uprezing questions/Legend Films colorization?
 

I am preparing a film shoot and looking to do some non-essential continuity stuff, mainly involving greenscreen, partial sets(to offset any greenscreen motion blur problems), closeup to medium shots, and then using compositing, splitscreening in the final process. I have a minor cast member who may be unavailable later so I want to get that done to avoid problems. The scenes can almsot be completely separated from the rest of the shoot, with only a couple of instances where I would have to splitscreen composite one performer into a scene with another.

Leaning towards an HVX as the capture medium-mainly because of the P vs I issue.

Once i get to the main production stuff, I might look at another rental cam if there are other new prosumer models out there with better options. I may have the budget to rent a better cam for it(one day of shooting) but the SDX and varicam are the only other options I have seen rentable here.

I know one shouldnt mix formats.
So I was curious about uprez options and how it works for making footage look better than it is. My only frame of reference is the "sharpen" options in photoshop--and I know if you press it too much you get serious pixellation mess.

I have seen a demo by Legend Films--who colorized a Three Stooges movie. The original footage looked extremely washed out and fuzzy--but in the "after" presentation, it looked like 1960s technicolor-and appeared amazingly sharp.

So my question is, would they have been able to create such a sharp image just by computer enhancement, or would they have got a better source image than they show in their "before" demo to do that part of the process?

I guess this was a "stump the band" kind of question
:)

Apparently, Color Correction is only practiced by a few "sorcerers" down in LA. This is not a field widely discussed as those in the know ain't tellin. The Three Stooges were originally shot on film, and because of films great lattitude and contrast, there is a lot you can do with it in color correction. As far as up-rezzing, if you are using FCP 5, I hear the uprezzing algo-rythm is pretty good. There are some other third party plug-ins that scale up to HD but you can't really make more detail than you shot. Hope this helps.

Yep--that's pretty good. Thanks!