Upscaling 4:3 to 16:9 with Vegas Pro 9?

[William Boehm]

i have just ordered Vegas Pro 9 and will beging editing soon. captured 90 hours of dv from a canon G1, and Canon xha1 hdv. I would like to select some good wildlife footage from the 4:3 dv into 16:9 and retain some of the initial IQ quality. Pipe dream trying to fit square pixels into rectangular by upscaling. I have read someone suggested Teranex does a good job...a hard drive maching..but pricy. any decent results with vegas or plug ins to vegas? thanks in advance to someone who is beginning to edit 7 years of footage. thanks in advance...bill

[Jonathan Palfrey]

Might be best to keep the 4:3 footage as it is in the 16:9 frame, then create a track underneath with the same footage but 16:9 and blurred. This creates a nice looking way of displaying 4:3 footage without losing image quality or being too distracting.

[Paul Kellett]

4:3 >16:9, crop it, there's a 16:9 crop in the pan and crop preset, i've done it loads of times.

Paul.

[Troy Williams]

I do this quite a lot using Vegas 8 and I would't call it uprezzing but changing the frame size from 4:3 to 16:9. I crop 4:3 footage using the crop preset and I render the footage using the default uncompressed *.avi format. I select the video tab and change pixel aspect ratio (PAR) to 1.2121 . I do not compress my video footage in Vegas I do that with another program depending on my output. DVD (TMPEnc) or Web (Serenson Squeeze).

[William Boehm]

jonathan.. i am somewhat unclear about the two tracks? is one 4:3 and then you overlay a blurred 6:9. Again i am new to editing and have looked at a few vegas editorial.

Paul..do you see any drop in quality or distortion on an hd screen

Troy...i copied all the G1 dv tapes into windows movie maker dv-avi files (hope i didnt make a mistake there) from the canon xha1. the hdv i tapes were copied high mode into cineform neoscene avi files. should i have also attempted to copy the dv tapes directly from the canon xha1 (which only seems to copy into hdvinter. codec?) into a hdv format? i am not sure in know ..can you clarify for me ? thanks again. bill

[Chris Jeremy]

I've recently been experimenting with upscaling using "warp resize" in VirtualDub with promising results at 1280 x 720 in Vegas Pro 9.0c.

For more info check out Mini DV 4.3 to HD 16.9 |upscalling with Virturaldub

[Chris Harding]

Hi Chris

Very interesting!! Will this give a better quality result than simply opening a Vegas project in 16:9 and using the 16:9 preset in Pan and Crop and then rendering????

Does Virtual Dub also de-interlace the footage first?? If you just use the Pan/Crop in Vegas do do need to set the de-interlacing in Project Properties otherwise when you crop and zoom the footage the interlacing lines are also grossly zoomed as well and a TV cannot handle them!!!

Chris

[William Boehm]

i still havent heard from paul, jonathan and troy..

[Troy Williams]

Ooops forgot to mention that I was using all SD footage for DVD output. William, you have a SD in a 4:3 format and HD in 16:9 format. Are you outputing to dvd or blueray? If DVD then downscaling your HDV footage for DVD and then you can crop your 4:3 footage using the 16:9 preset in the crop tool.

[William Boehm]

i will be outputting it to dvd blue ray most likely

[Chris Jeremy]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

Will this give a better quality result than simply opening a Vegas project in 16:9 and using the 16:9 preset in Pan and Crop and then rendering????

Yep.

Does Virtual Dub also de-interlace the footage first??

Yep again.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Troy Williams

Ooops forgot to mention that I was using all SD footage for DVD output. William, you have a SD in a 4:3 format and HD in 16:9 format. Are you outputing to dvd or blueray? If DVD then downscaling your HDV footage for DVD and then you can crop your 4:3 footage using the 16:9 preset in the crop tool.

Nice idea, but cropping 4:3 footage to widescreen will degrade the vertical resolution of that content: Instead of a 480-line image, you now have only 360 lines to work with. And uprezzing that to HD will only make matters worse since the 360-line result would then have been uprezzed. Therefore, the degradation in image quality when uprezzing SD to HD is unavoidable. The best bet if the end result is to be on Blu-Ray Disc or AVCHD DVD, as I have found, is to simply pillarbox 4:3 content and render the entire movie as 16:9. If the result is to be standard-definition DVD-Video, I would get some software which can encode a pan-and-scan flag to the 16:9 content (this will enable the "pan-and-scan" mode on DVD players which properly implement this feature; the default video setup for 16:9 content displayed on a 4:3 display is letterboxed). Simply cropping 16:9 content to 4:3 and rendering the entire movie in 4:3 will not result in a proper mixed-mode DVD - the entire movie would then be permanently in 4:3 (which widescreen HDTV displays by default stretch to fill the entire screen).

Also, you need to reverse the field dominance of SD DV content (standard-definition DV-AVI is always interlaced LFF while all interlaced HD content is UFF). Simply mixing the two without reversing the field dominance of one of them will result in a mess when both types of content are mixed together in the same video title. And again, most NLEs without the proper field dominance reversal plugins do a poor job of integrating the two types of video clips into the same movie.