How do I go about doing this? Someone said rent a Sony Mini DV HD camcorder and export the SD footage that way via firewire. Is that true? What are some other ways?

How do I go about doing this? Someone said rent a Sony Mini DV HD camcorder and export the SD footage that way via firewire. Is that true? What are some other ways?

use an NLE...

Why bother though?

The result will look terrible if viewed on a HDTV. 16:9 SD would be bad enough, but 4:3 would be horrible, as you'd have to crop; which'd reduce quality even further!! You could 'letterbox' your SD footage onto a HD size frame, but that ends up looking like a postage stamp in the middle of a black envelope. If that is what you're after - use an NLE.

Plenty of broadcasters (especially the ones here in Australia) try to get away with upconverting SD full screen for HD broadcast, and the result is the sort of crud that generates torrents of abusive posts to the Aussie Digital Broadcast forum...

I doubt that you'll be able to 'dub' SD footage into a HDV camcorder as HD data anyway. Even if you could, I suspect that the result won't be any better than what you'd get by rendering your SD material to a HD format via any decent NLE.

Greetings James,

I can think of three ways off the top of my head that will give you almost satisfactory to excellent results. All depend upon your budget and your needs, and no the HDV camera won't work.

1) Very time consuming and tedious but the cheapest option. Output each frame and convert to HD using a scaler application such as Spline Pro. On second thought, they may have changed the name of that app. Just do a Google and you'll find it. You won't get great results but hey, you get what you pay - or don't pay for.

2) Rent the Panasonic HD1200A with the HD up-conversion option. You'll get markedly better results using this option.

3) If quality counts and you can afford it, use this http://teranexlive.dimentians.com/home/applications/imageConvert.cfm

I could be blind but what's the price of the Teranexlive? I could find anything on their site...

Sony Vegas doesn't do a bad job of uprezzing, especially if you add a little (actually a lot of) sharpen while you uprez. There is a nice resize plug for VirtualDub as well which does a lancos3 resize. If you combine this with a split fields deinterlace before you resize and a combine fields afterwards it's amazing what you can accomplish with this.

How do I go about doing this? Someone said rent a Sony Mini DV HD camcorder and export the SD footage that way via firewire. Is that true? What are some other ways?

What is your objective for doing this? Are you seeking to intercut SD and HD footage in the same project or simply to make the SD footage viewable on an HD system? There is really no way to truly "convert" SD up to HD because HD contains more information frame for frame than SD and you can't create information that isn't there to begin with. You can convert the SD signal to an HD signal, playback SD material on an HD TV, or mix SD source material with HD source material in your NLE but the final product won't look any better than the original SD and may look worse.

I've yet to see any SD footage upsampled to HD which looked like anything other than enlarged SD. It doesn't make much sense to try to create up to two megapixels of detail from less than half a megapixel of source information: if that worked well photographers could all be using half-megapixel still cameras. And I like the fact that the Teranex upsampler costs something like $25K: for that price you could buy several HDV cameras and a decked-out HD editing setup.

Plus don't forget that HDTVs come with internal circuitry to convert SD input signals to HD resolution, so if all you're trying to do is display SD on an HDTV this is already taken care of for you.