Converting an SD Project to HD

[John McQuiston]

I've searched forums and found nothing that discusses this but apologies anyway if the issue has been addressed.

Several years ago I did a project in Premiere 6.0. I still have the project files, opened them in PPro 2.0 and they saved properly and work fine in SD.

Is there a way I can convert the project files into HD? The project is a family history documentary and much of the "video" is actually high-resolution photographs, which are easily big enough to blow up to HD size (even 1080p) and I'd like to update the project, if possible, without re-editing the whole thing.

[Harm Millaard]

Have a look at InstandHD from RedGiant. You need an expensive plug-in if you want any quality at all.

[Shaughan Flynn]

Agree with Harm - Instand HD...

[John McQuiston]

Thank you for your rapid reply. Ninety-nine dollars is not prohibitive to me, if that was the expense you mentioned.

But I wasn't looking necessarily to scale up video (though that would be an option for the on-camera interviews which are in SD) as much as to move the contents of the timeline in the SD project to an HD one, if possible.

[Battle Vaughan]

You can import your sd clips onto an hd sequence and PPro (cs4, anyway) will accept the clips and pillerbox them (black bars on the sides). You can output as an hdv 1920x1080 wmv file, for example, and so far as "can you do it," yeah, you can, easily. But you may not like the result, you can't get two pounds out of a one pound bag, and you can't get HD resolution and detail out of blowing up an sd image...

I've played with some of the "up-res" plugins and they seem to add sharpening and some attempt to clean up artifacts and so on, but nothing can put into your clip, data that you didn't record in the first place. So yeah, you can, and yeah, you may be disappointed...my dos centavos...../Battle Vaughan

However, I listen closely to Harm's advice, he knows his stuff. My experience with that plugin was disappointing, YMMV. /bv

[Harm Millaard]

Not everybody likes it, but I prefer to use PIP approaches over upscaling. This is an example of SD material in a HD movie:

Two cats turned friends on Vimeo

Maybe an idea...

I was not really thinking about the standard version of Instant HD, but the Pro version and that is $ 399.

[John McQuiston]

That's actually what I'm doing with the SD video in my project, for now.

Doesn't an SD file still need to be upsized to reach the top and bottom of an HD frame, even if you leave the "wings" on the side? It seems to in my project, though to get it to reach the top and bottom of the frame requires blowing it up only 150% vs. the 200% it would take to fill the HD frame completely.

Four hundred bucks is a lot and will give me more pause than the $99 option shown on the website's homepage did. In the meantime, the thing I hoped to do -- move an SD timeline into an HD project -- is possible.

I created an HD project, saved it, and opened the SD project, clicked on the timeline, hit CTL+A to select all the contents of the timeline, closed the SD project, opened the HD project and pasted the contents into the timeline.

This is in PPro 2.0, so it will let you copy from one project, close that project, then paste into a different project. Apparently this is even easier to do in CS4 because you don't have to do the opening and closing of projects part, according to the kind soul on the Adobe forum who offered the solution.

[Harm Millaard]

John,

The example above is a 1280 x 720 project with SD DV PAL material and some higher resolution stills to cover it up. I would have had a much harder time with 1920 x 1080 output.