Retaining resolution on scaled clips

[Paul Joy]

I shot some golf tuition footage with my A1 today in 1080p 25. I'm editing the footage into small format for internet delivery which is around a quarter of the size of the original footage.

I assumed that this smaller size would allow me to scale the footage in places as there was resolution a pleanty, but any scaling results in quite a large loss of quality.

Has anybody experienced anything similar with FCP and did you figure out a way to use all the excess resolution to scale in post?

Many thanks

Paul.

[Benjamin Hill]

Paul, what are your sequence settings for the timeline you are editing? You can certainly zoom in and crop on HD footage if you are editing in SD. Need more info to try and help you with this.

[Paul Joy]

Hi Benjamin.

I tried a couple of approaches, firstly I tried just editing in a 1080/25p (HDV) timeline (native to XH) and scaling clips in the hope that they retain resolution when exported and downsized, but the downsized footage still looked a bit fuzzy in comparison to the 100% footage.

Then I tried making a sequence (timeline) half the size of 1080p, and reducing the majority of the footage to 50% whilst achieving 200% scale on the parts I needed to crop by setting them at 100%. This still resulted in a noticable change in quality when exported.

It seems that downscaling the project on export increases the quality due to the excess resolution, and when that excess resolution is not present (on a scaled clip) the difference is still very noticeable on final output.

I've always thought that even small sized web clips benefit from the extra HD res before being dowscaled, I guess would just confirm that.

Does that make sense?

Paul.

[Benjamin Hill]

Originally Posted by Paul Joy

It seems that downscaling the project on export increases the quality due to the excess resolution, and when that excess resolution is not present (on a scaled clip) the difference is still very noticeable on final output.

Bingo. Quality in, quality out.

Try setting your sequence to something like NTSC and DV or DVCPRO50 compressor settings. Keep the original frame rate. Then export a web-size (320x240 or whatever) QT and see what it looks like.

I agree web videos will look better if originating on HD. The "harsher" the delivery format, the more beneficial it is to have high quality at the acquisition stage, and resolution is one part of that.