I think I posted the old DVX100 up-rezzed-to-HD vs. JVC HD1 clip here before, I'm not sure. Anyway, I've since figured out a much better way to up-rez, using S-Spline Pro.

Check out this clip:

http://66.78.26.9/~fiercely/DVXvsJVC/NewDVXvsJVC.mpg

That's the DVX100, up-rezzed to 1280 x 720 by S-Spline Pro, and then imported into Vegas side-by-side with the same clip as shot by the JVC HD1. Then I exported a new MainConcept 720/30P HD file (so in the DVX she'll be a little faster than in the HD1, but it was necessary in order to make a clip that the HD guys can download and play through their cameras).

If you try to play this back on your desktop you'll need a pretty fast computer to keep up the frame rate.

Wow- looks great. Never thought Up rezing would turn out results that looked that good!

Which one is the DVX100 footage? Is it the first one or the second one?

"Which one is the DVX100 footage? "

The one that looks good. ;)

(seriously, the DVX is the first clip, the one that has the S-Spline Pro watermark all over it. The JVC HD1 is the second clip.)

Awesome! Thanks Barry! I'm not familiar with that software though, was the process tedious?

Here I am, all the while thinking the 1st one was the JVC. Man 3ccds really help with color reproduction. The JVC's colors look flat and unsaturated.

I must be the only one not seeing the video- when I click the link, I get a new IE window and a spinning e-globe showing it's trying to get the mpg- but nothing comes down- anyone have any idea why?
(IE for Mac OSX)

Takes a while to load- try right-clicking and choosing "save target as".

<<<-- Originally posted by Barry Green : "Which one is the DVX100 footage? "

The one that looks good. ;)

(seriously, the DVX is the first clip, the one that has the S-Spline Pro watermark all over it. The JVC HD1 is the second clip.) -->>>

Yeah, that's what I thought, but I wanted to be sure. The first clip definitely looks better; I just keep getting more and more impressed with the DVX100. For the price, the image quality simply can't be beat. Thanks for this sample, Barry.

Barry, let be more specific about my question:

>>That's the DVX100, up-rezzed to 1280 x 720 by S-Spline Pro<<

Do you have to do this frame by frame? How long would this process take for 80 minutes worth of footage?

You do NOT have to do it frame-by-frame (thankfully!)

From your editing program you export your video as a series of stills (for 80 minutes' worth, you'll need quite a bit of space -- each frame is about a megabyte, and there's 115,200 frames in 80 minutes -- assuming 24 fps).

That'll create 115,200 frames on your hard disk, named something like Movie000001.tga, Movie000002.tga, etc.

You then open S-Spline Pro and tell it to batch-process those files. This will take a while. I think it was about 7 minutes for the three seconds that I did (on a P4 2.66Ghz). If you have a faster computer obviously it'll take less time. So it'll be hours and hours and hours of up-rezzing, my guess is it'd take around 8 days to do the up-rez. If you have multiple computers, obviously you could divide the task up between them, etc.

You'll also need about 500 mb of space for the up-rezzed files.

Thanks Barry! This is major news!

That's great! We finally get a chance to compare resolution and image quality. I tried up-rezzing DVX100 footage using S-Spline a while back but it was a slow and tedious process.

My workflow consisted of bringing the footage into After Effects, then applying the Magic Bullet de-artifacting filter to eliminate the 4:1:1 compression blocks, then exporting as uncompressed PNG files.

Then I would batch process the up-rez in S-Spline. Problem for me was I had no way to view it on a HDTV so the project was of little interest to me. Plus I was running on an 867Mhz G4 so it was painfully slow.

If you are looking into using this workflow for HD up-rez, then the best camera setting would be 24P/30P with the THIN setting. De-artifact (4:1:1) in After Effects. And use S-Spline for the up-rez.

Presumably a PAL DVX100 would be even better?

Patrick

yeah but not much.

PAL gives you 20% more pixels to work with. Also, it's 4:2:0 color sampling may or may not provide superior uprezzing. I would suspect that it might, but without a comparable PAL clip to test with, there's no way to know for sure.

But with a PAL camera you also give up the 24P frame rate (although 25P is not far off) and you also lose the 30P frame rate for slow motion.

If you're in PAL territory, sure, try it -- but I wouldn't get a PAL camera in NTSC territory just for this...

Hey Barry, in your opinion, would 1920x1080 be way too much uprez using S-Spline with the DVX100?

I dunno, let's try it!

here's the clip upsampled to 1920 x 1080, then saved out as a MainConcept MPG2 from Vegas:

http://66.78.26.9/~fiercely/DVXvsJVC/DVX-1080.mpg

Okay, just for grins, here's the JVC upsampled to 1080/30P:

http://66.78.26.9/~fiercely/DVXvsJVC/JVC-1080.mpg

Wow, that's not TOO bad. The image definately shows more degredation, but it doesn't look as bad as I suspected it might. I couldn't play the JVC stuff...but maybe it's because I need to "Save Target As" Let me try....

http://66.78.26.9/~fiercely/DVXvsJVC/JVC-1080.mpg

Yeah, that worked....resolution wise, the JVC uprezzes up to 1080 better then the DVX, but that is to be expected. Thanks Barry!

To be honest with you guys, I don't see the S-Spline doing much in pixel interpolation. Bicubic up sampling in Photoshop & AfterFX are almost the same. I don't think S-Spline worth rendering time for a 5% difference. See http://slav.1accesshost.com/

It's much easier and much faster to do it in AE.

Slav.

I don't know - when I tested it I got much better results - hardly 5%. Even your test shots, S-Spline looks like it doing noticeably better than bicubic and unsharp mask.

Yes, it's a LITTLE better, but viewing the result even on a large screen results in virtually no difference and the process of processing a large amount of targa files makes it unreasonable in real life situation. So, I guess the answer is it's ok for a test or two...

Well, it probably is like most visual things - it's a "depends" things. It depends on the eye and expectations of the user and the depends also on the file contents and uprez ratio.

If it did not work for some people in some situations, it would not last long as a product.

You guys are doing cool stuff! Any chance of seeing the standard rez DVX footage inserted into that sequence so we can see the "before and after"?