Has anyone had any recent experience with this? which apps work best, and what do they do?
What are the pros and cons? We have a JVC HD110 to shoot a feature on, obviously low budget,
and would like to figure out every way to make it look as best as possible.

We have a JVC HD110 to shoot a feature on, obviously low budget,
and would like to figure out every way to make it look as best as possible.

If you are mastering to bluray, keep it at native 720p resolution and use the highest bitrates possible. Let the bluray players and TVs upscale if necessary.

+1 on keeping it 720.

Up-res is an "urban legend" because you can't add data to the image that wasn't there to start with.

If all your data is in 720, all the "upres" procedures interpolate between adjacent pixels to create {blurry} pixels that don't exist in the original image to add up to 1080. There are people who will happily sell you apps that purport to do this, but all they do is make a blurry image and then add sharpening to it to try to steal back the contrast you lose in the process. There is no free lunch.

Has anyone had any recent experience with this? which apps work best, and what do they do?
What are the pros and cons? We have a JVC HD110 to shoot a feature on, obviously low budget,
and would like to figure out every way to make it look as best as possible.

I have, and uprezzing is fine and you'll have to add a bit of sharpening.

Here's what to do:
1. Shoot, edit and finish in 720p.
2. Master in 720p as an uncompressed TIFF sequence
3. Bring it to photoshop or AE (the former has a better algorithm I believe, so the results might vary - try both) and resample with the default sharpening (bicubic) and/or try variants of your own. Once you have your master it's an easy matter to test a few frames. Don't forget to test small 'snippets' of motion, since sharpening has a big impact on that, not to mention artifacting.
4. If your tests show you significant benefits, go for it. Most likely you won't see any. That's what I found. But there aren't any 'cons' that wrecks it.

Hope this helps.

Sareesh,

What is the AE workflow? Suppose I don't need stellar results, just a good solid 1080P24, I guess AE would be significantly faster...

Thank you,

Sareesh,

What is the AE workflow? Suppose I don't need stellar results, just a good solid 1080P24, I guess AE would be significantly faster...

Thank you,

Actually as of CS6 I think Photoshop might be better - it has good image sequence editing capabilities for this kind of thing.

In both cases (AE and PS), the philosophy is to have a TIFF master to work with, not the native files/project. This makes sharpening and uprezzing easier for the algorithm - the point is to avoid errors. One could say having a TIFF sequence is the most error-free way to uprez.

I used basic bicubic rescaling, nothing fancy. 1080p project and comps with 720p video rescaled. I tested sharpening but ultimately decided against it because the master was supposed to go to many 'deliverables', and each would need their own sharpening anyway. Now I know I could have added a bit of sharpening. If you were rescaling a full project, better to nest it in a comp and scale the new comp.

Both sharpening and uprezzing work great when you do it in step-increments. From 720p to 1080p, you could try a two step process 720 -> 900 -> 1080, though the difference might not be very noticeable. Maximum limit for uprezzing is 1.5x the original length/height.

One more thing: Add text and motion graphics to the resampled image, not the original. Learned the hard way. Hope this helps.