Scaling to HD

Hi professionals,
I'd like to know if anyone has experience and/or knowledge of the best path for bringing something up to
HD. My situation is this. I have an animated promo that was scaled down at some earlier point from HD to SD Letterbox. Unfortunately, now I have to bring it back up to HD 1080i. Blowing it up in Final Cut brings a pretty rough and aliased image. I thought if i deinterlaced the image it might look a little less jagged but so far that hasn't worked. t recognize that this is not a respectable/preferable situation.
However, I'm stuck with what I have. I have compressor/ After Effects and media encoder as well as aja.

Thanks,
td

tom dempsey

If you have no option then Kona cards do good scaling. AE is good too. FCP is not a good scaler as you have discovered.

Deinterlacing further reduces your resolution.

Letterboxing is unfortunate as it will be both letterbox and pillarbox in HD. So if you recapture from DV50 tape (if that is the source) then check if AJA scale from letterbox all the way to full frame HD. I can't check my AJA setup menu at the moment as I am outputing to tape but if you have it available there should be an option to select input as LB and then it should scale to full frame without the LB and pillar box.

If the shot is a file, then perhaps the best thing would be AE to scale. Because of the letterbox you have a much larger scale to do so aliasing will be worse.

We just switched to HD and have a lot of SD content that we contractually need to continue airing.

We did a lot of testing in this area.

AJA Kona card is the best option of your choices.

For letter boxed material choose Zoom Wide.

Steve.