Video quality from transcoding/upscaling

[Wojo]

Hi guys,

This is going to seem a bit rambly, but I hope it makes sense.

I've started converting all of my footage into AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) before working with it, and it seems to offer a much greater latitude when working in post, without seeing the image degrade. I understand that theoretically it shouldn't offer an advantage - transcoding cannot increase image quality, but to my eye it makes a noticeable difference.

Also, have people tried upscaling their footage to 1080P? I ran a bunch through After Effects to resize it (I heard its processing is particularly good at it, I can't remember the source of this!) and the footage looks lovely - much better than running the 720P in fullscreen (24" 1080P monitor from 2 feet range) it looks sharper and has far fewer artifacts, even when compressed using H264 at a very tight bitrate (5Mbit).

Does anyone else have any thoughts on transcoding and or upscaling the D90 footage to get better results?

John

 

[mattsand]

i wouldn't use any workflow that makes the image look better, since as you say it's impossible to really increase the quality this way, you're really just degrading the image in a pleasant way. nothing wrong with that, it's what grading is about, but I'd much rather do it in a controlled manner. as for upscaling that totally makes sense, at some point the image has to be upscaled to fit the 1080p monitor and it's kind of obvious that ae does it better, especially with a "destep" filter, than quicktime's on the fly scaling. h.264 incorporates heavy deartifacting so yes compressed footage will often look cleaner, but again that's also degrading which i'd rather perform with control using neat video or similar. good luck.