instantHD vs resizer 2 - battle of the upscalers
by Andrew Shanks
on
Jul 10, 2006 at 9:41:27 pm
Hi Guys,
I just did a search and this question was asked the other month by someone else but had no reply, so i thought i'd repost it. I'm just about to scale up some SD footage (interlaced) to HD, ...it's a doco that just needs a couple of these archive shots dropped in, so an upscale will be acceptable in this situation, but obviosuly I want to make it look as good as possible. Can anyone give an opinion of one of these applications over the other?
Resizer 2 seems to have one advantage in that it has a de-interlacer built in, and InstantHD requires you de-interlace first.
Any suggestions or recommendations?
Re: instantHD vs resizer 2 - battle of the upscalers by Andrew Shanks on Jul 11, 2006 at 3:39:52 am
Interesting, could it be that Adobe have tweaked something in their scaling algorhythms for AE7? ...I say this because I just tested both demos of the two upscalers, and really they don't give too much more quality than the AE scale up (granted I'm doing only from DV widescreen to HDV, not a really huge scale up). Of the two plugins, resizer2 seemed to give the most noticable (altho, as i have said this was slight) improvement to my scale ups (the smooth settings allowed a definite smothing in small jaggies that were trying to appear on some diagonals. I have a feeling I am going to end up just going with After Effects for my project and use some DV de-artifacting tricks to help smooth things a little.
I have to say, I was really surprised to see that After Effects 7 seemed to scale so well compared to the filters.
Anyone else (whose spent more than 15 minutes playing with these plugins) care to comment?
Re: instantHD vs resizer 2 - battle of the upscalers by Mylenium on Jul 11, 2006 at 5:13:45 am
No, AE itself hasn't received any special treatment in this area. It still only uses a pretty simple algorithm (bilinear). The results of up-rezing something are mainly dependent on the footage so maybe you are just lucky your footage doesn't require many adjustments. You'd only need Resizer's controls if you e.g. have some stuff with high contrast between FG and BG. Unlike normal scling, the tools mentioned use weighted algorithms which can prevent your foreground from becoming to soft and the other way around they can stop edges in the background from becoming overpronounced. In the end there is no rule of thumb when to use which method - like so many things it's more a matter of "It looks good to me".
