Best workflow to produce near HD from 24pa squeeze

M

marjamar

Well-known member
Hey there people. I've been shooting my DVX100a for a long time now, but just over the past few months I've been looking at ways to uprez to HD sizes and trying alot of ways to get the best quality from my 24pa squeezed footage.

I've read a few posts here on this, but thought I'd ask some of you who do this routinely, what you do.

I love my DVX, always have and will, but with the large screens we all use now for viewing, I'd like to bump quality up as much as possible. I actually bough a Canon HV40 HD camera, but I am just too spoiled with my DVX for consumer grade stuff I guess. Sent it back to B&H (absolutely a great company to deal with BTW) and so now that I've seen my own real HD footage, I'd like to get as close to that as I can using my DVX and my own editing system.

What about it. Anyone like to contribute to my understanding?

Not on here much as I once was, so I'd better just say hello to you ol' timers here who may remember me.

-Rodger
 
You cannot produce information from nothing. You can see some difference in the quality of upscaling, but SD will never look like HD.

If you want DVX form-factor, HD resolution and cheap media then get the HMC150.
 
You are better off leaving the resolution as-is and letting the hardware in whatever player is decoding your footage to output to big screen TVs. You're going to waste a lot of render time for very little (if any at all) gain.
 
On a second thought, YouTube and Vimeo seem to use higher bitrate if the source video is HD, that is, has frame 1280x720 or larger. So, there may be an improvement when upscaling to HD and uploading to YouTube or Vimeo. YouTube's 480p looks much better to me than Vimeo's SD. To get a decent image from Vimeo you must cheat and upload your video as HD.

So, this is the only reason to upscale. If watching on TV, a TV will do it for you.
 
I don't expect I'll reach extremely close to true HD, but this camera far surpasses alot of what CMOS HD cams are already. Rolling shutters seem to be a huge factor (at least in the HV40 I gave back) to limiting smooth pans just produce some weird effects at times. Also, I had alot of problems with setting workarounds for crippled settings, which I just didn't want to do. So, even though I'd agree HD is hard to get very close in older SD cams like the DVX, some of what makes this DVX so great, is still functional and even better (some may say much better) then the current line of consumer grade HD cameras.

Without any doubt and upgrade to a prosumer grade HD would be nice, but until I do, I'd still like some input from those smart guys here who do uprez from the DVX.

I have Red Giant's Instant HD Advanced, which is a pretty neat plugin for Premiere/After Effects. I tried Topaz Enhance and have Topaz Moment, which more or less gave me a taste of high quality uprezed stills, and because I can see some pretty significant improvements in what I'm doing with these, I know there's ways to make strides towards HD using SD footage source material. I'll continue testing myself, but thought others here may have already found some particular workflows which they like. And if so, I'd like to try them myself.

-Rodger
 
I have to agree with it not being worth the hassle to uprez. Just shoot as you are doing, master a proper 24p widescreen dvd, use an uprezzing dvd or blu-ray player to send the best possible signal to the big-screen.
 
Highest resolution you'll get from the DVX -- which you'll need if you want to uprez to HD -- is shooting progressive, with THIN vert. detail.

Use lots and lots of light, because the last thing you want is any more noise than it's physically possible to eliminate.

And keep your detail level down; the edge enhancement will lead to aliasing when you uprez, as well as enhance the noise.
 
My normal setups are usually that way. I've been doing some conversions using Topaz Moment (fast way to check any frame from clips for uprez quality) and Instant HD Advanced for whole clips. There are so many variables though, I could easily do this for maybe weeks or more trying all possibilities that come to mind. Between camera, lighting & subject matter, there is sure to be alot over usable variables that work, and a bunch more that won't.

I had a demo of Topaz Enhance, but it timed out, so I can't test with it anymore -- Which is too bad as they have an interesting way to do sharping, which gives a pretty good impression of HD quality, though somewhat harsh/blocky upon close inspection. But, it does do well when played as it helps to cut-down crawling dots and other artifacts attributable low light and lower quality captures in general.

-Rodger
 
Uprezzing is actually quite nice sometimes if you do it right. Again, it's not going to add in detail that wasn't already there, but doing it in post can often be much more efficient than letting some random TV or Blu-Ray player do the work.

As an example, here's a trailer for my film that I scaled to 720p from my DVX's 480p. Take a look for yourself!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KALcMw-vGFw
 
Just a stock lens DVX shoot through and through. Did my scaling in Compressor after everything else was done (effects, colour correction, etc.).

I'd do it a little different on my next project, but the workflow is sound.
 
ALEX - Niiiiiiice looking stuff.

Red Giant makes a doo-dad called INSTANT HD and a better doo-dad called INSTANT HD ADVANCED for more money.

They do some pixel interpolation-something-or-other but the Advanced one really does improve your results IF you have good clean footage to start with.

I think it's worth it.
 
Try a detail level of -4 or -5 for the best result. Upres. If you feel you need more sharpness, add a little sharpness to the upressed 720p file.
 
Thanks for the helps. I've found that most of the perceived enhancement quality of uprezzing is more attributable to filtering out some of the artifact type garbage identified by doing comparative analysis of past and future frames and by applying filters to blend and enhance edge effects to uprezzed frames. This is all good, but it is somewhat lacking when the video is already of higher quality to start with. In fact, where high quality control is applied to shots, I've not really found any of the uprezzing softwares to really add anything but more pixles to the frames. Looking at the stock clip and comparing it to uprezzed samples in such cases shows no improvement to my eye at all.

Now, this is not to say adding various filtering techniques will not make footage better looking, but this can be done without uprezzing. So, unless there is a particular requirement for frame size, it looks to me like uprezing is more or less to make lesser quality footage look good, rather then good footage to look better.

-Rodger
 
Uprezzing never really makes footage look better, it just makes it "bigger" with minimal loss of quality if done properly. It can make SD footage match better with HD footage, but I don't think people should be expecting to gain quality unless they just want smoothing and edge enhancement.
 
Yeah, I have Instant HD Advanced and it's good if your footage can use some help, but with already good/fine SD footage, it seems the filtering process really doesn't add anything. I can actually see more help for fine SD footage using 4-1-1 Helper in VirtualDub. Just converting to 4-4-4 makes alot of problematic color bleeds (red especially) diminish notably.

-Rodger
 
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