up-rez software (SD-HDV)
 

I was wondering if there is any good up-rez software to use SD files and output them on Bluray disc.

Not aware of a Vegas specific software, but InstantHD for After Effects is available from Red Giant and I am on the beta trial for InstantHD Pro (actually they are calling it something else now - can't recall what!). The latter is VERY good (but not quite ready yet - I believe release is imminent, though).

Also, I think Spot (Douglas Spotted Eagle) mentioned another software that does something similar in a recent post. Can't put my finger on it just now and am also dog tired so going to bed!

(Edit - this does not handle the output to bluray, of couse, just the up-rezzing)

Cineform does a good job of up-rezzing...

how to use cineform for up-rezing?

if you are ok to convert your movie to a serie of pictures, photozoom is ok too.

You mean Vegas cannot do this by using the pan / crop??

I was thinking of offering the ability to deliver on HD if I filmed in SD, but I wanted to check here and see if that meant I would loose nothing from the source DV.

In otherwords, I thought it should be possible for the source DV recorded straight off the MiniDV tape (in SD) to be rendered to HD (however that works) by dropping the SD media onto an HD project time line and then rendering to HD.

The way I would _think_ it should work is that rendering to HD using SD source would take the SD source and practically transfer it straight to the compressed HD with little to no loss in information. After all, SD has 1/4 the pixels of HD so the compress & render to HD using SD source material should be almost lossless, right?

There's no need to use Pan/Crop.
Load in your SD file and render it out in the HD format of your choice.
I just tried rendering an SD clip in various sizes of HD AVI and Blu-Ray formats and it didn't look too bad on my 24" editing monitor.

My main question was if the SD media is going to be as compressed as HD media would be. In otherwords will SD footage rendered out as HD look better than SD on an HD TV?

I'm just trying to figure out if there is any value added benefit to potential clients that actually do have Blu-Ray / PS3 systems.

SD rendered on an HD timeline looks just like SD.

I've been editing a project where I am mixing SD and HD and rendering out as HD. The HD looks great and the SD looks like SD displayed on an HD TV. Not terrible but definately not HD. To make this work I am either going to have to up-rez the SD using one of the AE plug-ins or scale down the images and play games with PinP and tiled images.

An SD image displayed at 720x480 will look awfully small while an SD image displayed at 1080 will be a bit blurry. Without uprezing the images, SD will look like SD.

VideoEnhancer

Comparison of different video upsize methods

That is what I'm talking about. I guess I need to call it upres-ing.

So what it sounds like I'm hearing, is that there is NO benefit to deliver SD media via Vegas in HD unless the media has first been upresed. So delivery in HD will still compress the SD footage, even though the SD footage has far less information. Correct?

I'm not sure what you mean by "compress the SD footage".

Keeping it really simple - a 1440x1080 frame has 4.5 times as many pixels as a 720x480 frame. A frame that is 480 pixels high will look fuzzy stretched over a 1080 pixel high frame. Vegas will stretch the SD frames, in which case the image will look fuzzy or, you can set the SD image up at 720 x480, in which case it will retain its original resolution but look awfully small on an HD monitor.

The Video Enhancer Software looks very interesting. I'll have to play around with it this weekend.

I was also assuming that Vegas would do some sort of up resing of its own if the SD media is stretched to cover the entire HD frame.

I've heard many times that MPEG2 compression (SD or otherwise) throws away a lot of data (it has to in order to fit 1hf of footage into just 4.3GB of disc space). Is it possible to put SD footage in an uncompressed file format on Blu-Ray media in order to retain all that picture data? THe real issue with SD DVD players is the data rate they can handle, right? 9Mbps or so? What data rate can a Blue-Ray work with? 25Mbps? Or at least in a less compressed format that MPEG2?

All I know is what I see when I edit SD on a Vegas HD timeline.

SD is, by definition, lower resolution than HD. Without some sort of software or hardware "fix" to interpolate all the missing pixels, a 720x480 image is going to look fuzzy when stretched to 1440x1080. This applies to a still image or a frame of video.

Software and hardware uprezing will help but from what I'v seen, they won't do miracles either.

i always use uprezzing like this.
uprez to image size bigger than what you need, then apply filters to clean picture, the size down to final size.
video enhancer is great for this because you can add all the filters for virtualdub.
take care that video enhancer is just twice doubling when uprezzing 4x.
so they said on their web site that you better will double and double again than going directly to 4X.
using Neat video with video enhancer will give you astonishing good result while requiring intensive calculation.
for the the best quality use uncompressed video (no codec) or Huffyuv you disk space is a concern.
my last attempt was on a 1 hours theater performance and takes 200gig and 2 days of calculation. (and i discovered later that a used the wrong file !).