Best way to up-res 720p to 1080p?

Cory Braun

Cory Braun

Well-known member
My school's film festival requires all films to be submitted in 1920x1080, however I shot my film in one of the GH1's 720p modes.

What is the best way to up-res my film to 1080p? I am not to impressed with final cut's upressing from 720p to 1080p so I'm looking for another method.

I've been looking at Magic Bullet's Instant HD. Has anyone used this program before and had success?

Thanks in advance for the help.
 
I would talk to the film festival organizers and find out why the f they want all the movies in 1080p? Wtf? How are they going to be showing/projecting them? Most film festivals still REQUIRE submissions on TAPE.
 
Will Instant HD do 720p to 1080p? What about "Resizer 2.2?"

Will Instant HD do 720p to 1080p? What about "Resizer 2.2?"

Does Instant HD 1.2 or Resizer 2.2 work with 720p to 1080p?

What's the difference in Resizer 2.2 and Instant HD 1.2?

I e-mailed Magic Bullet a last week, but have not heard back from them yet.

Also, is Instant HD 1.2 better than resizing in Compressor? Looks like MB discontinued Instant HD Advanced, implying that Compressor was as good here http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/featured-news/ihd-adv-discontinued/

I hope it's OK to bring up an old thread -- saw this thread when searching for 720p to 1080p.

Thanks!
 
If your master copy is avi, or can be easily converted to avi, then the Lanczos3 option in the "resize" filter within Virtualdub is excellent, and Vdub is freeware.

Are you sure they want 1080p and not 1080i? How are they projecting?
 
GrahamH said:
If your master copy is avi, or can be easily converted to avi, then the Lanczos3 option in the "resize" filter within Virtualdub is excellent, and Vdub is freeware.

Are you sure they want 1080p and not 1080i? How are they projecting?
Click to expand...

Short answer is, I don't know if ProRes is easy to convert to AVI and back.

From looking at Wikipedia, it appears avi is just a wrapper, not a codec (so no recompression is necessary when going to AVI and back). Is this correct?

I would want to work with 1080p or 720p. I would prefer output to be onto Blue-Ray at 720p24. (I have only printed to DVD in the past, at SD, usually at 24 fps progressive).

I would rather use a plug-in that can handle ProRes, if anyone has suggestions.

If you're interested, here's my planned workflow:

I'm just starting to shoot with my Nikon D7000, and will probably borrow a friend's Canon 7D (to shoot 720p60). I would normally convert straight into ProRes (422 SQ). With the 720p60 footage, it would go to Cinema Tools for conversion to 720p24 (slow motion).

Want to upres/cross-convert 720p24 to 1080p24, and drop it in a 720p24 timeline due to the the cropping that comes with stabilizing very shaky footage.

I guess the order would be denoise, upres/cross-convert, stabilize.

Any suggestions welcome.
 
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Contacted Red Giant Software by phone. After checking several times with her coworkers, sales rep said the following:

*Both Magic Bullet Instant HD 1.2 and Magic Bullet Resizer 2.2 will indeed upres/cross-convert 720p24 to 1080p24 (among other things).
*Neither plug-in can utilize "Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously" in AE CS5.
*Red Giant does not give out information regarding approximate render speeds on these products.

If anyone knows of another plug-in for upressing/cross-converting footage, I have not yet purchased Instant HD 1.2.

Within a week will probably purchase some form of "Genuine Fractals" for video.

Thanks.
 
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I've found the upscaler in Canopus Edius 6 to be fairly amazing.... thats Win 7 though and I assume you're mac based, but it handles pretty much any file format and I was impressed with its handling of 1080 HD projects that had mixtures of SD footage and 720p footage that needed to be upscaled... it looked stellar to me and I'm a pixel peeper.
 
Please explain to an old thicky like me can 720P resolution be made 24P,i thought once its filmed its filmed so how can more resolution be given to 720P,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WV_NT4FE04 there is a noticable difference when playing that on an avchd or bd discs to hd tv ,so there is a magic formula that makes 720P the same :Drogar-KnockedOut(D
 
I've used Compressor for this (enable Frame Controls and then set the various options to high quality settings). The results were good, but I did not see them projected on a big screen--only a 30" LCD. I also haven't used the other tools mentioned in the thread, so I don't know how they'd compare.

But, for what it's worth, Compressor's resizing seemed quite good (and vastly superior to Final Cut Pro's low-quality resizing).
 
Blackout said:
I've found the upscaler in Canopus Edius 6 to be fairly amazing.... thats Win 7 though and I assume you're mac based, but it handles pretty much any file format and I was impressed with its handling of 1080 HD projects that had mixtures of SD footage and 720p footage that needed to be upscaled... it looked stellar to me and I'm a pixel peeper.
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Interesting. Yes, I am on Mac, so no Canopus for me.

flinty said:
Please explain to an old thicky like me can 720P resolution be made 24P,i thought once its filmed its filmed so how can more resolution be given to 720P,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WV_NT4FE04 there is a noticable difference when playing that on an avchd or bd discs to hd tv ,so there is a magic formula that makes 720P the same :Drogar-KnockedOut(D
Click to expand...

I'm here to ask questions rather than answer, and usually differ to the many pro's on this site. I assumed you're kidding with your question, as you're a Senior Member. But but if you're being sincere, just let us know, and I'll give your question a shot. (I assume when you say "720P resolution be made 24P...", this is a typo, and you're referring to upressing/cross-converting 1280x720 footage to 1920x1080 footage, rather than just changing frame rates?)

Gerson said:
I've used Compressor for this (enable Frame Controls and then set the various options to high quality settings). The results were good, but I did not see them projected on a big screen--only a 30" LCD. I also haven't used the other tools mentioned in the thread, so I don't know how they'd compare.

But, for what it's worth, Compressor's resizing seemed quite good (and vastly superior to Final Cut Pro's low-quality resizing).
Click to expand...

OK. Good to know Compressor is doing something different from FCP with upressing/cross-converting. The Compressor settings are helpful. Thank you.
 
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Ripple said:
Interesting. Yes, I am on Mac, so no Canopus for me.



I'm here to ask questions rather than answer, and usually differ to the many pro's on this site. I assumed you're kidding with your question, as you're a Senior Member. But but if you're being sincere, just let us know, and I'll give your question a shot. (I assume when you say "720P resolution be made 24P...", this is a typo, and you're referring to upressing/cross-converting 1280x720 footage to 1920x1080 footage, rather than just changing frame rates?)



OK. Good to know Compressor is doing something different from FCP with upressing/cross-converting. The Compressor settings are helpful. Thank you.
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Sorry if you thought i not being sincere and kidding but i thought it regarded turning 720P into 24P resolution but it seems its more to do with upscaling like is done with dvd but that does not look much different to me,i know youtube/vimeo are not ideal for showing resolution despite the fact the difference in 720/24 can still be seen on my test i would like to see a similar test where the upresulution has been done.
 
HansSteinert said:
Red Giant Instant HD 1.2 produces amazing results. It's what I've used in the past for 720p video game footage being upscaled to 1080p.

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-instant-hd/
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OK. Sold. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to post.

flinty said:
Sorry if you thought i not being sincere and kidding but i thought it regarded turning 720P into 24P resolution but it seems its more to do with upscaling like is done with dvd but that does not look much different to me,i know youtube/vimeo are not ideal for showing resolution despite the fact the difference in 720/24 can still be seen on my test i would like to see a similar test where the upresulution has been done.
Click to expand...

finty:

I left some time for a pro or more experienced enthusiast to answer. Looks like no one's taking a bite, so I'll give it a shot. Anyone please correct me if I am in error on anything that follows. Again, I'm here to learn.

The short answer is probably found by understanding what PS plug-in Genuine Fractals does (Genuine Fractals has just been renamed "Perfect Resize 7").

I learned of GF on a Lynda.com tutorial for PS CS4. Deke McClelland suggested it as the only way to get good results when upresing pixels (I believe there are other PS plug-ins that do something similar, which he may have mentioned, but GF is the one I hear about the most).

I do not understand how GF works. The best way to see that it does is to download a "free trial," and use it in PS on low res, noisy screen-shots, for example. I only tried it on a couple pictures (low res, noisy jpeg's), and I was actually amazed. I never used it on high mega-pixel resolution TIFF's though, and seldom hear about it on still photo only forums.

It is probably incorrect to say GF "adds resolution." The information added by Genuine Fractals cannot be the same as shooting at higher resolution. It generates information based on mathematical equations I would never understand, even if they were relased. It guesses what information "might" have been there, and seems to focus on finding patterns that we would not see, but that are enough for it to draw an edge. It probably generates thousands of such edges per image, then "draws" based on this. It is doing something different from "sharpening," although the results might look similar in some cases. It also removes noise. At any rate, I find the images it generates generally more pleasing than low pixel resolution, high noisy jpeg's.

You likely already know this, but actual luma resolution between various cameras that output 1920x1080 (about 2 MP's) vary quite a bit. Some factors that contribute to this are optical low pass filter, line skipping (such as on Nikon and Canon video DSLR's), pixel shifting, and of course, number of photosites. I believe the (excellent in my opinion) Panny HMC-150 has a little over 1 MP of photosites on each chip, while the Panny AF-100 has something like 12 MP on a single Bayer sensor. Both output 1920x1080.

In my opinion, aliasing and high noise codecs (such as AVCHD) degrade resolution, although perhaps not in a way that would limit resolution "lines" when shooting a test chart. There's a strong push now for more chroma resolution, and both Canon and Sony have codecs that do 4:2:2, but at 8 bit using mpg-2 compression, at 50mb/sec. (I think). Maybe keying is easier with these codecs, but there cannot be much more information in them than 24 bit/sec AVCHD, as the H.264 codec that AVCHD employs is generally thought to compress info two times as "tightly" as MPEG-2. I'm not impressed at the way the giants are limiting our access to minimally decent codecs. I have not seen it but I doubt anything less than AVC-INTRA will be considered adequate in the $5K+ range, once RED's Scarlet 2/3" is released. But I don't know broadcast...

Anyway, i digress.

You may consider referring to 1080x1920 resolution as "1080p24" or similar so people here can more easily understand what you may be asking. Just saying "24P" does not refer to resolution at all, and is not a generally used shorthand for 1080p24. For example, although 1280x720 is usually shot at 60 fps (e.g. for sports broadcast, also referred to as 720p60), it can be acquired and displayed at 720p24 (a seldom used Blue Ray standard), or 720p30 (an internet standard).

I hope what I've said is mostly helpful, and semi-accurate. I also hope that you will not take offense at what I've written that you already know.

And again, those of you who know, please correct my errors...
 
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RE: Instant HD

RE: Instant HD

DrDave said:
I've used Instant HD and it is excellent.
Click to expand...

Dave,

I hate to resurrect a 2 month old question, but I have a question for you:

Are you using FCP?

If so I am having issues trying to uprez 720p anamorphic footage to1080 using Instant HD. Either image is stretched too far vertically, stretched too far horizontally, squeed into 4:3, cropped wrong etc.

I think the problem has something to do with the pixel aspect ratio.

Any luck getting this to work?

Thanks, Louis
 
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