How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)?
by lisa rolley
on
Jun 4, 2008 at 2:18:32 pm
Hey everyone,
its been awhile since i posted a question or thought and I must say I miss my Cow crew.
How should I be Upressing 1280x720 ProRes 29.97 (None Fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 upper fields first?
To explain a little bit of whats going on let me start with this - this was a last minute client change and I have today to make these changes...i am not sure whether to use compressor or FCP to do this...my sequences (25 of them) are each roughly 2 minutes in length and at ProRes 1280x720 29.97 no fields. i am running a compressor test on my 2nd 8 core with 4 gb of ram to see how long it takes to convert the self contained QT movie out of fcp into a 1920x1080 upper fields first uncompessed QT.
I want to make sure that my workflow is correct and the fastest smartest method...i have set qmaster to use all 8 cores but my concerns include whether or not switching to upper fields will affect any of the footage and whether or not i should be doing some of this in fcp in the edit suite (also an 8 core)
Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated in that our deadline is tonight and we are delivering these QT's on a drive.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Rafael Amador on Jun 4, 2008 at 2:42:49 pm
If you would be downscaling you could do it in FC without problems. But when you are up-resizing you need to generate new pixels, and or that task I think Compressor will be better. The quality of the job will depends of how you set the "Frame Control" parameters and those will take his toll in processing
time.
there are some solutions like "Instant HD", but truly I haven't tried it.
rafael
Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17"Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17"
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Jeremy Garchow on Jun 4, 2008 at 3:11:24 pm
I'd put your footage in a 1080 timeline with NO fields, scale up and render. See how it looks.
If you use Compressor: in the frame controls tab make sure to put the resize filter at BEST and leave the output fields to 'same as source' which should turn out progressive. Leave the deinterlacer at the lowest quality setting (whatever that is). No reason to make an interlaced movie at all. Just make a 1080p movie. Much easier, cleaner and better looking! :-D
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by lisa rolley on Jun 4, 2008 at 3:39:15 pm
they client requested upper fields so i have to deliver that - not sure i understand everything you were saying either. thank you for the response i will continue to work while hopefully a solution is decided upon
thanks
lisa
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Jeremy Garchow on Jun 4, 2008 at 3:47:02 pm
[lisa rolley]"they client requested upper fields so i have to deliver that "
OK, this is a time when you go back and explain to the client that your footage is progressive, and in order to maintain the utmost quality, you suggest a 1080p movie for delivery. If you try and deliver a traditionally interlaced program from your progressive program, you will be interpolating fields and generally mucking up the image.
You can deliver a 1080p program that will play out psf from their systems and you will be fine. Anything else is image degradation.
[lisa rolley]"not sure i understand everything you were saying either"
What don't you understand? I'll walk you through it.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Jeremy Garchow on Jun 4, 2008 at 4:12:51 pm
[lisa rolley]"its going to be projected "
Even further reason to keep it progressive as that screen is not interlaced. Listen, you don't even have tell them what you are doing (cheating a bit I know, but sometimes you have to save people from themselves). You will be delivering a high quality movie that conforms to their stated specs and they are none-the-wiser.
The absolute easiest way to do this is to:
1) Make a 1920x1080 10bit Uncompressed timeline.
2) Bring up the sequence settings by hitting apple-zero and change the field dominance to 'none'.
3) Bring in your exported 720p 29.97 ProRes movie to the 1080 timeline.
4) Make sure the movie has scaled up properly in the timeline, if not adjust it.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by lisa rolley on Jun 4, 2008 at 4:31:13 pm
so do i copy the entire sequence from the 720 p timeline and paste it into the uncompressed 1920x1080 timeline and then render - also switching fields to none?
thanks so much
lisa
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Jeremy Garchow on Jun 4, 2008 at 4:34:28 pm
[lisa rolley]"so do i copy the entire sequence from the 720 p timeline and paste it into the uncompressed 1920x1080 timeline and then render - also switching fields to none? "
You could, but that will be messy.
An easy way is to export your 720p movie as a reference movie, then reimport that movie and put it in the 1080 timeline.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Lu Nelson on Jun 5, 2008 at 8:41:24 am
The best way to scale it in the timeline is to drop the ref movie in to the 1080 timeline and then with the clip selected do "Conform to Sequence" under the "Modify" menu.
However as stated elsewher, Compressor might offer you better upres quality if you have the render time. You have to choose "Statistical Prediction" which is the "Better" form of scaling but takes a lot of time.
In my experience it works as well as tools like Instant HD
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Rafael Amador on Jun 5, 2008 at 8:51:27 am
Hi Lu,
How good and fast is InstantHD?
Rafael
Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17"Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17"
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Lu Nelson on Jun 6, 2008 at 7:46:23 am
Hi Rafael,
I did some unscientific tests with Instant HD when it first came out and my results had little artifacts throughout, like pixels or groups of pixels that would sort of crawl, wiggle around and sometimes just sort of flip out like the signal was breaking down there. I found the upres results with Compressor (since version 2) to be much better, as long as you use its highest quality settings for scaling.
However, I was testing with relatively low quality SD footage, uprezzing to HD so that really pushes the capabilities of the software. You can of course download the Instant HD demo and try it yourself, it may be better if your 720p footage is already pretty sharp, etc.
You can also try Digital Anarchy Resizer, but I believe this will also not be appreciably better than what you've got with Compressor. The retiming/resizing algorithms Apple built in there since v2 are really very good
Re: How should I be Upressing 1280x720 Pro Res (no fields) to Uncompressed 1920x1080 (upper fields)? by Rafael Amador on Jun 6, 2008 at 9:17:04 am
Hi Lu,
Thanks a lot for your helpful info.
Rafael
Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17"Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17"
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.
