DV to HDV/Cineform Conversion?

[William Gardner]

Hi All,

I'm working on a project with AspectHD and Premiere Pro. The project includes HDV footage, DV footage, and stills. My master project format is the 1280/30p Cineform preset.

For the DV footage, I'd like to scale it up by 50% to fill the vertical 720 dimension (and I'm happy enough with cropped sides/4:3 instead of stretching it to fill the 16:9 space).

If I use the Adobe Premiere Pro scaling in the Effects Controls with 150%, it zooms appropriately but then of course I get nasty interleaving jaggies on motion. The Cineform Pan/Zoom effect also leaves jaggies and even worse, it maintains the cropping DV dimensions (720-by-480), so it doesn't even fill the screen.

Have others tried to mix DV and HDV content in a Cineform/Premiere Pro project? Are there other scaling plugins that people would recommend that do a better job of removing the interlacing artifacts? I'm happy to use a slow plugin to do a single conversion from DV to a Cineform AVI and then edit the Cineform AVI, but I'd like the best quality I can get (motion compensated deinterleaving, etc.).

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide,
Bill Gardner

[David Newman]

Hi Bill,

The main issue will be the interlacing in a progressive project not the resizing. Premiere doesn't have advanced deinterlacing (for that you might try DVFilm); in Premiere right-click on the timelined DV Clip and select "field options...", within this pop-up select "Always Deinterlace." The vertical resolution will drop but all the interlacing weirdness will go.

[William Gardner]

Hi David,

Thanks for the response. I am aware of the simple "Always Deinterlace" option, but given that the initial vertical resolution is already only 480 lines, dropping it to close to 240 lines in a 720 line progressive project seems a bit extreme. I know that there are other deinterlacing software packages out there, and I'm still curious if anybody else has used any of these smarter but slower deinterlacers.

Also, even if I started with a 720 x 480 30p source, I'm curious if there are better, more sophisticated scaling options for zooming this content to larger resolutions. I know that some of the larger progressive displays (e.g., plasma) use some more sophisticated algorithms to remove some of the blockiness of low resolution sources (e.g., on diagonal lines, etc.). I also wonder if anybody has any experience with software to do this?

Thanks,
Bill

[Craig Bellaire]

I heard the best way to uprez us using PhotoZoom. Export the 480 footage as tiff or PNG files and then uprez using a batch. Then reimport into the time line... Not sure if this will help...

[George Odell]

I've been playing around with the trial version of PhotoZoom Pro. All I can say is Wow!

This program will absolutely blow your mind in what I can do in terms of upsizing an image. There is no comparison to using Photoshop/Bicubic scaling and using this program with their patented S-spline technology.

Here's what I'm doing...

Open DV clip in Virtualdub and apply Smart Deinterlace Filter. Save at same resolution as a series of Targa files. This converts to progressive scan with resolution intact and without the jaggies of a lesser deinterlacer.

Open Targa sequence in PhotoZoom and apply your new scaled up size. BTW: It actually has presets for HDV in both resolutions. Save as a new series of Targa files. Each frame is now uprezzed and still looks darn nice, thank you.

My Question: If the resulting HD uprez is now a series of targa or tiff files, can Premiere Pro or Cineform work with them on the time line, as is? I have neither as yet so that's why I'm asking.

[Steve Crisdale]

Originally Posted by George Odell

My Question: If the resulting HD uprez is now a series of targa or tiff files, can Premiere Pro or Cineform work with them on the time line, as is? I have neither as yet so that's why I'm asking.

Not so sure about Cineform... Besides; the true advantages of Cineform CFHD format are really only apparent for those working directly from HD compressed video stream material.

Premiere, Vegas - no doubt almost any "decent" NLE should import your image sequence without any problems.