Best in-camera settings for uprezzing to 720p?

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benjamin222

Member
Hey guys! I work for a TV show on PBS that films in HD, and occasionally they ask me to find a musician and film a short music video for the show.

Anywhoo I'm filming with a DVX100b, and just recently started playing around with HD upscaling. As far as post production goes, I think I got it down. I basically am just exporting my SD footage as an HDV 720p file in sony vegas, quality is great.

Just curious though if there are any specific settings in the camera itself that could help me get the absolute best picture for footage that is intended for upscaling to 720p?

Right now here are my settings:

Scene File -


  • DETAIL LEVEL = -3
  • V DETAIL LEVEL = -1
  • DETAIL CORING = +2
  • CHROMA LEVEL = +3
  • CHROMA PHASE = 0
  • COLOR TEMP = 0
  • MASTER PED = -6
  • A. IRIS LEVEL = -1
  • GAMMA = B. PRESS
  • SKIN TONE DTL = OFF
  • MATRIX = CINELIKE
  • V DETAIL FREQ = THIN!
  • PROGRESSIVE = 30p!
...and for widescreen I'm using letter-box. (I know I could just crop in post but I like having my LCD show up in 16x9 without putting electrical tape on it)

The first thing I tried was turning the Detail settings way up to +5 or so, but then I started getting a picture with lots of screen-noise, finally gave up and put detail back down again.

Anyway has anyone else worked with upscaling footage from their DVX to fit 720p 30 fps? Have any problems with screen noise when putting detail settings way up or were you able to figure that out? Any suggestions would be awesome!!
 
vxdvx said:
wats the advantages of squeeze mode?
i dont really like the look of it.
Click to expand...

If I'm correct you use the whole sensor in squeeze mode and in letterbox the sensor is actually cropped, so you loose resolution. Squeeze mode uses non-square pixels to achieve the 16x9 image from the 4:3 sensors.


EDIT: Acutally after looking at the brochure, I belive I'm wrong. So I'd have ton concur with the question. What's the advantage to squeeze mode?

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/Panasonic/Drivers/PBTS/brochures/B_AG-DVX100B.pdf

The brouchure makes it seems like a cropped sensor image is scanned by the CCDs and then recorded stretched vertically.
 
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Because the process of taking part of the sensor image and stretching it out to create anamorphic widescreen is done in camera with more information than it ever would be if you shot 4:3 (and letterbox IS 4:3) and did it yourself in post.

You want to uprez to 720, so you need widescreen at some point. Do it with the most information possible.
 
But aren't both Squeeze and Letterbox 16:9 windowed on the sensor? Meaning they have the same amount of pixels, one is just stretched vertically to fill 4:3... Or am I missing something?
 
Andrew McCarrick said:
But aren't both Squeeze and Letterbox 16:9 windowed on the sensor? Meaning they have the same amount of pixels, one is just stretched vertically to fill 4:3... Or am I missing something?
Click to expand...

Yeah, but you can either scale a compressed, 4:1:1 colour sampled frame or you could get the camera to do it from the uncompressed, raw source. They're both windowed, but one method is definitely better.

As for scene file settings, Detail at -4 is my big thing. I won't say that it will give the best scaling performance, but I've done pretty well with it. I link to this in every thread about uprezzing, but here's an example of my work and my settings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KALcMw-vGFw
 
Alex.Mitchell said:
Yeah, but you can either scale a compressed, 4:1:1 colour sampled frame or you could get the camera to do it from the uncompressed, raw source. They're both windowed, but one method is definitely better.
Click to expand...

Oh it scales (stretchs up to 4:3) before the compression? Didn't realize that. Makes more sense now.
 
Jordan_Sopinsky said:
I know the OP said he doesn't want to crop in post but wouldn't shooting 4:3 and cropping in post give "the most information possible"?
Click to expand...

Honestly, it really depends on how the DVX generates widescreen video. If it does what I hope it does, shooting squeeze should provide more detail than shooting letterbox and then scaling the footage afterwards. They both use a similar portion of the CCD, but one method should produce higher quality footage.
 
Jordan_Sopinsky said:
I wrote 4:3, not letterbox. Squeeze is basically letterbox stretched.
Click to expand...

Six to one, half-dozen to the other. Whether you're shooting letterbox of 4:3 fill frame, the results should be similar, if not exactly the same. You can shift the frame around if you want with 4:3, but you're still scaling an already compressed, 4:1:1 image.
 
Hey me again. Yeah I've since been filming with squeeze mode, as far as having an actual quality difference I'm still not entirely sure. My footage looks pretty much the same as it did when I'd crop in post or use letter-box. However I do have the DVX100b, so I can still view the LCD as 16x9 when shooting in squeeze, and the footage imports as native 16x9, so it's what I've started using with no problems at all. Also now I'm thinking there just HAS to be some kind of better resolution coming from the picture when the whole picture is stretched to 720x480 vs. Letterboxing in the 4x3 frame. So I agree, just keep using squeeze if you plan to up-rez your footage
 
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