DVCAM footage up-converted to HD?

[Chris Pyle]

I know this has probably been covered before, so my appologies in advance...
I am looking at putting together a short video for large screen projection at a State Park visitor center. Ideally, we would like to shoot in some form of HD / HDV. The problem lies in the fact that I have a ton of existing wildlife and beauty footage that would be impossible to re-shoot (given the budget and time constraints) This old footage was all shot in 4:3 with a 1/2" ccd Sony DSR 300. The footage is all very sharp and well exposed, but it is DVCAM. Now, much of the footage looks OK stretched out to 16:9 so aspect ratio is not a huge issue. What I am wondering about is how will the DVCAM footage look up-scaled to HD? And How do I do it? Is there somewhere that can do a sample for me as a test? I am in the San Diego Area, not too far from LA. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

BTW, My private opinion would be to continue shooting in SD so it can all cut together better, but the client is wanting to jump on the HD bandwagon.
On that note, what would be the best procedure for getting the most out of SD in a projection situation? Probably about a 25 foot screen.

Chris Pyle
Wildland Films

[Douglas Call]

I also shoot DVCAM and have to get it converted to HD or Beta SP depending. I simple go to my local video conversion center http://www.accordvideo.com/ I live in South Florida but you should be able to find the same type of service in San Diego or LA.

You can ask the people at the video service center how the different upconversions turn out. Since they do it all the time they would be in a better position to tell you. Are you trying to upconvert to HD SDI or some specific codec?

[Chris Pyle]

no specific codec at this point. Just exploring what options are out there. So, Douglas, have you had this done in the past? DVCAM to HD? If so, how has it turned out? Have you been happy with the results?

Thanks,
Chris

[Douglas Call]

I have imported DVCAM (shot with native 16:9 2/3" chip camera) into an HDV project using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Then once all the video footage was edited and corrected burned it to DVD. Since the DVD is going to playback at 480p on the clients DVD player (if they use component out or DVI/HDMI out) and they have a de-interlacer in their DVD player. This will work great because your’re keeping SD material more or less intact and your down rezing the HD. Because unless the client has a HD edit station setting next to their HD projector or HDTV big screen they'll have to use a DVD player to watch the content.

I would say if 60% of your material is SD I don’t understand why you don’t shoot the rest in SD. Then if you need to at the very end drop everything into your NLE system and create the project in HD and import everything.

I have converted DVCAM to Beta SP many times for TV broadcast reasons. When I need to do HD I distribute the content using WMVHD on DVD. Only one or two DVD players can playback WMVHD but almost all of the PC DVD players (assuming the PC has good graphics card 256MB and P4 CPU) can display WMVHD especially at 720p.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Chris Pyle

What I am wondering about is how will the DVCAM footage look up-scaled to HD?

It will look like DVCAM footage made bigger. You can't create detail where none exists in the source image, so upsampling to HD just ensures you'll have minimal artifacting when playing on an HDTV display.