ford]

Terrific, thank you! I’ll give it a shot.

[Alden Ford]

Thank you Graham! Currently I’m using AE’s face tracking on footage of myself and making nulls from that to put on my still image of the mouth. Is CA’s face tracking better for this?

I’ll try stabilizing the head to add my animation first. Good plan.