View Full Version : DV to HD upscale


Vishal Jadhav
August 5th, 2015, 12:34 PM
Hi

There is a piece of footage I am trying to use from a friend who originally shot it on dv tape , my other footage is HD and 4k down scaled to HD
What is feasible solution to up convert the DV footage to hd
Not sure if it's right forum but you folks may have faced such a issue in past .

Thanks

Mike Sims
August 5th, 2015, 02:39 PM
Hey, Vishal.
I’ve run into that myself several times and tried several things including Red Giant’s Instant HD, Avisynth, and just scaling in AE followed by judicious sharpening. Sometimes the results weren’t too bad but people would always notice and comment. My best results have been using Alien Skin Software’s Blow Up 3. This is stills software that is used to blow up shots from digital cameras to billboard size. I output the DV footage as a series of stills and then batch process it in Blow Up. I then import the processed frames into Premier as numbered stills. With well exposed DV the results can be very good but if your source is noisy you would do better by running Neat Video first . No one has ever commented about the upscaled footage unless I first pointed it out and then the comments were usually “Wow!”. There may be a better way to do this (and hopefully someone here may let us know), but BU3 has a free trial so you can try it with you own footage and see if you get what you need. It has presets for both 1080 and 720 16:9 frames. Good-luck!

Bruce Watson
August 5th, 2015, 03:03 PM
What is feasible solution to up convert the DV footage to hd?

One thing to consider is whether or not you should up convert at all. I've seen several Blu-ray documentaries that use all kinds of footage. Their solution seems to be to show it in its original resolution using letterbox and pillarbox as required.

I would have thought this was a completely terrible idea until I played a blu-ray disc and saw the results on screen. Thing is, it works. Surprisingly well. I didn't really see it as being the wrong resolution because I was too busy looking at the image itself.

Undoubtedly how well anyone can pull this off depends on all kinds of things. One of the more important of these is going to be context, and another is going to be how long the low resolution footage is on the screen, and how much is used in the entire program.

Vishal Jadhav
August 6th, 2015, 12:15 AM
Thanks Mike , Bruce

Will give it a try.

I did consider using the letterbox option but the footage i am using may be small but the parts i use may be spaced out, hence i didnt like the idea of HD,letterbox, HD , letterbox, HD .....

just looked jarring to the eye, if i was to use it single time, the HD .. letterbox would work but multiple times can be jarring on the audience, (i got jarred too)

i have considered a option of showing 2 sd videos sideby side on the screen may work, but multiple times may or may not.

Lets explore it further.