I shot a documentary in 1080p. The film will include 720x480 SD archival footage, edited in PPro CS5. What do you do in projects that mix video of such different resolutions?

For a previous film in 720p, I upscaled the SD video 150% so that it reached the top and bottom of the frame and the quality was acceptable. It was old black and white film footage from the Internet Archive.

I fear blowing up the footage any more would make it unwatchable. What has been your solution -- or compromise?

When I need to include SD archival footage in an HD project, I always use a smaller than HD framesize- either letterboxed on a black background, or as a PIP over some HD content.
IMO, enlarging 480 footage to 1080 is more disturbing to watch than presenting a smaller framesize.

Robert, thank you. What kind of HD background do you use for the PIP?

I shot a documentary in 1080p. The film will include 720x480 SD archival footage, edited in PPro CS5. What do you do in projects that mix video of such different resolutions?

For a previous film in 720p, I upscaled the SD video 150% so that it reached the top and bottom of the frame and the quality was acceptable. It was old black and white film footage from the Internet Archive.

I fear blowing up the footage any more would make it unwatchable. What has been your solution -- or compromise?


There are various tools for upscaling that will offer better quality than merely zooming the footage in Premiere. If you have FCP hanging around, Apple Compressor can do a good job at its highest quality setting.

Magic Bullet have a plug-in that I'm told does excellent quality upscaling as well. Think it's called Instant HD. Of course you can't introduce detail that isn't there to begin with, but the quality if the upscaling software can make a big difference.

In the past I've had to put some fairly unstable archive 8mm footage into a 720p project. I kept the upscaled 8mm at 4:3 but instead of using black bars to the left and right I took a copy of the footage, zoomed it to 16:9 and added a heavy blur. This meant the the sides were less distracting but also when required I could add further cropping to disguise film damage

I got Red Giant's Instant HD. Easy to install, easy to use and the quality seems decent. It's a little hard to judge because the original footage is not crystal clear. When I try upscaling good MiniDV footage, I'll get a better idea of how well it does at preserving image quality at expanded sizes.

Hi
Instant HD does not seem to work here. Instead I import the old material in a sequence that match and convert to HD from it. In my HD Seq I put on some effects like Red Bullet Looks that include some grain in HD - then it almost look like HD.
Snæbel LIFE projektet. (Coregonus oxyrhynchus) on Vimeo -the aerials are SD material.