[Elliot Frahs]

Try working directly with the Cinema DNG files in AE. If you need to, give it a “video” grade that isn’t so washed out and work with that. Your goal is to pull a matte – after that work is done, you can always apply that matte to a differently-graded layer. The extra advantage is fine control over spill suppression in your final graded layer.

[Elliot Frahs]

Update! I tried skipping every third line by using track mattes and appropriately offsetting duplicates of the upscale layer (based on the position of the appropriate layer below.) I think the results looked good in the x-axis, and then on the y-axis I simply used AE’s scale. The rescaled external recorder footage looks better than the in-camera footage, in my opinion:

BUT, I don’t want to create thousands of layers! This method requires a new layer for every other pixel in the x-axis. I’m already getting stack overflow errors. The good news is that it seems like skipping every third line gives a good result. Is there a practical way to do this?