Uprezzing SD to HD.
 

Hi,

I am making my first indie feature film, shot entirely in DVX 102A(PAL).

Can anyone please summarize the workflow for uprezzing my footage shot in DVX 102A (PAL) to HD resolution. I am aware that my footage should be exported as .tga sequential files and resized to 1080 for HD using PHOTOZOOM PRO. I have also tried to do it with few frames which looked awesome and sharp. But my query is what should I do with the resized frames?

Should I import the sequence to my SD editing platform which is an AVID EXPRESS DV 3.5 and work as a 16:9 project or should I import the sequence in a HD editing software like AVID PRO HD or Premiere Pro? Which will get me better results?

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

This forum is absolutely mindblowing, providing even the minutest details in DV production. Thanks to all of you.

Vigna Raajan

Can anyone please help me out in this?

Vigna Raajan

Simple editing of DV footage is lossless.

If you do color correction or effects or titles, you should do these in an uncompressed format, otherwise you'll lose quality.

What i would do, would be to FIRST edit your whole film in standard definition, THEN export and scale the finished film as tga's. This way you'll only need to process the frames that will be in the final movie.

Hi Eki,

Thanks for your response.
We are right now doing some preliminary tests and as you have adviced, we have already decided to do the visual effects and titles in uncompressed. But my doubt is, after editing in my SD editing system, exporting the tga's and scaling the exported tga's to HD, should i again import the scaled tga's in SD editing or should I move to HD Editing platform like AVID PRO HD? Which would fetch me good results? Any ideas?

And by the way, what is the size I should scale my SD tga for attaining HD res. I am in PAL land. Thanks in advance.

Vigna Raajan.

If you import those HD rez frames to an SD edit, you will get back to where you started from - the frames will be scaled back down to SD and you gained nothing. If the final is going just for DVD, there's no need (or real advantage) to scale to HD at all.

If you want your final master to be a HD tape, scale the tga's up to 1920*1080 and print them to HD tape in a HD capable edit.

If the final master is film, take the tga's on a portable hard drive to the film facility (consult the facility first though - the requirements may vary from place to place).

Eki's points are very valid.

What is the distribution method you intend using for your HD uprezzed material?

If it's indeed DVD, then you need to work within the 720x576 PAL guidelines.

The need to go to 1280x720 or 1920x1080 (1440x1080 1.3333 pixel aspect ratio) is only of benefit if you're intending broadcasting your finished program, or WMV9 HD web distribution.

The only really important variation you need to consider with HD PAL vs HD NTSC is the frame rate... There's no image size variations between NTSC HD and PAL HD.

Probably the cheapest method for you is to use quicktime pro after you've uprezzed the frames. You coud output to h.264. check out the quality of the HD trailers at apple.com.

I believe a dvd with h.264 encoding will play on an xbox 360.