Faking a close up

[dstevens]

I was looking at some footage I shot, and I felt my close up wasn't as 'close' as it should have been.

I've been playing dragging the handles of the footage, and 'zooming in' on the actor. I know that loses some resolution, then I played with the sharpen effect to make it look, well... sharper.

I guess it's a matter of taste, just wondering has anyone else ever tried this? I think it looks sorta ok on a regular tv monitor, but I'm thinking if it was ever shown on a theater screen, the lack of resolution would look much more obvious.

[vidled]

You'll find that quite a few TV shows do this, especially the ones that think showing any one clip for more than ½ second is bad. They will then go from the close up to a zoom version. It is, however, quite noticable, and IMHO looks bad.
It will largly depend on what you show before and after your "blown up" clip, I think. If it is a shot all by itself, you might just get away with it.

[Can Scanner]

I've found that you can zoom in about 110% before the res loss really starts to show. If you want to zoom in a lot, you might look into Photozoom Pro.

[TeamJoeDawn]

I've found that you can zoom in about 110% before the res loss really starts to show. If you want to zoom in a lot, you might look into Photozoom Pro.

Agreed.. I've done a number of them (with limited success)... for some pro-bono videos I did for a private school.. anything much over 10% shows, especially when smacked between two standard resolution shots.. its the comparison that kills you... they are out of continuity with preceding and proceding shots.

J

[TeamJoeDawn]

I've found that you can zoom in about 110% before the res loss really starts to show. If you want to zoom in a lot, you might look into Photozoom Pro.

Does photozoom pro work for video, or just stills?

J

[vidled]

Photozoom is for stills, so you'd need a frame server to feed it individual frames. BUT: there's another program that is easier to use and works with video; I beleive they advertise on the banner above left of this site. InstantHD, it's called:
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/instanthd.html

[Can Scanner]

Yeah, Photozoom is for stills, but it can batch convert. If you export a movie as a sequence of tiff files from Premiere, you can batch those files with Photozoom.
Haven't heard about InstantHD. It's $99. I think Photozoom is about the same. I know Photozoom has a try-out...

[Baluardo]

my experience is that using photozoom for anything else than cartoons or very geometric patterns helps very little..
what dsstevens says could be easily done in a context with a few 'effects' on the images so a blurry shot (possibly covered with effects) wouldnt fit bad.

but i wouldnt expect to get sharp results if you zoom in a lot, regardless of the filters you use. it would look like you didnt focus properly

Andrea