Upconverting SD to HD
 

We just filmed a spot with a Varicam. We need to mix in some SD footage by upconverting it to HD.

My question:

When we simply upconvert SD footage and mix it into HD footage, are we going to see a huge difference? Will our upconverted 16:9 SD footage look "digitally enlarged" or pixelated when displayed on an HDTV?

Thanks ahead of time!

You might try the demo of Red Giant Software's $99 InstantHD to convert some actual footage and see what you think (unless you have access to better resources):

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/instanthd.html

Short review with images here: http://www.outside-hollywood.com/2006/03/instant-hd-10/

I've tried "uprezzing" on and HDV timeline in PPro 2.0 and came up with a muddy unimpressive result. Using the Instant HD demo above, I got a much more pleasing result. Seemed sharper and more color saturated. Of couse I didn't try tweaking either. I just slapped the changes on and outputted to .m2t file to play back on Media Player.

It shouldn't look unnaturally enlarged, but it's likely to look blurry compared to the Varicam material. Depending on your subject matter and how the footage was shot this may not be entirely obvious to viewers, but chances are it might be. Keep in mind that you can't create detail where none exists in the source image -- if that worked that we wouldn't need HD cameras in the first place. I've yet to see any solution for upsampling SD to HD which made it look like HD source material.

Thanks for the info, everyone! The SD footage will come from an SDX-900.

All of our local channels broadcast in "HD" which is actually "upconverted SD". How do they do this? They claim such impressive results in HDTV and blah, blah. They talk about something called line doubling.

Our stations are so far behind the times. They only take Beta and they didn't even know what DVCPro is! At least the sales people don't.

I wouldn't put any stock in a review that doesn't list DV Info as one of it's Digital Video links. ; ) Somebody needs to invite Mr. Isaac Botkin to join us here!

It looked like an incremental improvement in the stills posted. As always, its hard to evaluate the change to video by looking at the effect on stills. But it was definately sharper imagery.