DV Upscaling to HD (those thin little black bars)

[roxics]

Whenever upscaling NTSC DV 4:3 to 1080p (1440x1080) in Premiere Pro I end up with little black bars at the top and bottom. This is after selecting square pixels as my choice in the sequence settings and upscaling to fit the frame width. I can of course scale a little further cutting off parts of the side to fit it vertical. But then I'm cutting off the sides of the video. Even if it's only slightly.

I assume this is just a pixel aspect ratio difference between DV and square pixel HD and there is nothing I can do about it. But maybe it's possible this should be a perfect fit and I'm just doing something wrong. You tell me.

 

[jmone]

I had a look at my old DV Footage and did black bar detection to see what the active window is:
- PAL DV 4:3 (720 x 576) - Active Window 720x560 (so 8 pixel black bar top and bottom)
- PAL DV 16:9 (1440x1080) - Active Window 1440 x 1072 (so 4 pixel black bar top and bottom)

I'm guessing it is not the edit suite but that is how the DV cameras wrote out the file. I say this as I've added title pages and they don't have any black bars.

I guess you have 3 options:
- Live with the black bars (I do)
- Crop (as you have mentioned)
- Vertical Scale (if you apply just a bit of vertical scaling it will remove the top and bottom black bars and I doubt anyone will notice the change in perspective).

Thanks
Nathan

Note: the older 4:3 (720 x 576) footage is much worse than the newer 16:9 with analogue noise also creeping into the image on Left, Right and Bottom. The 16:9 has crisp edges.

 

[jmone]

...also keep in mind that in the DV days, it was designed to be played on Analogue TV's that have overscan that hid these edges (eg the display "cropped" the image anyway).

 

[roxics]

Thank you for your feedback. So it sounds like I'm doing things right then. I can live with the tiny black bars when I really want to preserve the full frame for posterity (such as old home movies) and just scale to crop it for other videos where I don't mind losing a bit off the side. I just wanted to make sure I didn't have my pixel aspect ratios all messed up or something.

You're right about the overscan. Forgot about that. Good point. We usually weren't seeing the full picture off the tube anyway due to bezels as well, so losing a little on the side shouldn't be a big deal if I want to be authentic. Lol. But in this case it's more about preserving as much as possible.

I guess alternatively I could also put it into a 16:9 frame and then just scale to fit the height. Then the extra width isn't an issue.
Most displays are 16:9 anyway and will pillarbox the footage But then I'm encoding large pillar bars on the sides as part of the video data, which seems like a bigger waste.

 

[CharlesPapert]

I guess alternatively I could also put it into a 16:9 frame and then just scale to fit the height. Then the extra width isn't an issue.
Most displays are 16:9 anyway and will pillarbox the footage But then I'm encoding large pillar bars on the sides as part of the video data, which seems like a bigger waste.

There's not much to be gained visually by upscaling DV to 1080 vs 720, other than making a larger file. Adding black pillarboxes should barely increase the size of the file (very little data being added) in comparison to the 1080 upscale.

 

[jmone]

If roxics DV footage in this case is 1080 wide, rendering it out to 1080 makes sense. I did not know that that there was a Square Pixel version of 1440x1080 DV. Mine is also 1440x1080 but the pixel aspect ratio is 16:9 so it displays on a 16:9 without pillar boxes. There should be no issues (pending the player) with the Player/Display playing these as they are without hard rendered pillarboxs (eg the Player/Display will just add them as needed), but has you say encoded it a 1920x1080 with a bit of scaling keeps all the info and the pillar boxs will be a bit narrower. Good Idea.

As an aside I've had a play with (the demo version) of Topaz Video Enhance AI to see how well it works on my older 720x576i DV and it did a pretty good job in cleaning up chroma noise and sharpening but you get some weird jello effects (especially on pans). I think it has promise but it is not there yet.

 

[roxics]

There's not much to be gained visually by upscaling DV to 1080 vs 720, other than making a larger file. Adding black pillarboxes should barely increase the size of the file (very little data being added) in comparison to the 1080 upscale.

I'm uploading these to Youtube, so the goal is to take advantage of the higher bitrates it affords HD footage compared to SD. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with the upscale at all.
I'm replacing older 480p content I uploaded five or six year ago, that doesn't look so hot on that platform today. I'm not sure if it never did and I just didn't notice as much in the past, or if Youtube decided to go through and further compress it's SD content again in recent years.

This is what it looks like now on YT.

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[Peter C.]

I think you would have to prove that it actually looks better upscaling it before going through all the effort. Let's think about this logically. If you took a low res compressed photo then upscaled it the file size would increase but not the quality because you aren't adding better image data you're just spreading the existing data out over a larger area. To illustrate it further if the jpeg was compressed 8 then saving it at 12 won't improve the quality for the same reason. Video is simply a series of pictures and a higher bitrate shouldn't improve anything.

 

[jmone]

True if using "Nearest Neighbor" for upscaling (and I've no idea what PP uses) but these days there are much better algos - Image scaling - Wikipedia

Also true, that you have to look at the results if they are any better. My tests on upscaling DV Footage using Topaz Video Enhance AI was in the end not good enough for me to bother at this point (due to weird artifacts, but it was much sharper and cleaner). Philip Bloom seems to love it - "Now I See" Sony a7S - 4K Topaz AI upscale - YouTube

 

[Jim Feeley]

Is uprezzing/enhancement from SD to HD worth it? I guess it depends. A week ago, this episode of the old US public television series, The New Yankee Workshop, was posted to YouTube in a version uprezzed from the original interlaced standard-definition to HD (1080p/60 max). It looks pretty good, imo, especially considering the enhancement (ie- deinterlaceds, uprezzed, denoised, etc) was made with off-the-shelf software by (I think) an informed producer (as opposed to a full-on online editor or colorist or something). I asked how the conversion was made. The reply:

"It's Topaz Video AI. I just do a single setting for the whole video but I make adjustments to the source material (color & sound) prior to bringing it in. Still tweaking the settings as we go but overall it's a nice improvement.”


The 24-min episode was first broadcast in March, 2006. So maybe captured on good Sony Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, or XDCAM cameras. But also probably interlaced at 720x486.

Just one white guy on camera, but plenty of trees, straight lines, close ups, and such. Perfect? No. Encouraging for those of us who want to uprez old interlaced SD footage? Yes.

Here’s a link to Topaz Video AI. Usually US$299, on sale now for US$249.
It’s currently a stand-alone application; I haven’t upgraded to the current version.
https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai

I’m going to try REZup from RE:Vision Effects.
RE:Vision Effects tends to have good careful products and REZup works as a plug-in to all major NLEs, so that seems easier to integrate into work.
About US$170 (slight variance depending on host app):
https://revisionfx.com/products/rezup/

The other enhance/uprez tool that people currently like is SuperScale in the paid version of BlackMagic Resolve.
It’s not available in the free version. So that’s US$299. But you get some other features, too:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/pro...solve/whatsnew


There are others, and I’m sure we’ll see updates to various tools and NLEs that are as good as or better than the above. But the bottom line is the current tools are pretty decent, not that expensive, and not that hard to use.

 

[Peter C.]

Norm is great. I love how they produced the related shows especially post Bob Villa Ask this Old house. Not overly produced with the right about of humor.

 

[roxics]

I think you would have to prove that it actually looks better upscaling it before going through all the effort.

It does. I've done it before. Youtube gives a higher bitrate to HD videos. So all you're really doing by upscaling in this case is trying to preserve more detail from the original video. Not add more.
Comparing the two I can tell the difference right away. I'll never upload an SD video to Youtube in SD again.

 

[Peter C.]

It does. I've done it before. Youtube gives a higher bitrate to HD videos. So all you're really doing by upscaling in this case is trying to preserve more detail from the original video. Not add more.
Comparing the two I can tell the difference right away. I'll never upload an SD video to Youtube in SD again.

If you're happy with the results then that's all that matters.

 

[NorBro]

It does. I've done it before. Youtube gives a higher bitrate to HD videos. So all you're really doing by upscaling in this case is trying to preserve more detail from the original video. Not add more.
Comparing the two I can tell the difference right away. I'll never upload an SD video to Youtube in SD again.

Why don't you then upscale it to 4K since YT provides even more resources (over HD) to 4K videos?

 

[roxics]

Why don't you then upscale it to 4K since YT provides even more resources (over HD) to 4K videos?

The file was already 10GBs in HD, I really didn't want to be uploading something 3-4 times the size. That said, HD and below gets avc compression on YT unless it's public and you've got some followers, in that case you get VP9 compression, same as anything over 1080p. So there might be a good reason for me to at least go 1920x1440 or maybe 2560x1920.