I've got a project I've been working on for about 12 years or more. I started it back in the days before high res cameras etc, and so I'm stuck with standard resolution footage. Just wondering if there is a way to up res standard resolution finished files to a higher resolution, and if so, if anyone has had any experience in doing this.

Yes there is, just search for Video Enhancer, it's something I looked at before I got my first HD camera. I also vaguely remember there was a tutorial on how to do it free in, I believe, VitrualDub.

Dave

I have pondered this recently too, am just finishing up a documentary from 4:3 standard definition footage that I shot 15 years ago on a Sony VX-2000. My current thinking is that there isn't much point in converting it to HD for my purposes.

I'm using the Mac, so the tools are different, but the principles should be the same on Windows. My first priority is to have the highest quality for digital projection on a large screen. And I am getting results that I like by rendering with highest quality motion compensated deinterlacing and exporting as uncompressed standard definition. I have used a lot of color correction and other effects on this project, and exporting as uncompressed looks a lot cleaner than DV.

Now this creates some big files - over 100gb for my one hour film - but that doesn't matter much since I will be connecting my laptop directly to projectors or large screens. For online distribution, I will just use H.264. My current version is about 700MB. It looks good on my 46" Sony TV, but certainly not as good as the uncompressed version.

As for the resolution, most modern TV's seem to do a pretty good job of scaling. At some point I may do some experiments with up-rezzing to 720p but not sure if it will be worth it.

At this point I'm aiming at DVD as my final destination for the project...

Doesn't that limit you to standard definition anyway? Sorry, I stopped making and using DVD's about five years ago...

At this point I'm aiming at DVD as my final destination for the project...

Hi Renton,

I cannot offer any suggestions it you are going from DV to DVD other than the normal color correction and desharpening FX. But I can offer you mu expereince. I have been processing in HD and this year went to UHD. But, in the spring I had some old Super 8 film digitized and brought it in to Vegas to render out a 14 minute home video.

I spent about 3 weeks messing around with various methods and trial applications to uprez. It was aggrevating, time comsuming and at the end I had little improvement to show for it. That could have been my fault, but I think I gave it a good shot.

When I went from SD to HD, I would often render to DVD (I had a lot of DVD disc) as test productions, as well as for those folks still wanting DVD's. I already had a Bluray player, but last year I replaced the old flat screen with a new Sony 1080p 60" flat screen. Between the Bluray p;ayer (nothing special) and the Sony 60" (now that is nothing special), my DVD's seem to pop! The modern players and TV's do thricks with contrast and edge sharpening and that seem to do wonders on DVD's.

It didn't help improve the poor quality Super 8 source on YouTube, but there is a marked improvement when I view DVD's on my home system. Just a few thoughts.

Doesn't that limit you to standard definition anyway? ...

I don't know. I've just started down this track...

By the time I've finished the project (I have just finished episode 8 of 13) it may be easier to improve the resolution. Realistically I've got a couple of years to go...unless I'm able to put more time into it...

Hi Renton,

I cannot offer any suggestions it you are going from DV to DVD other than the normal color correction and desharpening FX. But I can offer you mu expereince. I have been processing in HD and this year went to UHD. But, in the spring I had some old Super 8 film digitized and brought it in to Vegas to render out a 14 minute home video.

I spent about 3 weeks messing around with various methods and trial applications to uprez. It was aggrevating, time comsuming and at the end I had little improvement to show for it. That could have been my fault, but I think I gave it a good shot.

When I went from SD to HD, I would often render to DVD (I had a lot of DVD disc) as test productions, as well as for those folks still wanting DVD's. I already had a Bluray player, but last year I replaced the old flat screen with a new Sony 1080p 60" flat screen. Between the Bluray p;ayer (nothing special) and the Sony 60" (now that is nothing special), my DVD's seem to pop! The modern players and TV's do thricks with contrast and edge sharpening and that seem to do wonders on DVD's.

It didn't help improve the poor quality Super 8 source on YouTube, but there is a marked improvement when I view DVD's on my home system. Just a few thoughts.

I would like to deliver to the TV the best quality I am able to...thanks.

DVD is certainly not the "best quality" since you must re-compress the video in a different, more compact format. Whenever you do that, something is going to suffer so you are looking at some trade-offs. Often it will be "good enough" however.

One hour of original standard definition DV results in a file that is about 12gb. It depends on how you create a DVD, but IIRC an hour is about 2gb using high quality DVD compression. So something has to give.

If you are doing things like color correction and effects while editing your project, even using the original DV format may not give you the best quality, as I mentioned above. This is why I am going to use uncompressed video for output, but that will result in around 100gb for a one hour video. A DVD only holds 4gb.

I would really question whether there's any advantage in converting to HD for what you describe. IMO, the only time this makes sense is if you are using SD footage in an HD project.

+1 boyd's observations...

The reason I am going for DVD is that I am hoping to sell this project so average people can buy it and readily view it in their own homes on their own equipment...

You said it will be a couple years before your project is complete. Do you think people will still be using DVD's then? ;)

Regardless, DVD's are for standard definition video, not high definition. And as I said above, they cannot even deliver the full quality of the DV footage you already have. There was something called the "HD DVD" a number of years ago, but it never caught on. I never actually saw one of these, and it required a special player.

I shot a lot of performance video going back to 2001, and burned it to DVD at the highest quality (using DVD Studio Pro on the Mac) after editing, I think I could only get around 1.5 to 2 hours on a DVD. Since I was shooting video of operas, I needed to use two DVD's for a full show.

Recently all my original DV tapes came back home and I have started a project to capture them all and get them on a hard drive to preserve them at full quality. Anyway, looking back at this after all these years, the quality of the DVD's I made is very noticeably worse than my original DV footage. My old DVD's are also inferior to compressing the original footage directly into an H.264 file at high quality.

Now there are some tricks that can be used to improve the quality of DVD video. There's something called "compression markers" IIRC that allow you to specify different types of compression in different parts of the video. Commercially made DVD's of major films manage to get better quality. I never dug very deeply into that, it gets very complicated.

You might consider some form of online distribution, that has the potential to reach a much bigger international audience. I realize you aren't in the US, but here I really don't know very many people who use DVD's anymore.

This might help: https://www.redgiant.com/products/instant-4k/

At some point I may do some experiments with up-rezzing to 720p but not sure if it will be worth it.

Thought I would follow up on this old thread since the topic is relevant to my current projects. Here's a little two minute montage remembering a special person that passed away a year ago. The original footage was anamorphic 16:9 480i60 DV from my Sony PDX-10 back in 2003 for use in large screen video projections for the Opera Il Trovatore.

PDX-10 footage is a mixed bag. Some of it looks surprisingly good, some of it is horrible. The lighting has a lot to do with it, and the low resolution viewfinder and LCD screen also made it hard to get critical focus. Most of the footage I shot on this particular day turned out pretty well though.

So I used Apple Compressor with highest quality settings to convert the 480i60 to 720p30. The results are kind of soft, but that seems to fit the mood. I did some tests converting 480i60 to 480p30 and didn't like the results as much, I could still see interlace artifacts.

Anyway, here's my little two minute video so you can judge the results of the 480i60 to 720p30 for yourself.

Trovatore Daydreams on Vimeo

I just realized this thread is in the Vegas forum and I am using Apple Final Cut Pro, sorry for taking things off topic, although I am more interested in the value of converting SD to HD video as opposed to the nuts and bolts of how to do it. So here is another example from footage I shot of the opera "The Pearl Fishers" in 2004 with the same camera. Can't post video due to contractual/union issues, but here is a still 480i60 frame compared to an up-res'ed 720p30 frame.

Getting rid of the interlace is good, but I'm not sure that the results look any better than just letting a TV/monitor automatically scale the video....

Beck then VHS and DV was watched on mainly 20, 27inch if you were lucky TV's most now are 40+ so qualty will show through.

I agree that a big screen will "make quality show through", but I'm not sure that is relevant in the context of this discussion. We are starting with legacy 720x480 DV footage. The question is whether the TV's built-in scaling will be any worse that the software you use to scale the image yourself.

I think you can do a better job of deinterlacing in software as opposed to the TV doing it in realtime. I also think there's a value to converting to a better format than DV if you're using color correction and effects. But I'm not convinced that merely up-resing will give any better results than the TV can do in realtime.

The question is whether the TV's built-in scaling will be any worse that the software you use to scale the image yourself.

I think the thing to consider is that not all TVs will scale equally and you have no control over them. Scaling it in the software will produce a result that all those TVs will show more-or-less equally (more or less because most people do not know how to set up the colors on their TVs properly, but that is a different issue).

More importantly, doing it in the software results in something you can control because you can still work on it (e.g., color grade it) after you have scaled it up.

Very good points, and this has been part of my thought process as well.

But another thing I'm pondering is whether converting it to HD creates an expectation of quality that just isn't there in an up-res'ed image. I have been spending a lot of time staring at different approaches to this on different monitors, tv's and even my phone.

With some footage (like the opera example I posted), seeing it in HD makes it look "out of focus" since you expect more detail in real HD footage. OTOH, if the TV scales it and it looks a little more rough, then your expectation is lowered and you realize that it's just standard definition.

One reason I up-res'd this opera footage is that I am rendering English subtitles into the video. With 720p the text is sharper and more readable with a small font, which means I don't have to cover up as much of the image with the subtitle. The downside is that the sharp text seems to increase the perception that the actual footage is out of focus.

I agree with converting the original footage to something better than DV to work with it. For another project I recently finished, I rendered it as uncompressed standard definition. That gave me a file over 100gb for a one hour standard definition film. I am now using ProRes 422 though, since it's the native format for Final Cut Pro X and should result in smaller file sizes.

For rendering the final movie, I am using HandBrake. For the two minute video I posted before, HandBrake with Super HQ 720p30 settings produced excellent results that looked the same as Apple Compressor but the file was only half as large.

Just picked up this revived thread...

I'm now editing episode 11 of 13 so I'm nearing the end!!!

Anyways...I realised in re reading the thread that it is not so much upresing that I want to do, but specifically improving/smoothing edges...sharpening the image. I've filmed in front of green screen and used zoom in post to create movement. This reduces the resolution as I zoom in and introduces a certain amount of blockiness.

The issue is in talking head sequences where there is a blockiness at my shoulders. I would like to smooth this blockiness away...if at all possible...

Renton

Assuming that you shot interlaced video, try deinterlacing it. Not familiar with your Windows software, but you want a "smart" deinterlace function that treats moving parts of the image differently from static parts. This might be called adaptive deinterlacing, or motion compensated deinterlacing.

The good software will have various additional settings to smooth jagged edges, in Apple Compressor the best quality is called anti-aliased. Anti-aliasing will smooth jagged edges in lines that are slightly angled. But you will always be up against the fact that there are only 480 horizontal lines in SD video. If you smooth them too much, everything will look out of focus. Since you zoomed in on the image, there will be even fewer horizontal lines so it may be hard to improve that.

If you use Handbrake to compress the final video, it has some pretty nice deinterlacing capabilities you can choose in the video settings, try the Yadif setting for example.

Here's another example of up-resing. I just put this little video online today, no great art but it's a nice memory for the people who were there. It was shot on my Sony VX-2000 in 2002 and I converted the 480i60 to 720p30. But I didn't want it pillarboxed in a 16:9 frame, so I kept the 4:3 aspect ratio and exported it as 960x720. The audio is a mess but I did all I could...

I think this worked out pretty well in terms of quality. The VX-2000 really was a nice camera for its day and the larger chips give a nicer image than the little ones in the PDX-10 examples I posted earlier.

Opera Scene Change at the Academy of Music on April 1, 2002 on Vimeo

How did you deinterlace the footage?
It seems like a single field deinterlace, also notice the edges having black lines.

I would recommend to deinterlace with a motion compensation algorithm and always to frame double.

Also if you upscale it would help to change the video from Rec.601 to Rec.709.

Here is an example of an old NTSC source deinterlaced with motion compensation and frame doubled and updated to Rec.709:

Stevie Wonder - Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday [Restored] - YouTube

I used Apple Compressor (newest version) with the highest quality scaling and deinterlacing settings (antialiased/motion compensated/adaptive details). Definitey not a single field deinterlace. Will have to check the rec 709 setting next time, thanks.

I don't know, I've looked at the original footage on my Sony LMD2110W monitor and compared it to the version here and I'm not sure I could do much better, will have another look.There are some black edges in the original video due to the harsh lighting conditions.

The example you posted is very nice, but I think it was shot with a much more expensive camera under lighting conditions designed for video. That is a bit different from a prosumer camcorder under available light. :)

I posted some stills on the previous page showing an example of original and deinterlaced still frames. This is and original 480i60 frame:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachments/what-happens-vegas/37635d1501722445-up-resing-480i60.jpg


and this is a 720p30 frame processed as described above with Apple Compressor

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attachments/what-happens-vegas/37634d1501721894-up-resing-720p.jpg

The blacks in your video may be caused by the 'black sun' effect of the sensor. Should be easy to fix in a good NLE.

If you have a second or 30 of the original source for upload I can take a look at it.