View Full Version : AE to upscale SD to HIGH DEF footage


Marcus Martell
March 21st, 2009, 06:55 PM
Hola guys,
i wanted to know if somebody here could explain me how to upscale with After effects SD footage in HD.Is there any tutorial?
I found this on vimeo...very interesting
Demo Reel SD To HD on Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/3616964)

Douglas Wright
March 22nd, 2009, 07:10 PM
You could just put an sd file into an HD comp, scale it and apply some sharpening and other filters, maybe find a good deartifacter... Other than that, there are various plugins that can help like Red Giant's Instant HD, topaz has a plugin, and others. It's no real substitute for true HD though and the most important thing is to have footage that already looks great in SD... uprezing won't improve a low quality image.

Tripp Woelfel
March 23rd, 2009, 06:14 PM
Douglas is essentially correct. Just this week I had some VHS footage, probably 2nd generation, that I needed to use in a 1080 project. I simply scaled the original in Premier Pro as a placeholder.

I dragged the source clip into AE and used Red Giant to deinterlace (required for InstantHD) and scale to 1080. The result was markedly better, but it still looked like rubbish. Would the unwashed masses notice the difference? Dunno. Maybe not.

As many wiser folks than I have said, you can't replace what is missing from source footage, but you can make what's there look a little bit better. There are several ways to make the most of what you have. Tools like Red Giant are faster. Playing with the tools you have is cheaper.

Ray Bell
March 24th, 2009, 05:20 AM
The red giant product actually uses the Topaz engine.... if you watch when you fire up red giant the splash screen for Topaz pops up for a nano second....

here is the page for Topaz...

Topaz Enhance - High-end video enhancement software (http://www.topazlabs.com/topazlabs/03products/topaz_enhance/)