Best process to crop SD footage for widescreen
 

We have a short film, shot in SD on miniDV (Sony PD150).

The footage was framed for widescreen.

In post I applied a 16x9 mask and was just going to show it as letterboxed and pillarboxed on screen.

But, I tried rendering a version where I zoomed in the footage to be fullscreen 16x9. It looks better than I expected, though there is a definite softening of the image in many shots.

I did try up-res'ing to 1080-50i, and zooming in to that and then rendering the DVD, but it does not appear to have given any better result than just cropping and rendering the original.

My question is then: what would be the best way to process the SD 4x3 footage to retain the best image quality when it is zoomed into?

Hope all that made sense.

All information and advice gratefully accepted.

Regards,

marks

I don't have a direct answer on best approach to preserving resolution, other than to beware of track motion. Usually event pan/crop is going to be the ticket for zoom-ins... but this could be a tossup for quality since you're starting with SD. Do test.

On another topic, I would strongly suggest that you cut this piece in a 16x9 project, and preserve 16x9 through your post and dvd process. The letter-box-in-post approach is sorta' OK for showing on older televisions, but quality is degraded on a widescreen / HDTV.

This is because you're sacrificing resolution on the DVD to black borders - your actual image is much smaller and therefore lower rez if you make letter/pillar boxes in post. Let the DVD player make the letterbox.

I have an example of HD and SD cameras with the SD cropped to letterbox in Vegas 8 Pro. Softness wasn't much of an issue due to the fog in the rink, and my wife (shooting with the older SD camera) had a wide angle adapter so the zoom-in crop didn't hurt the overall effect. If it had been a talking head and we tried this, head room would have been an issue.

The latest two videos here:
Chip Gallo on Vimeo